In the last post on this build, I talked about the housing dados that I cut. To finish the interior, I had three operations I needed to complete: cutting out the angled feet, putting grooves in the back of the sides to accept the rear panel, half blind dovetails in the top front and rear of the sides to accept the top front and rear pieces.
Running the Grooves
For this, I was going to use the Veritas skew plane. I haven't used this tool a lot yet so this will help give me some experience with it. Given the long grooves I need to make, I should get some good experience for this project. After running the first groove, I finished off the bottom and sides with a shoulder plane. The groove looked pretty good, however I eventually discovered that the fence moved and I hadn't noticed it. As such, the groove wasn't a uniform distance from the rear edge. To fix it, I glued in some thing offcuts of cherry and then used a combo of chisel and shoulder plane. Now the groove was uniform and given the location for this error (rear of case) it will likely never be seen.
Cutting out the feet
Was pretty easy to mark these out and then cut with a mixture of saws and chisels and rasps to clean up the newly formed edge. I got more breakout that I would have like on the chisel work but that was completely due to me being aggressive and not sensitive to the work. Unless someone gets on their belly and then looks underneath, it will never be seen. Still, it is a reminder to myself to be sensitive when working. No good can come from beating on the wood.
Half blind dovetails
Cutting the two horizontal pieces with the tails was straightforward. Given the length of the vertical pieces, it was a bit challenging to set things up so that I could transfer with my marking knife the tails locations. I found a way. Needed to use a ladder for the sawing but that is ok. For half blind dovetails, the way I was taught by Paul Sellers is that you don't need to cut close to the knife lines. It's chisel work on half blinds that gets you to the final distances. They came out pretty good all things considered.
Glue Up
In order to get deeper clamping, I used this project as an excuse to buy some Bessy clamps that have a bigger head. I wanted to get more pressured deeper into the sides. I am sure I could have rigged up some sort of wooden cauls. Again, I just used this is an excuse. One thing I am really fussy about doing is a practice dry run for glue ups. Though its still stressful gluing up something this big, it was reasonably uneventful. I did the glue up in two steps. The first day, I glued up the center horizontal divider so that way I would have less clamping directions to worry about when doing the main carcass. I didn't talk much about this piece but I did keep grain direction in mind so that way it would be able to move with the main carcass and not create a cross grain situation.
I did have my wife help me as the pieces are big and heavy and I just want to avoid a crisis. The other thing I do is now use Titebond liquid hide glue. It has a longer open time and this helps my stress level as well. I almost always leave things overnight so its longer dry time isn't really an issue for me.
With this all behind, this piece is starting to look like furniture. Still a lot to do but I kind of felt like the "hard" part was behind me. This was mostly true but I did done some bone headed use a bigger hammer to pound things together that created problems but I will save that for the next post.
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