I'm reusing my existing cabinet boxes and converting the lowers to drawers. The original 1958 vintage cabinets were European style without face frames. Instead of 35mm cup style hinges, which were probably not available at the time, the builders used knife hinges on birch plywood doors. A very clean, modern look indeed. This is the only photo I had on the SD card, I left the iPad at work. You can get an idea of what it looked like from the lower cabinets.
I will be going with painted, shaker style paneled doors and drawer fronts. I thought soft maple would look nice for the drawer boxes rather than pine or poplar, but my hardwood dealer didn't have any so I came home with birch instead. Should have gone with poplar! I tried to select boards that would give me the maximum number of parts with a minimum of waste. First, there is a lot of reversing grain in this stuff. Not cool when using hand planes. Second, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be.
I decided that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. When else would I have a chance to practice hand-cut dovetails on 20 drawers. I had the good sense to have the lumber yard plane it down to 5/8" so I wouldn't destroy my little lunchbox planer. The finished thickness is 1/2". I brought home enough to build the ten drawers for the lower cabinets. I didn't really have room in the shop to store more than that. I bought poplar for the parts that will be painted.
I decided to build the bottom row of drawers first. These would be nine inches deep and have five tails. On the first drawer, I started with a sharp one-inch wide chisel. I had to stop and sharpen it three more times during the process. Did I mention this stuff is hard? In spite of that, everything went fairly well. There were no Kodak moments on drawer number one but my dovetails did show substantial improvement with each corner of the drawer.
Drawer number two went along a little better but still not magazine cover quality. However, both boxes went together tight, square, and were mechanically sound.
Drawer number three is where I started to hit my stride. All of the pictures in this post are of number three. None of these joints went together straight off of the saw, there was a fair bit of paring and fitting but they fit nice!
There is still plenty of room for improvement and I don't know that I will get a much better fit than these but I might reach a point where there is less paring involved. Considering the hardness of the wood and that its fibers don't compress like my pine practice material (I was able to get dovetails to fit straight off of the saw in pine) I am really pleased with the results. Only 17 more to go. I might be pretty good at this by then.
