When doves make me cry

It’s no secret that I like to incorporate lots of curved lines into my pieces. Generally I start with a concept and decide where I want to bend some lines to add visual appeal, and most of the time I have little concern for how much more complex it will make the project. As a result, I almost always underestimate the extra work involved in adding even simple curvature. So of course this piece is no different. In my mind, dovetailing into the sides of a curved drawer front is really no different than a flat drawer front.

But especially with a bow-front drawer, this is not the case at all. There are angles that need to be cut in the top and the shoulders of each tail that then need to fit into a similar angle in the dovetail sockets. So this episode focuses not on how to hand cut dovetail drawers, but more how the process differs for bow-front drawers. 

Lock and Load

The further into the chest of drawers project I get, the more I realize how much the stepped front complicates construction.  From a design perspective, it didn't seem like this build would be dramatically different than a standard chest, but boy was I wrong.  In this episode, I go through the process of fitting the lower drawer blades, or dividers.  Normally, you would just need one blade between each drawer, but the steps in the front face required me to double these up.  My choice of sliding dovetails also created an additional complication in both positioning the dovetails, and also marking the sockets from the tails.  But with a little creativity, and perhaps luck, I managed to complete the task without any major issues.




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