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College Practical techniques

College course: Day 5

Good progress today on this little cabinet. The side panels are pretty much together, just awaiting the boards that will be cut to size and enclosed by the framing. Next time I’ll be cutting the board stock and will start thinking about making rails that connect the cabinet together, one side to the other, and getting this thing standing on it’s own feet.
I started out with setting up a router, to cut the rebates for the boards in the legs and also the cross rails. If you have ever read the blog before, you’ll know I try to do everything with hand tools. But, as in previous days, I need to take the opportunity to learn the set-up on these machines, as I’ll no doubt need to use them again at some point.

‘Oh infernal machine, your dust and noise displeases me greatly…’

I set up a fence for the legs to run through, but the magnetic clamps didn’t hold quite solid to the base plate. I added ‘G-clamps’ on the ends of the fence also. And a final check that the cutter was aligned with the mortices.

All legs and rails were run through with the final ‘face’ sides in the same orientation. This way I know my rebates are all the same distance from the edge. Here I’m checking the final board will fit into the panel frame, by slotting in a piece of scrap from the same board.

Once the rails are in the mortices, the panel will fit into the verticals and horizontals. Lovely!

Here’s a final panel, there’s no board cut to go into it yet, but I have chiselled out the final part of the mortices to house the haunches. All the joints close up nicely. There’s some minimal twisting on the tenons, but hey, I pretty much did this all by hand!

Second panel fitted together. While the legs were on the router with the correct-sized cutter in, I took the opportunity to cut the rebates for the back panel, which will be made from the same stock as the boards on the side panels.