Notchin’ the Grids

Yesterday afternoon I sanded and stained the four color samples Nance requested. The stain cured out over night and I shot the boards early this morning with semi-gloss lacquer to match the CD End Table we’re building for Nance. Once that hardened, which doesn’t take long with lacquer, I wrapped them up, processed the shipment and ran them down to our mail box next to the road. OK, I didn’t run, I walked. But they are on their way.

Now we move on to the woodworking stuff again.

The front grid work that I made yesterday will fit into small rectangular pockets in the inside surfaces of the front side stiles (stiles, as you will no doubt recall, are the vertical frame members around the panels.) So I begin by removing the front side stiles from the side panel assemblies and strapping them together, inside face to inside face. I lay-out the location of the pockets (I suppose, technically, these are rabbets – just really short rabbets) and use the mortising machine to mill the four pockets in the doubled up stiles. I could do this by using a smaller mortising chisel and cutting each of the eight pockets individually, but that would take more time and could result in slight misalignments. By doubling the stiles and cutting each pair of rabbets at once their alignment is assured.

When the pockets are cut I open up the bundle, clean out the bottoms of the pockets, test fit the grid work and adjust if needed. The pockets were about 1/16th inch shallow, so I simply chiseled out a tad more for a perfect fit. Finally, I re-installed the stiles on the cabinet’s side panels to keep them out of harms way.

Next I repeated the above process with the horizontal grid members to mill the little pockets that will receive the front end of the drawer slide T rail. The stumpy little chunk of rail sitting on the grid is my set-up jig and is used to configure the table saw when I mill out these rails. The front end it the triple step end, the lowest, longest part fits into these pockets, the second step allows the claw on the back of the drawer to lift free of the rail so the drawer can be removed – if you want to. But we’ll cover that in more detail later. There is another little tab on the back end of the rail that fits into pockets in the back rails. We will be making those tomorrow.

See you then!

Doug