The Drawers
The back panel is finished, the hardware is ordered; in the meantime my attention shifts to the drawer construction. Rails are installed and drawer panels put together.
First a filler is glued-in at the back, to compensate for the frame height in the front.
Wooden rails will support all the drawers. To minimize wear I’ll use hard maple strips for the bottom drawer to ride on.
Next a few pieces of plywood make two filler inserts, one on each side of the narrower top drawers. These are attached with a dado to a wide hard maple rail that supports both the bottom and center drawer.
They are left to dry overnight.
At the front, the inserts will be finished off with the ‘ribbed’ decorations that I made at the start of this phase of the project. That has to wait until after some sanding and painting is done.
The drawers consist of hard maple sides and rear, dadoed to a cherry front panel. The height of the bottom drawer forced me to glue 2 boards together. By bookmatching them, they make nice, though hidden, statement.
All parts of the drawer are individually fitted to the cabinet. The width of each side piece is carefully adjusted, so it snugly fits between the upper and lower rails.
Complicating things is the requirement for the drawer to extend both at the front as the rear of the cabinet.
Next is the front panel. It is cut and planed to a size where it tightly fits the drawer opening; later on this will be fine-tuned to its final dimensions.