Clamping the half-blind dovetails that join the side to the bottom. The vertical divider has already been assembled to the bottom with a tapered sliding dovetail.

Here are those half-blind dovetails, viewed from the bottom.

Dovetails, again. You can also see the rabbet on the front of the side which will accept a vertical stile.

Assembling the horizontal dividers to the sides/vertical divider. The horizontal divider is half-lapped at the vertical divider and has a dovetail tenon on each end that fits into dovetail mortises in the case sides.

A little tough to make out, but you can kind of see the dovetail tenon on the end of the cherry horizontal divider (which has been inserted in the dovetail mortise on the case side). There you have it, a sliding dovetail.

I'm using clamps to pull one of the rear horizontal dividers into position. Again, sliding dovetails and half laps.

One of the rear horizontal dividers awaiting it's turn with the clamps. You can see the tenon on the end of the runner, which fits into a corresponding mortise in the divider.

The chest of drawers is starting to take shape as I begin to take the individual parts and assemble them to create the case. Up until now each part represented a lot of work – milling, sizing to dimension, joinery, more joinery, smoothing, fitting – but hadn’t yet been assembled into something recognizable.

I always design and build case pieces with wood-to-wood joinery, and this piece is no exception. The sides join to the bottom with hand cut, half-blind dovetails. The off-center vertical divider joins to the bottom with a tapered sliding dovetail. Horizontal dividers join to the case sides with sliding dovetails and to the vertical divider with half-laps. The benefit of all of this tight-fitting joinery is a case that will be more than adequate to resist the loads it will see over the span of its life – no bowed sides or sagging dividers. And that’s extremely important because a case that is not rigid will lead to drawers that don’t slide in and out sweetly. And what’s the point in a chest of drawers you can’t use?

One of two bending forms needed for this piece. It is made of MDF ribs with 2 layers of 1/4" plywood glued & stapled over the ribs.

Same form, different view. Here you can see the ribs. The entire form is wrapped in packing tape to prevent the adhesive from sticking to the form.

Pressure is applied with clamps and cauls. For this piece, I used 3 layers of 1/4" plywood, with solid maple cauls attached to the topmost layer of plywood.

Another view of the same glue-up. The triangles drawn on the maple clamping cauls illustrate how the force exerted by each clamp transfers through the caul to create even clamping pressure. The row of clamps on the right side are offset a bit because this drawer front is not the full width of the form - it is for a shorter drawer.

Clamps have been removed, showing the clamping cauls. Notice how the plywood cauls have sprung back from the form.

The top layer of 1/4" plywood/maple cauls has been removed.

And here is the curved drawer font, after all cauls have been removed. The fronts did spring back consistently from the form, maybe 1/16" at each end. The tan thing at the edge of the form is adhesive that squeezed out during clamping. I used Unibond 800, a 2 part urea resin glue.

Ten drawer fronts and here are nine of them. The finished chest has only 8 drawers, but I made an extra drawer front for each side, just in case.

The curves are much easier to see here.

I’m working on the chest of drawers and have been sawing laminations and building forms for the curved drawer fronts. In a nutshell, the fronts are made by sawing maple into thin slices, called laminations, which are then glued together over a curved form. The adhesive, in this case a 2 part urea resin, prevents the laminations from slipping past each other and returning back to their original (flat) shape. Here are some pictures showing the process. Click on any image at right to open up a full screen slideshow.