Drawer Bay Side Panels

This next step involves making the side panels for each drawer bay.  When you open the side doors, I didn't want you to see the side of the drawers, so these thin panels just hide the drawer bays and give the door bays a solid backing.

I resawed the maple with my new carbide tipped Lenox Trimaster blade.  Even though it cuts smooth and stays sharp, it can't fix kiln-dried lumber.  The resawn boards cupped after resawing an 11" wide board.  I tried playing around with wetting one side and letting it air dry, but nothing really helped.  It's a good thing I left plenty of extra thickness.

I planed the high sides down until one face was resting mostly flat against my workbench and then used my 13" power planer to mill the other side to thickness.  Once I got a solidly flat face, I began flipping the board for each pass through the planer.  I ended up stopping .02" thicker than 1/4" thickness, realizing it would leave me a little planing to do in order to get it to fit correctly, but this is better than having all of the boards fit too loosely.  I can't stand rattling panels.

So I cut the panels to width, squared one end, cut to length, and used my skew rabbet plane to remove that .02" of wood off the outer edges of each panel.

1/8" x .02" Rabbet along the length of the board.  Here I'm set up to cut the 1/4" x .02" rabbet on the end.

I found that scoring the grain with my marking gauge before planing resulted in a cleaner cut.

3-4 very light passes is all that is needed.

Ready for the dry-fit.

Slide it in.

Like a glove.

First 3 Drawer Bays assembled.

Interior View.

I wrapped up the rest of them the following day.

Side panels completed.

Detail view of side panels.

Detail view of side panels.

She said she doesn't want me to cover these with black velvet, that she would rather see the wood.  I'll probably pre-finish them with 2 coats of poly before I assemble the carcass.  They don't really need to be glued in place, and sanding after the glue-up would be too difficult.

I'm still thinking about whether I want to pre-finish most of this before assembly.  I can't decide.  It's a lot of work either way.  I'll probably have to pause the project to make a few different stain samples for her to choose from, too.

At this point I need to make eight 1/4" pegs for the drawbores, sand everything, and do a few dry runs with my brothers so that when they help on glue day we all know what we're doing.  Once it's together it just needs 2 doors, 9 drawers, and fancy jewelry trays.  I think the hard parts are behind me now, but there are still plenty of opportunities to screw it up. :-)