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Thursday, October 20, 2011

The devil's in the dovetails

I knew this project was going to include a ton of dovetails.  I just didn't realize quite how many.  Further complicating matters, few of the drawers are actually the same height to I needed to lay out a different set of tails for each tier in this chest of drawers.  But to make things a bit easier on myself, I really just "eye-balled" the layouts rather than actually measuring everything out.  The first few drawers it really offended my OCD, but by the end I was just happy to have the drawers finished.  I've managed to distill the process down into about 20 minutes of video, but the real elapsed time for this process was probably about 15 hours.  And lets just say I also did my fair share of sharpening along the way as well.




Right click to download the HD version of this video

9 comments:

Mansfield Fine Furniture - Nick said...

Three things:
1. As much as I like Christopher Schwarz' videos, I like your musical choices more...
2. I'm not sure if the video uploaded entirely, it ends kinda abruptly, without your typical wrap-up...I suspect technical issues.
3. Nice work...(except the lip-sync)

Bruce Somers said...

Yep, DT interuptus... Stopped about 5 minutes short of expected. However, I still enjoyed watching it Rob. Glad to see you are overcoming your OCD tendencies....LOL...

Rob Bois said...

Thanks for the heads up on the abrupt ending, I'm going to re-post the video and hopefully I can get that resolved. I've fired three people in my QA department over this.

Rob Bois said...

Quick update. I've found the reason the last few minutes of the vid are cut off is that the source file was incomplete. Unfortunately, I'm about 2000 miles away from my source file right now, but will get the problem remedied this weekend. Sorry for the technical difficulties.

Aaron said...

Great video, Rob. The last few minutes were worth the wait.

Next time we get together over a tasty hoppy beverage, you will have to teach me the difference between "R" and "L" when it comes to drawer layout. :) I think some lubrication may enhance my understanding of your method.

Rob Bois said...

I think some lubrication would enhance my understanding as well. I always mark from the reference point of the front of the case, and number drawer tiers from the bottom to top (so top left drawer on a four drawer case is 4L). This gets a bit more trick though when I'm marking individual components, since each drawer has a left and right side. So the right side of that same drawer would be L4L. Trust me, it makes a lot more sense after a few beers.

Jeff said...

The repost of your video is only about 8kB can you re-re-post the full meal deal? Thanks.

Rob Bois said...

Jeff, give it a try again and you should get the full meal deal. Thanks for the heads up.

rolling tool chest said...

Great video, It is really not easy to do that.