Making Lemonade

Moving along in my hanging wall cabinet project, I was really starting to feel like I was getting my groove back. In this next phase of the project, however, I needed to tackle some tricky joinery with some fairly thin stock. While this project originally seemed like a good way to ease myself back into woodworking game shape, I quickly realized the joinery I decided to use - stopped dados and sliding dovetails - wasn't going to be quite a easy as I hoped.

As it turns out, my biggest challenge actually had little to do with experience, technique, or materials. But rather a simple design flaw in a tool that can be found in almost every shop. In this episode, you can find out where I ran into trouble and how I plan to make lemons out of lemonade.

A game of recovery

You might recall that I’m building this entire live-edge hall table completely on the fly. This all started with the live-edge top dictating the exact size and shape of the carcass. While this project seemed simple enough, having no drawings, model, or even sketch started to become a limitation. I started to make some fairly dumb mistakes that I would have easily avoided by looking at a 3D model or even a sketch. But woodworking is a game of recovery and agility, and fortunately I didn’t screw anything up so badly that I had to start over. I retrospect, deciding to introduce drawers into the plan this late in the game probably didn’t set me up for success!


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