With the hidden mitered dovetails complete, the areas I focused on next were the vertical partition that separates the door and drawer spaces, as well as the two horizontal partitions that separate the three drawers.
I decided to treat this cabinet as an experiment of sorts and try out a few different types of joinery for the main case pieces. Since the corners with the hidden mitered dovetails were pretty involved I thought I’d try to keep things more simple for the partitions. In the past I’ve used tapered sliding dovetails to join partitions but they can be fiddly to adjust, and more importantly when I was building this cabinet I didn’t have access to a decent router table. So I decided to use some simple stub tenons to join the vertical partition to the top and bottom of the cabinet. And for the horizontal drawer partitions I decided to use dominoes. I could have use either method throughout, but I was curious to compare the two processes.
Below are the stub tenons for the vertical partition, which I roughed out on the sliding tablesaw. To trim the tenons down to their final thickness I used a little kiwa-ganna. The key to this step is to leave the waste between the tenons to support the kiwa-ganna while planing/adjusting the thickness.
After cleaning things up with the kiwa-ganna, I rough cut out the waste between the tenons using a bandsaw. Getting as close as I could without risking cutting into the finished shoulder cut.
From there I cleaned up the final bit of waste with a bench chisel.
Here I’m dry fitting the vertical partition to the bottom of the main cabinet.
Now for the horizontal partitions/drawer dividers. For these I went with dominoes. I have to say I’ve always been a bit skeptical about dominoes and I admit to a strong bias towards more traditional joinery. When I was working in NY a lot of the woodworkers around me used dominoes for everything, and I was an outlier who stubbornly continued to use traditional joinery. But recently I used them on another project and they turned out to be much stronger than I imagined (something I found out first hand after gluing the wrong parts together and unsuccessfully trying to take them apart :p).
Some might argue that for horizontal partitions that are bearing a vertical load from drawers, a stronger form of joinery is called for. Perhaps the strongest method would be to inset the partitions into a dado to fully support the partitions and drawers. But this is a small cabinet, and it’s also my own cabinet. If I was going to make this for a client I might opt for a more robust solution. The drawers are relatively small and I don’t anticipate them getting very heavy in use, so I figured the dominoes will be fine for supporting the vertical load and weight of the drawers. If they do fail, then it will be a good lesson learned.
Here I’m using a simple piece of ply with some layout marks to guide the domino while cutting the mortises.
I have to admit the speed of the domino is really appealing, and on future projects I may start using it a bit more. Overall I was able to join the horizontal partitions using the domino much faster than the vertical partition with stub tenons. That said I won’t be abandoning traditional joinery anytime soon. I think the domino has a place but where you use it needs to be considered. Joinery is such a deep topic and huge consideration when designing and building a piece. I think at some point I’ll do a blog post just about joinery considerations.
With the vertical and horizontal partitions complete I went ahead and glued them up to the top and bottom halves of the cabinet. I did the glue-up in stages, first gluing the partitions to the top and bottom halves of the cabinet, and then later brought in the sides of the cabinet.
Not pictured is the work I did on the back panel, which I made from kiri (paulownia). The panel itself is a simple board that is fit within a groove running around the back edge of the cabinet. Below you can see the back panel in place on the assembled cabinet. The three kiri panels sitting inside the cabinet are the drawer bottoms.
I often find glue-ups to be really stressful. But I’ve gotten better at planning and preparation, and when possible it’s nice to take things in stages like I did with this cabinet. If I attempted to assemble all of the mitered dovetail joints, partitions, and back panel at once I think I would have been in a massive panic. Trying to ensure that each seam is tight, while also cleaning up glue squeeze out, is a lot to deal with in the span of time 20-30 min. Gluing up in stages makes the overall process much more manageable and gives you a bit more time to focus on any unforeseen difficulties, which there often are.
Thanks for following along. Up next I’ve got some photos from the ken-don door assembly, so stay tuned.
