Here is one more shot of the ends being glued up. This is another case of never having too many clamps of flat surfaces in the shop. The ends are clamped at very joint and spaced up above the work surface for the first 2 hours. They are also checked for squareness. which is pretty good given the shouldered mortise and tenon joints, but a couple needed to be tweaked of the last 1/16″ on the diagonal measurements (your true test of squareness on a large piece).
With the dresser ends glued up and the glue squeeze out cleaned up it is time to run my attention to the dresser rails and dividers. The rails, for lac of a better term, are the horizontal dividers between the drawers. The dividers are the vertical pieces between drawers on the same level. The rails and dividers are part of the overall frame structure. They are not however the primary support for the drawers. That is done by the runners which are a future topic.
For the rails, the mortises were cut on th CNC router, but this time I squared up the holes with a chisel. In many cases this is actually less effort than rounding off the tenons. The mortises were cut with a 1/4″ router bit. So there was only 1/8″ to clean up on each side. Start with the cross grain cuts. This is normally 2 strokes. Here it is shown on the top mortises.
Note the chisel is angled. This makes it much easier to keep it in the corner. Yo are trying not just to clean up the cross grain side but also lightly score the fibers for the cut along the grain on the adjacent side. The cut along the grain requires more effort. I will press down with my chest or chin to assist in paring the cut. I am not a fan of using a mallet for this it is too easy to dig in and make a mess of the mortise
Now with the mortises cleaned up, it is time to fit the tenons. There is a small amount of work to be done for final trimming with the rabbet plane. The rails and dividers are also sanded to final thickness on the drum sander to make for an exact fit in the half lap joints. Then the first dry assembly is started.
So far so good. The pipe clamps are the only practical means of clamping something this wide and gently squeezing together the assembly. Note the couplers in the pipe clamps. I have a selection of 3,4,5 foot 3/4″ pipes and when I need long clamps as I do now the couplers join the sections. You can also see that the joints for the rails and dividers are half lap joints. These were cut again on the radial arm saw with the blade set for 3/4″ width (that has not changed for the hundreds of cuts). Here is a close up of the smaller dividers and joint.The next step is to gut the dadoes in the rails. The drawer runners fit into these with tenons on each end. One of the fine poitns is tha the runners are not level with the rails but slightly raised by about 1/16″ . This is so the drawer can slide in without wearing on the rail and having a gap on the bottom that is closer in size to the side and top gaps.
Here is a shot from a previous project which is a very large chest / wardwrobe with cock beading around the drawer openings. Note I love the kids but I am NOT going to do 3 cockbeaded dressers for them – way too much work.
Cockbeading is an applied bead around each drawer. It can either be on the frame or drawer. Here is a shot of the whole wardrobe. You can see it as the raised profile around each drawer.
The drawer runners are slightly raised compared to the rails. You can do this by either offsetting the tenons on the runners as I did in the wardrobe, or by offsetting the dado in the rails which is what I am doing for the dressers. For the dressers, teh rails are all carefully arranged and marked for which side is up. Making mistakes now is critical.
The table saw is set up to make the dadoes with:
zero clearance insert around the blade for support of the piece when pushing through.
Feather board to push the rails against the fence.
Block to hold the stock down. Note in the setup the piece of paper as a spacer and rounded leading edge to make feeding easy.
The dado is offset by about 1/16″ and a test block is run.
One final double check of the orientation of the rails
Running one of the rails through.
Now I have the rails ready for the runners. Next step will be making the runners and inner dividers that go between the drawers.