Building Dovetail Drawers

How to build dovetail drawers with a floating base.

Building dovetail drawers.

A well built dovetail drawer is not only incredibly strong and long lasting but is aesthetically beautiful. Use a miter gauge to guide the cut. One way to identify a woodworker s skill level is to check and see how well they build the dovetail drawers in their projects. The base on this drawer is 1 4 sheet material.

While they do take some planning and careful setup they are achievable for the average home woodworker. This drawer method is so simple it should be illegal. The sides and the front will have a 1 4 groove cut near the bottom inside edge of each piece. After marking the tails on the drawer sides scribe the dovetail baseline onto the ends of the drawer front about 1 4 from the face.

Building dovetail drawers is one of my favorite things to do in the shop. Through dovetail joints are as beautiful as they are strong and work great for all kinds of casework including drawers. Grabbed my ever present camera and took some shots. Discover the secrets to making strong drawers by cutting locking rabbet joints on the tablesaw as taught by wood magazine design editor jeff mertz.

In this video wood magazine s bob. In wood magazine torture tests this drawer joint proved stronger than even dovetails. Use plywood ideally i m using 1 4 mdf i had laying around. Best of all this technique allows you to cut all parts of the joint with just a dado blade and a single setup on the tablesaw.

If you were making an overlay drawer the front would need to be rabbeted for the necessary offset and the fence reset to run the drawer fronts. For years i thought the joints were for only the best woodworkers and would be difficult if not impossible to master. Once you understand. In this article we take you step by step through the process of building dovetail drawers.

Learn all about mdf here. With one table saw setup and a dado stack you can build drawers all day long. That way when the.