Hello and welcome back to my Blog. Â Today I am continuing the medicine cabinets build by creating the outer door frame of the case. Â I have prepped the stock and cut the first dovetail in the previous installment. Â I’m now transferring marks onto the pin board.
After I transfer my marks, I scribe parallel lines and then make small notches at the corners of the pin. Â The reason for this is that it allows the saw to fall next to the line, rather that on the line and the result is a tighter fitting dovetail.
Now I begin excavation work, I start chopping ahead of the baseline, taking a chop then turning my chisel bevel down and splitting the waste out. Â You’ll see from the shape of the remaining waste how I take out the corners first, this helps to minimize split out at the inside corners of the pins.
I split away the waste until approaching the floor of the dovetail, then I will pare away the remainder. Â I then chop to the baseline and clear the corners.
And test fit.
The fit up is looking sharp, that left side is actually a pencil mark and not a gap. Â Next I continue along, making certain to mark my baseline using the case as a reference so that when the dovetails tighten down it will do so without gaps. Â There is no second chance at this so it is important to mark properly.
Note the kiridashi knife, excellent for this sort of layout because the backside is flat. Â Now I will trim to length and then use a smoothing plane with my shooting board to clean up the edge. Â Many people have wondered why I chose to do so, the reason is that it creates a very smooth finished edge, difficult to do on end grain that will be visible.
Test fitting is complete, but before gluing up I will chamfer every surface that will not be directly contacting the case and will otherwise be impossible to chamfer otherwise.
And finally the glued up surround;
Thank you for joining me and I hope that you have enjoyed. Â The next coming steps will be building the doors and completing the back panel.
Medicine Cabinet – Door Building
Some of the tools that I used in this post can be purchased using the link provided, which will help to support the production of content available on my blog.
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