B. Brinkley

OK as promised, here are a couple of photos of the drawers. They look pretty good. After I spent all morning hand waxing and buffing them, my wife strolls in and says that she can't wait to stick on some shelf paper to "protect" the wood. I nearly had a heart attack! Dang womens....

I get y'all some pictures as soon as I get them glued up. Right now it's just a stack of pieces for each drawer. I think that I agree about the single knob. Looks cleaner on this design.

I am assembling 4 drawers for a project and I'm at the stage to drill for the knobs. I am using standard cabinet knobs held in place by a single screw through the drawer front. Two of the drawers are 16 inches wide and are of traditional construction with a full inset into the frame. They are solid wood (pine) with solid wood bottoms so they are medium weight. They slide nicely into the carcass now. With all of that being said, is their a standard in furniture design that determines if I should use two knobs or one knob? I like the idea of a single knob, but I wonder if it will be a problem down the road after a few years of slop and wear and tear on the drawer slides and possible racking and binding in the frame? Any advice would be much appreciated!

Yeah they all fit pretty good. I'm using some antique long-leaf pine so some boards are softer than others. My chisels were getting a bit dull towards the end as seen by the crushed fibers. I did a total of 4 drawers with full dovetails in the rear, and half blinds on the drawer fronts.

I spent all morning chopping dovetails for 4 sets of drawers. I did not donate any blood either, which is always a good thing. LOL

I have made a batch of tenon stock in standard widths and planed down to standard thicknesses. I then round the edges using the router table. I usually make it in lengths of about 2 feet and then I just cut off whatever length I need on the bandsaw.

No problem Coop. I probably should have covered that in my post. The piece to receive the mortise is clamped under the top table using the Matchfit clamps in the clamping pad in view in the first photo. The picture is not that great, but the Matchfit pad is the piece with the dovetail grooves in a grid pattern. This allows clamping both vertical or horizontal pieces such as table legs or aprons etc. Hope that is a bit more clear.

Just thought I would share my mortise technique with those who are interested. I recently built a Morley Mortiser jig to use my plunge router. I really like his design as it is very quick to set up and mostly because I get repeatable accuracy time after time. I did modify mine from his original design. Instead of using a 5/8" guide bushing, I just set up some fence stops to guide my router. My old Ryobi router has a nice flat cut into the side of it's base which makes it very easy to register against a fence and with my setup using two fences the router base is captive and so it is pretty fool proof to cut a straight mortise. I am building two large bedside tables out of some antique longleaf pine that is about 200 years old. I am using reclaimed wood from roof beams from an old dairy barn. It has it's issues, mainly it's rosin rich and hard and brittle with a lot of nail holes and damage. I have built several furniture pieces from this wood and it finishes beautifully using shellac and hand waxing. It's a pain to work with and it's tough on cutting edges, but the end results look great and it has a lot of family heritage in each piece. Anyway, enough yammering, so on to the mortises... Here is the mortise jig. I am really liking the Matchfit Clamp setup as it allows for quick clamping of all sorts of shapes and is very quick to set up and use. You can see the two small fences I have added to guide my router. The adjustable stop blocks on each end control the width of the mortise. I have pre-cut some shim blocks that allow me to quickly set these stop blocks to standard mortise widths such as 1" or 1 1/2" etc. I just set the stop blocks and go without having to think too much which is a good thing. What I really like about Morley's jig is that everything is set up using just a single center mark which saves a lot of time. Here you can see the center mark that is circled. Here is a centering bock that allows me to place it into the slot and center the jig to the mortise location. It is then removed and set aside, usually getting lost in my pile of shavings on the bench. I really need to paint it orange or something. You can just see the mortise inside the slot with everything centered around that one point. I then tighten all of the knobs and lock everything down. I am now ready to cut the mortise. My ole faithful Ryobi is ready to go to work. I have had this router for around 20 years or so and it just keeps ticking. I am tempted by all of the shiny new routers now, but she just keeps hanging around. This is a good shot showing how the router base registers between the two small fences. By using two fences I don't have to worry about it wandering and drifting in the cut. Finally here is the end results. Clean and accurate mortises ready for a floating tenon. I hope this may help someone. I was a mortise cutting fool today, but I got it done much quicker than I thought I would.

I rearranged my computer area in my library. One thing I absolutely could not touch is Daisy Grace's little bed on the floor. She told me that...

Here's my long winded take on Amazon and EBay books and such. I am an Author. I have written a number of books on various subjects over the years. My latest book is about wood boat building that is shortened down for the beginning or novice boat builder. Amazon opened up the self publishing arena for Authors who really have no business writing, let alone publishing a book. There is so much crap out there now it has really lowered the standards that traditional publishing houses upheld. Just today I received a book that was in reality a reprint of an early 1900's woodworking book now in the public domain that some schmuck copied and put his name on the cover as the author! They really push reader reviews, yet I can promise you that most book reviews are fake and generated by commercial reviewers. On the other hand it is pretty nice to be able to write, publish, and make money on books that cover some obscure subject matter that a traditional publishing house would not touch because of their overhead. So it's a double edge sword I suppose. Ebay may have its issues, but in my experience I have never bought anything not exactly as described and I suspect most folks on here have bought tools there occasionally. Amazon rapes an Author in fees and such, so many including myself buy their own copies in bulk and then sell them on eBay as another revenue source. Writing is dang hard when doing a non-fiction book with several hundred photos and illustrations that you have to pull out of your behind all while trying to create a book that is of good quality and actually helpful to your readers. LOL Not sure where I am going with this except just be sure that you have a good idea of what's in the book before you buy it and ignore most of the reviews.

treeslayer I do plan on ordering some bolt covers from Woodcraft. That's on my to-do list. I had also considered using a Texas star plate, but those are somewhat overdone and overused around here. Thanks for the kind words fellas!

I finally finished our bed for the wife and I. It is king size and constructed of some very old heart pine that I salvaged from some dairy barn beams. I resawed the beams to get the wood sizes required and then ran everything through my planer etc. The wood is extremely hard as much as oak and machined beautifully with the great pine smell permeating my shop. I managed to hide most of the old nail and peg holes and then finished the wood with 3 coats shellac followed by hand waxing and buffing. That took a long time as there is a lot of surface area to cover. LOL This is my largest furniture project to date and I learned as I went along. I did not take any shortcuts and everything is put together with hand cut mortise and tenon joinery. I used splines to join the panel boards. I used Titebond PVA and the bed rails are fastened using old fashioned bed bolts through the ends of the tenons and posts. I did make some mistakes of course, but nothing major. I just took my time and slogged at it for about 4 weeks.

Chip did you happen to build some type of center support for your slats? I am finishing up a massive king size for myself and I'm pretty sure we're gonna need a center support beam. I'll probably build something self supporting and just place it in the center of the frame under the slats. Great looking work by the way!

I may be wrong but I think Gorilla glue is basically spray foam insulation in a bottle. I've tried it on various projects, but I have no real need for it. The biggest drawback is it's a mess to clean off your hands and other places. I just can't see what major advantage it has over other woodworking glues. It does hold well. For lamination's, I still like resorcinol glue like Weldwood. For typical joints like mortise and tenon I still like yellow glue and for gap filling I use epoxy resin.

I would suspect the top rail is probably doweled into the post. If you can't see any plugs hiding screws, maybe take a flush cut saw and cut it loose that way. You can reattach it a number of ways from underneath the top railing using a mortised L-bracket to secure it. Once you cut the top rail loose, the spindles will probably just fall out of the bottom rail which does not have to be removed anyway.