Bathroom Stuff; part II

It's been so long since I've posted that I think the pageviews counter on the blog has started going backwards.  Basically I've had this post going for a while now and just haven't finished it off.  This post was actually started over a month ago...TONIGHT, I SHALL FINISH AND POST IT SO I CAN MOVE ON TO OTHER PROJECTS!!!

I last left off with a single cabinet door not quite finished. Since then I've knocked out the other four, plus three new drawers. Here's the breakdown:

I had a big problem with tearout when I was fielding the panels for the doors.  There were a few panels with sections of sappy, knotty bits that just wouldn't plane nicely and left a really rough surface.

For those I just took a little putty and smoothed out the bad parts.

A few of the joints also had some unsightly gaps which required wood filler:

Soon I had finished constructed the necessary five doors:

Then it was off to the sander:

This setup is great: I've got the Shop Vac hooked up the sander, but I've also got a switch from Sears that turns the vacuum on automatically when I turn on the sander.  Having the hoses and wires hanging from the ceiling also makes sanding a lot easier.

One last touch on the doors was a little ogee around the perimeter:

Looks nice, right?

Well, I certainly screwed up one of them pretty bad: what's wrong here?

Yep, I routed the ogee on the wrong side of the door...time for some surgery.

First I had to cut the screwed-up piece off:

That's my new saw in the foreground.  It's a Bridge City Tool Works Kataba Meiko.  It has an unusual tooth pattern that lets it make crosscuts extremely fast.  I got it on sale and am really pleased with it.  Yeah, I said I was getting away from Japanese saws...oh well.

Then I had to clean up the saw cuts so that the new frame member would seat correctly; for this I used a shooting board.  I don't think I've demonstrated this before on the blog, but the shooting board is extremely useful:

Essentially, the shooting board lets you use a bench plane to trim ends very precisely and accurately.  It holds the piece at 90 degrees to the path of the plane.  Here I'm using it to clean up the saw cut so that the new frame member will seat squarely.

I suppose I could have gone to a lot of trouble and created loose tenon joints for the repair, but that would have been a ton of trouble (unless someone wants to buy me a Festool Domino...Any takers? Anyone?)

So I ended up using the old through-dowel method.  It gets the job done:

Paint 'em and done:

Now time for the drawers.  Usually for drawers that protrude beyond and/or overlap the actual cabinet, the drawer box is constructed and then a face piece is attached to the front of the drawer.  I decided to try a one-piece front that both contains the dovetail pins and the overlapping face. Claro?  Probably not, but pictures will help a lot, I'm sure.

Here's my drawer front blank:

I then used the Stanley 78 with depth stop to run a rebate along both long-grain edges.

Then I connected those two rebates with cross-grain rebates with my skew rebate plane:

So perhaps now you can see the drawer front take shape.  The rebates create the part of the drawer that will overlap the cabinet.

Here's what makes the one-piece drawer front difficult:

That overlapping section of the drawer front makes transfering the dovetail locations very difficult.  The marking knife I usually use for this wouldn't fit down in there so I had to use a pencil with the graphite extended so far out that it probably broke four or five times.  Note to self: use thinner stock for the drawer sides next time.

Once the pins were marked out, the overlapping section further complicated things by getting in the way of waste removal operations:

In the end I prevailed...not once...

...not twice...

...but three times:

And the crowd goes wild!!!

I would also like to show off my firewood collection to the world:

Things were pretty lean for a while there, but I'm sleeping much better now. There is actually still a fair amount left to split too...anyone need some stress relief?

Here's a weird coincidence: my birthday is only about 2 month away and Chris Schwarz is selling a bunch of his loot. *hint**hint*

That's all for now.

Wow!  I actually finally posted this!