Making drawers for the workbench

Here’s my workbench on wheels and I want to make some drawers
to go along the top of it along, and I’ve already done
the most difficult part which is figuring out which pieces of
wood to use. So, this’ll be the front
sides and backs and these pieces will be
the drawer bottoms. So, here’s how the four drawers
are gonna fit together and I was thinking of assembling
it just with dados But, then for the front I wouldn’t want that dado to
come all the way to the top because that would look a
little bit ugly. So I was thinking more of a stop
dado, and then I was thinking, well a stop dado is really
a lot like a mortise so, why not just mortise it
together with a pantorouter? So, I’ll make a double
mortise and tenon joint here and to align this, I’m
just gonna find the center of this piece of wood by
scratching it in here. And, then I’ll put the
router exactly in between by just pushing the pin into
one of the holes, here. And, then I’ll make sure
the bit is centered on the piece of wood, here.
And, make sure I have this on here square. And, then
just move the fences up against the work piece. I
want the bit to be vertically in the center, so I’m just gonna
loosen the template, here. And, line up this line in
here with the top edge of my work piece. And, then with the pin in
the slot, that lines up the bit vertically centered
in the work piece. Now, I can adjust the size
of the tenon with the taper on the templates, and
that means I should cut a test mortise first, so I can
make sure the tenon will fit. And, I’ll just tilt that
up against the bit. And, I had the clamp
in the wrong place. And, I want this mortise
to be 17 millimeters deep so I’ll move the bit up
against the work piece, and then move the front
stop so it’s 17 millimeters forward of that. And, now we’re ready
to cut a mortise. Now, I have it jigged up
for making the mortises near the ends of the sides. Well, here’s a couple
of screw ups, big ones. First one is, I forgot
to set the depth stop when I cut the first
set of mortises, here, and it milled right through
the wood and into the table. Now, I can sort of fix this,
or at least hide this because this table can be
flipped over, so I can put the scar on the bottom side.
The other screw up was that somehow I managed to get
this on here just a tiny little bit crooked, and
that makes both the mortise and the tenon crooked, but
in opposite directions which means the error
doubles, and so the drawers have a tendency to go
together like this that’s just a bad thing,
so I worked around that by twisting this the other way, and then going over the mortises
again, which unfortunately does make them a
little bit loose. But, at least I won’t
have twisted drawers. Now, for the drawer fronts,
I need to put the mortises closer to the end, so I couldn’t
put a stop on the bottom and so I put one here, and
I’m using the side stops here and now I can cut the
left sides of all the drawers. So, with the fronts a little
bit taller that the sides I no longer have
these in the middle so when I flip this around, the mortises are now actually
further to the right. So, on here I moved all my
stops further to the left, which would put the mortises
further to the right. Now, I need to cut a groove
along the bottom to accept this plywood to act as a bottom.
And, for that I prefer to use a table saw, and I
stacked 3 Skill saw blades in here, and because some of
these grooves are gonna have to stop before the end, I marked
on the fence where that blade starts and stops. I hate wasting this nice
Baltic Birch plywood but I realized that if I cut
the pieces for the bottom just a bit too short, I could
get 2 pieces out of the same part with no waste
and then I’ll just splice another piece on the back by
gluing a piece of plywood on the bottom, and no one
will know the difference. So, I got my plywood splice glued
on the back of this drawer and I thought I’d glue the
next one already before I put it together, while I
wait for this one to dry, and I’ve got another one
that’s spliced together and this one’s ready to go, I do question my sanity every time
I scrounge material like that. With the drawers complete,
now I need to make some wooden drawer slides to
attach to here so the drawers can be up here. My slide design is
just a piece of wood that’s gonna get screwed
into the side that the drawers slide on. And,
then I’ve got another piece that goes against this side
here, and it’s notched so that I only have half
an inch of space here And, I made it so I have just the right
thickness, so that if later on I want to switch it over to
some metal drawer slides, these’ll fit right in. I set it up so that most
of this cut to the notch can be done on the table saw. And, I have a stop behind
the blade, so that I cut just the right distance. I prefer to refill my glue
bottle way before it’s empty so I don’t have to squeeze so
hard to get the glue to come. Well, I just barely
have enough clamps. At least of that size. So, this is the same
height as the drawer plus I have a shim in here
to give it a bit of slack. I glued on these blocks
here, so the drawers wouldn’t tip down too far
when they’re pulled out. Ha, the gap is almost parallel.
So, the reason I used this wood for these drawers is
because they already had varnish on that was in good
shape But it’s already quite scratched up and I realized, this stuff is shellac, and it’s
just not very durable at all so I’m gonna have to strip
these and re-varnish them. I guess the best thing
about shellac is how easily it comes off. Now
I need to make some handles and I figure about this
design would be good. But with the drawers now
a light colour, I figure a dark handle would be good.
So, I’m gonna cut these out of a scrap of Mahogany. I’m using an improvised
drawer drilling jig. It’s amazing how much
money you can spend on that sort of thing,
if you buy one. Now, before I’m gonna mount
these handles on here, I want to varnish the front, and
before I varnish the front, I want to round over the
corners, so that they’re nice and round, using a little hand plane The only problem with this workbench is it came out way too nice to get welding splatter all over it