Guest Bedroom Dresser

[glenn bradley]

As usual I am using a thread to force me to stay on track and moving forward. Back in November of 2023 I made these side tables for the guest bedroom.

My challenge now is to make a 7-drawer dresser to go with them. This will replace some Wal-Mart dressers I have been dragging around since before the dot.com explosion. I could be wrong but I though it might be interesting to see where I start and how things morph, evolve and eventually end up. Here is my first draft over coffee this morning.

The legs will be tapered like the side tables and there will be frame and panel work on the ends. They will be primarily walnut with some curly maple accents. I do not want to go with curly maple for the drawer fronts as there is just too much real estate for that big of a splash. If you have ever seen a hallway table made out of 100% zebrawood you may know of what I speak. I am thinking curly maple pulls at this point but we will see where the coffee leads me. Different strokes, and I love me some figured and exotic wood. I also like habanero peppers but . . . too much is too much

We'll take the trip together and see what happens. Stay safe and enjoy your shop time.

 

[bill kaminski]

Watching

 

[Phill Clay]

Glen, hope you don't mind me making a suggestion the two side tables look fantastic, If you did not want to use curly Maple for all what if you made the two top outer drawers in the dresser to match the side tables?

Phill

 

[glenn bradley]

Glen, hope you don't mind me making a suggestion the two side tables look fantastic, If you did not want to use curly Maple for all what if you made the two top outer drawers in the dresser to match the side tables?

Phill

Thanks and a great suggestion. We are of a like mind Phill. I am playing with just that sort of an idea. Curly maple fronts with dark pulls and dark fronts with curly pulls for the balance.

 

[glenn bradley]

I think I am closing in. I had to adjust the height since the guest bedroom windows are not at the same height as the new master windows that I used as a model. I figured out this was due to the new master windows having a different trim dimension so the height was adjusted to make things look right from the street. We have plantation shutters and they swing inward when you want to clean or open the windows so that becomes the driving factor for furniture height in front of those windows. Wow, that was way too much information . . .


Be that as it may . . . The legs are tapered from the outside, the pull appearance is approximate, and the false fronts will have a profile similar to the nightstands, not squared off as shown. I try to wait till I am really comfy before profiling certain things in SketchUp because if you want to tweak dimensions, curves and round overs can be problematic. I believe I have enough dimensional data to start picking out material and making parts. Let the madness begin

 

[glenn bradley]

Sorry guys. Lazy day today. One of my favorite parts of a project; material selection.

I chalk out parts and work on material appearance matching.



I have been waiting to use this material on something and finally think I have found a place for it.

The figure is not perfectly symmetric of course so I split it at the bandsaw along appearance versus dimensional lines.

I stop to swap out the Woodslicer. I keep this narrow kerf blade for exotics where I do not want to lose a lot of material to the saw kerf. I sometimes get lazy and leave it in place which wears it out prematurely.

I finally stopped for the few minutes it takes to swap back to the Resaw King.

I will mill out the side frame and panel parts first.

To be continued . . .

 

[glenn bradley]

Kind of limping along here. It's a bit after 7am so I am gonna grab some breakfast. I did get the raised panels for the sides milled to rough dimension.

I am taking a little longer than normal because I want to try to milk some parts out of these old off cuts from previous projects.

This is pretty much a utility piece for the guest bedroom but I want to do as well as I can while using up some leftover stock.
When you resaw you sometimes find wonderful surprises and sometimes not.

I got a couple of voids in the stock. I will try to use the taper to eliminate them but, just in case I cut a couple of extra blanks. In the past I have also placed these voids at the rear and filled them with epoxy. We'll see how it goes.

 

[glenn bradley]

Still bumbling forward. Book-matched panels for the sides.

I already showed the leg blanks. Sorry about that.

Here is where my planer sled lives in one of the out buildings.

I give the bottom a clean off and a re-wax. The bottom drawers call for false front of 8-1/4" and my jointer is only an 8".

So I have a decent amount of blanks broken down and milled.

Apparently I am the only person who knows where the grocery store is so I have to go pick up some last minute items for tomorrow before I get to eat lunch

 

[glenn bradley]

Much of the reason I post all this blathering is to keep me moving on. Mission accomplished. Is it weird to get some twisted pleasure from how much spoil your cyclone removes from the air stream?

And it leaves your filter box this clean???

Be that as it may . . . . The usual cutting of rail blanks to length.


Same for the stiles.







I tend to over-mark parts.

Grooves for everybody in this assembly.

Tomorrow may be hit and miss depending on when guests arrive.

 

[glenn bradley]

Time for Dominoes.

When I am looking for center on anything I tend to measure from both ends to be sure I am right on target.

Tinker Toys . . . whenever I am doing Domino joinery I can't help it; I think of Tinker Toys.



Moving on to raised panels.

 

[glenn bradley]

I built this fixture back in 2013. It serves as a tall router fence for things like drawer-lock joinery.

It also has a face board with abrasive attached and a curved caul that lets me do raised panel cuts.

These are right off the machine and will require some hand plane love but,

the jig does save time when folks are coming over for Memorial Day and I still need to go pick up the cake!!!

 

[Charles Lent]

I got one of the center out steel rulers as a gift some years ago, and thought to myself "What a waste", until I started using it. Ever since it's been used significantly. I get both ends to read the same as I measure across something, and then Zero is the center point to mark. No calculation or multiple checks.

Charley

 

[glenn bradley]

Charles is right on target. I have a couple of center rules at 12" and 24" and they are great. They come into use more often than one might think. I just use the combo square to give me a bearing edge to run the pencil down.

 

[Vaughn McMillan]

When I was hanging pictures for a living, I bought a centering tape measure. One scale was regular inches and fractions thereof, and the scale below it was half size. I could measure the distance on the top numbers of tape measure, then find that same number on the bottom and that would be the center point. My boss didn't like it because he'd been finding center with a regular tape for decades and he figured everyone should do the same. I know how to do it his way, but the centering tape was faster. When I left that job, I gave the tape to the guy who replaced me. He later told me the boss took it from him and threw it away on his first day of work.

 

[glenn bradley]

I started in I.T. with heavy iron IBM mainframes in 5000 sq ft data centers that ran on only 2.25 gig of spinning memory. How far would I have got in the dot com world if I tried to hold on to that model? Be fluid. Move with the changes. Give to the givers and leave the takers alone. When faced with a wye in the road always veer toward the better path. Often not the popular one but you know when things aren't right . That philosophy got me to retirement so I can't argue with it.

 

[glenn bradley]

A little hand plane work and the raised panels are ready.

Starting the glue up.

More glue up stuff.

Lee Valley has gotten pretty proud of their bar gauge heads but, even still they seem worth it.

I have made a variety of "sticks" for them and they are quick to change as required. If they are too rich for your blood some stair gauges and some scrap will work as well as shown n the lower left.

I use the gauges to confirm square like so.



And here is one side done.

Another side part way there.

Odd use of setup bars to assure things are square.

I should be able to finish this side today and get on with the legs tomorrow.

 

[glenn bradley]

And here's the two end panels all glued up.

I need to taper these leg blanks.

I cross cut them to final length.

I don't know why I built this taper sled so heavy. I must've thought I was going to be batching out parts for a ship builder or something.

At any rate, the blank gets marked out and laid in place.

The taper is cut.

And it ends up like so right off the machine.

A little hand plane work and it is ready for some joinery.

Three more to go . . .

 

[glenn bradley]

Not much this morning. Family activities. 40 mortises, legs tapered and dry fit for my first look at the side panel/leg assemblies.


I just need to surface prep the legs and then I can glue the legs to the already glued panel assembly.

 

[glenn bradley]

We have hardwood floors in most of the house. I tend to chamfer the bottom edges of legs and then apply a heavy felt pad. This lets me slide the pieces out from the wall to clean without jacking up the floors. I made this jig a few years ago. I marked out the base with some common angles to allow for quick setup. It has an upper and lower platform that ride perpendicular to each other on dovetail ways. Be that as it may, it sets in the miter slot.

Here you can see the dovetail ways. I believe I used some Rockler aluminum dovetail bars that I picked up on the cheap at one of their "garage sales".

I use an expansion style miter slot stop to set the position. Anyone who has gotten past center on a disc sander and ended up with a part launching into outer space knows why.

So it sets like so.

Moves up to the stop

This is not precision joinery so a speed square sets my 45 degree angle.

You can mark the end of the leg but I have done this so often I am comfortable with just going for it.

And the end of the legs end up like so. I shellac or varnish the end grain and apply the self adhesive heavy felt after the finish is applied.

This is going to seem dumb because I did not take a "before" picture . . . why didn't I take a before picture!?! . Now the story begins . . . I am doing surface prep on the legs. I have one in my hand and reach for a scrap of sandpaper on the bench. I whack the leg into the end of a bar clamp and ding the sharp corner edge to about the size of a BB. My first thought is that I am glad I made an extra leg because this thing is toast. In a rare moment of clarity I break out my little iron and a damp paper towel. After three or four applications of steam the ding swells back out and I get to move on.

Some of these old tricks still work. Sorry there was no "before" pick. The ding was bad enough that I though the leg was done for. Total recovery. A win right off the bat after a not-so-good day yesterday. This bodes well for the rest of my shop time today.

 

[glenn bradley]

Time for some rails/stretchers/whatever-you-want-to-call-them . I resaw this rougher material at the bandsaw to create some blanks.

As usual infeed and outfeed support for longer material is a good insurance of success.

Slightly oversized blanks.

We sometimes experience more stress release in material than expected. This material has been in this shop for 7 years and was in the previous shop for a decade but still . . . . more stress release than expected.

I will keep working the material. I wish I would have cut it more oversized but we can't tell the future, eh? I do find it amazing the amount of spoil we can create when doing larger pieces. I save anything I think I can use for frames, boxes and such. The really useless stuff goes to the burn barrel or the kindling bucket.

I also keep an old recycle trash can for things that the grandkids should never roast marshmallows over; MDF, ply, painted material, and so forth.

At any rate it looks like I have gotten some usable stock out of that bowed resaw material.

I'll keep you posted as I move along.