Sellers Home Side Cupboard

The final stages of any project are always interesting, like the final pieces to a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, only you made all the pieces and perfected the design yourself.

Hingeing the doors and hanging them to the main body of the cabinet necessitates precision so that the doors open and close well and also align in parallelity with the cabinet. The procedure guaranteeing our success has not changed in 300 years.

In this episode, we create the panels for the doors, fit them and then glue up the doors ready for fitting. We also move ahead with creating the divider rail to separate the drawer from the doors.

With both dovetailed ends of the drawer cut, fitted, and completed, it’s time to cut the three grooves to the front and sides of the drawer. This quick and simple process prepares us for laying out and cutting the housing dadoes to receive the drawer back.

Making and fitting dovetails for a drawer is just about the most important skill a furniture maker must master, as well as stock preparation that gives the precise sizing for the joinery.

There are lots of different elements to developing a twist-free door, and each step we take ensures that the doors come out as planned.

The undercarriage of the project takes a little geometry to get the cross-halving just right and then the arching that helps the bulkiness disappear without losing the intrinsic strength of full mortise and tenons to the legs.

The undercarriage framework and legs carry the weight of the cabinet on four points, and we rely on well-proven traditional joinery that guarantees the full support we need to that end.

There are many panels to glue up on this project, quite large ones, in preparation for the dovetail joinery to each of the corners. Paul has combined different methods for removing the waste between the dovetails and the pins.

Marrying the second half of the dovetails was not so simple this time, but perseverance gets the result we need and strive for. We learn so much when we recognise that different woods act and react differently as we work them.