Worth Your Time

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Measure Once, Make the Same Mistakes Twice.

The web frames are going to be suspended by their corners in little notches cut into the inside corners of each leg.  
We need those stinking notches!
Like so.

These notches need to be at the exact same elevation on each leg for the given drawer bay or things are gonna get wonky.  I needed an accurate way to mark all of the legs exactly the same.  Just using a tape measure wasn't going to cut it, so I came up with this template.

Removing the chance for human error.

The template is the same length as the leg and has a long fence and a stop block at one end.  The bottom of the leg needs to rest against the stop block and the long edge of the leg gets clamped to the fence.
2 Registration Surfaces.
This next photo shows how it all fits together.  I have yet to saw the notches, but I've marked them in pencil.
Clamp it to prevent any movement.
And here it is completed.  I just need to mark a tiny bit, just to get the elevation of each notch correct.


After this, I remove the template and place my marking knife into each cut, slide my square up to the knife, and mark the full depth of each notch.

I penciled in the areas that need to be removed and set the legs next to each other to make sure it was working correctly.  Looks perfect!

Important note: Try to get the template perfect... but don't freak out if it isn't.  By using the template, every leg will get the same exact mistake.  Maybe the 5th drawer notch is 1/32" lower than I originally planned.  No big deal.  The web frame with still be level.  I'll just make that particular drawer 1/32" taller.  In my case, I was careful and the template is pretty perfect.

It works!

Now I just have to not screw up when I cut into them.  :)

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