Building Dovetail Drawers

In this article we take you step by step through the process of building dovetail drawers.

Building dovetail drawers.

On the interior surface of the drawer front scribe a line about 1 32 less than the thickness of the drawer side. This drawer method is so simple it should be illegal. Building dovetail drawers is one of my favorite things to do in the shop. 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.

The base on this drawer is 1 4 sheet material. A well built dovetail drawer is not only incredibly strong and long lasting but is aesthetically beautiful. Once you understand. 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.

Learn all about mdf here. Through dovetail joints are as beautiful as they are strong and work great for all kinds of casework including drawers. Discover the secrets to making strong drawers by cutting locking rabbet joints on the tablesaw as taught by wood magazine design editor jeff mertz. 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.

Grabbed my ever present camera and took some shots. Use plywood ideally i m using 1 4 mdf i had laying around. How to build dovetail drawers with a floating base. The sides and the front will have a 1 4 groove cut near the bottom inside edge of each piece.

Use a miter gauge to guide the cut. With one table saw setup and a dado stack you can build drawers all day long. In this video wood magazine s bob. Stopped by a fiends shop to see what was going on.

For years i thought the joints were for only the best woodworkers and would be difficult if not impossible to master. One way to identify a woodworker s skill level is to check and see how well they build the dovetail drawers in their projects. That way when the.