Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process
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Posted 13th May 2023
It's time to start working on the drawers. The first job (I think) is to get all the drawer fronts shot to size. I've started working on that (two down, four to go), but haven't taken any photos yet so you'll have to wait a bit longer for those.
In the meantime, I also want to plan the drawer construction in a bit more detail. I've decided to use 5.5 mm plywood as the bases, but I'm going to set that plywood into drawer slips to keep the construction as traditional as possible. I'm sorely tempted to make the bases out of solid wood, but with all the stock preparation that would be involved in making the base stock, there's very little chance I'd have any drawers made before I go to Brittany so plywood seems like a sensible option. I can always pull the plywood out and replace it with "real wood" later if I choose to.
Given the thin drawer sides, that means using slips. However, having looked at the construction described by Joyce, Charlesworth as well as AndyT from the woodworking forum, I think I'd struggle to get height of the inside bottom of the drawer any lower than 15 mm above the outside bottom of the drawer. I'm trying to squeeze quite a few things into the very narrow drawers and I don't really want to lose quite that much height. Having done some quick calculations, I reckon the maximum I can get away with is 12 mm loss and even that might be a bit tight.
All that combined means that I'm trying to come up with a drawer-slip based layout that doesn't lose much height. I've been playing around a little in CAD to see what it might and this is what I've come up with so far:
(Note that I haven't bothered to model the dovetails yet – that'll come later). The front joints will be half-lap dovetails (or whatever they're called), the back ones will be through dovetails. The drawer base will have a slot at the back and will be screwed into the back piece with a 4 mm torx-head stainless steel screw.
As you can see the back is lowered. I think this was traditionally done to prevent air pockets stopping the drawer from shutting. I don't need that in this tool chest (as the back is slatted), but the top left drawer needs the lowered back so it doesn't hit the stainless steel brackets for screwing stuff to the back. The top-right drawer will also need the sides lowering.
The drawer slips stick up slightly from the base, which isn't anywhere near as neat as the way AndyT et al showed drawer slips being made, but it has the advantage of a reduced height usage. Hopefully with the chamfer it won't look too odd.
Here's a couple of views of that drawer slip (I haven't quite decided how much to cut out at the back, although it probably doesn't matter much which I pick):
If I plan it right, then the groove in the front piece will be a through groove that comes out in one of the tail locations so that I can plough it more easily. As I said, I haven't designed the dovetails yet, but that's something I'll consider.
I would very much welcome any comments on all of the above. I'm hoping to make some progress with the drawer construction this weekend but I'm still not feeling very confident that I'm doing it right.
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