George Vondriska

Drawer Making: Session 4: Drawer Joinery Alternatives

George Vondriska
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Want more joinery choices? Here they are. We’ll teach you to cut through dovetails on a router-based jig, along with all the required setup tips, and how to make drawer lock joints on the router table. Whether you use a slot-cutting bit or a task-specific drawer lock router bit, you’ll get the instruction you need.

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Well, we've taken you through some great information on half-blind dovetails and drawer locks that are done on a table saw. Now, we wanna expand your joinery arsenal here, and move on to some other stuff. In this case what I'm gonna talk about is through dovetails. Part of the reason for that is a lot of these jigs will do both. So it's handy for you to know how to handle both types of dovetails on your dovetail jig.

Additionally, what some woodworkers will do is half-blind dovetails on the front, through dovetails on the back corner. So this gives you another option for doin' those high-quality drawers that we keep talking about. Here's what we've got goin' on this particular jig, and many jigs are similar to this, I changed the comb. And if you look at the comb here, there is quite a difference from what we used before. This is our half-blind comb.

On the through dovetail comb, notice that we've got straight fingers on this side, angled fingers on this side. It's real important that for step one of this process, which is cutting the tails, we've got the straight fingers toward us right now. The other thing that's gonna be real important, hate to make you do this again, but you gotta look at the owner's manual because what's gonna happen with your dovetail jig is that it's gonna call for two different bits. My dovetail cutter and guide bushing are still in the router. For this jig, when we go to through dovetails, it uses the same guide bushing and the same dovetail cutter.

However, what changes is we have to add a second bit. Smaller guide bushing and a straight bit, that's gonna make more sense when we get to that aspect, those are used for cuttin' pins and sockets. Now, I talked about this a little just a second ago. Sequence of events is real important, regardless of whose dovetail jig you're usin', you're gonna wanna always do tails first. And then we cut the sockets to fit the tails.

Really hard to do it, almost impossible to do it in the opposite order. In the world of stuff you should get together, one of the things that you'll need is a piece of scrap. This is gonna go into the dovetail jig like so. And it's gonna act as a backer board for our cut. Big difference between the throughs and the half-blinds is that when we did our half-blinds, the pin and socket board was in a horizontal position on the jig.

The tailboard was vertical. We cut 'em both at one time. Through dovetails, you always cut 'em separately. And that makes sense. We're usin' two different parts of the jig to do it.

We can't cut 'em together. If we don't have a board behind our target board, when we go through the backside, we're gonna get a lot of chipping back there. It's gonna get real ugly, real fast. So we wanna make sure we've got a backer board and we want the backer board to be thicker than the material that we're cutting. That's so that we have really good support when the router bit exits toward the backside, to make sure we don't get any blowout.

Now, one of the things we've talked about a little bit is the position of the comb on the dovetail jig. When we do tails, where we're starting right now, that position isn't real critical. We just wanna make sure the comb is deep enough that it's gonna complete the cut. So lookin' down from the top, here's what we're after. There's, on this jig, there's a line engraved here on top of the jig.

I want that line to be even with or behind this seam between the horizontal piece and the vertical piece. And like I said, if we go a little bit too far back, like that, that's not a problem. If we're too shallow, that's gonna be a problem, 'cause you won't be able to complete the cut. So if anything on your jig, it's better to go a little bit too deep than bein' a little bit too shallow. Now, let me readjust my height down here 'cause I loosened it.

So again, you're gonna have to look a little bit at the owner's manual for your jig to make sure that this stuff is workin' for you the way it's workin' for me. And like I've said before, these jigs are all real similar in setup. My next step pertains, again, to the stop that we have on the side of the jig here. And again, we've got two options here. One is a stop that's in a fixed position.

And I'm gonna control the width of my material for that layout under the fingers based on what's given to me by the jig. Or in the case of a stop that's moveable like this one, I'm gonna position my material under the jig so it's centered under the fingers. And then make the stop adapt to what I'm doin'. What I'm lookin' for when I set this up is equal projection, equal projection. In other words, the edge of my material, same distance past that finger as it is past that finger.

Gonna go ahead and put my sacrificial board in, my backer board. And lock that in place. And then, just like we've done with the half-blind dovetails, wanna make sure end grain is even with face grain. So I'm doin' a little micro-adjust here. And those attention to details doin' this last little bit of tweaking, that's what really helps make the difference between a good dovetail and a not so good dovetail.

One of the things that we did real painstakingly on the half-blind dovetails was set depth of cut on the router bit. Great news here, depth of cut on through dovetails is really, really, really, really easy. What we do is take the mating board, the one that you're gonna cut your pins and sockets in. Kiss it up against the bottom of the comb. And then reach under here with a pencil and make a line.

The depth of cut, which is about to become the length of these tails we're gonna do, is equal to the thickness of our other board, plus a little bit. When we're done with this whole thing, we'd like the end grain of this board to project just a little bit past the face grain of the other board. So now, router unplugged. We get on here and dial that router bit down to take away the pencil line. That's another case where bein' just a little bit too deep is better than bein' a little bit too shallow.

Now, the rest of our rules of the road are gonna pertain. We're going to straight in, straight out. What's different from half-blinds is, of course, we don't have to worry about followin' these rounded fingers out here because there's no material out there. We do have to worry about using good hand control, makin' sure we're moving the router with hands and fingers, not with entire upper body so that we have good control, don't do any rockin' and rolling. Let that router just sit there till it comes to a stop.

We still have that possibility of pullin' the spinning router bit up through the comb. Now, if we get the junk out of the way, we can have a look at a couple of things here. Lookin' at the pencil line, I wanna check, did I, in fact, cut even with or below the pencil line so I have plenty of depth of cut? That looks pretty good. Then we'll do another comparison here, I can show you in just a second.

Regarding the dovetails, we don't have the issue here of when we back out, did we completely cut the tail? 'Cause again, we're not following this finger. So we really don't have to worry about that. The issue instead, lookin' down from the top is, did I cut deeply enough to make sure that the dovetail is completely cut here? So in other words, did I follow back far enough that the walls of my tails right here are straight and there's no little curves left in 'em?

If the column is too far forward, you'll have high spots here that'll prevent you from bein' able to ever assemble this. If the wall is nice and straight all the way back, then you're golden. This board can come out. Now, to check that depth of cut, what's real simple is to just using the tail out here on the end, put your mating board on the shoulder that we created with the cut we just did, and check, look at that. I've got just a little bit of end grain pokin' past the face.

It's exactly what we want. If that's good, then we're ready to cut every tailboard. Now, earlier I showed you how to make sure we have the exact same setup on the left side of the jig as we would on the right side of the jig, you would repeat that process here so that these tails would be cut here. These tails would then be cut over on this side. So once we're set up for tails and we know the depth of cut is right, cut all of your tail boards usin' both sides of the jig like we did with the half-blind.

Now, what we're ready to do is move on. We've cut all our tail boards and we're gonna move on. So what I'm gonna do is flip my jig around. I'm gonna get that bit out of the router. Then when we come back, we'll talk about what we need to do in order to make pins and sockets that perfectly fit our tails.

I've changed the router bit and the guide bushing based on what the manufacturer told me to do in order to cut pins and sockets with the dovetail jig. On the comb, in this case, it's not two separate columns. It's just the same column gets flipped around. So I've already taken care of that. My sacrificial board, which by the way, is a beautiful piece of maple.

Look at the chatoyance in there, but I digress. We'll slip that in 'cause we're gonna need that again in a second. Now, when we make this cut, this is where we get the fit or no fit between the two boards. So here's the way to think about this. With the shape that we have built into this comb, the deeper the comb goes onto the jig, the wider the sockets will be.

I'm gonna make that a little bit more clear for ya. So we're not doin' anything yet about cuttin' a joint. All I wanna do is demonstrate this idea of deeper makes it bigger. When I bring the comb toward me like this, if I make a line which simulates what the router bit is about to take away, the cut's gonna be in between these two fingers. If I move the entire comb back like this, the distance between the two fingers gets progressively larger.

So the way that we control the fit between the tail and the socket is by controlling the front to back position of the comb. In this particular case, the theory is use this line on top of the jig. Align that with the back edge of the material. And we need to do it on both ends. And we're gonna start with a test cut.

So the test cut'll really tell us everything. So don't sweat it too much about dialin' it in perfectly. As long as you get close, then it's easier to tell from the test cut than from what we're doin' right now. Backer board is gonna come up against the back edge of the piece. Now, one thing that's real important is that the stop on the edge of the jig over here didn't get changed.

It's in the same position it was before. That's what controls alignment between this board and the tailboard when we put the joint together. Now, like we've done before, end grain to face grain. I'm gonna do a little micro-adjust. Depth of cut is still dirt simple.

We're gonna do that the same way. The mating board goes onto the jig here, where it's just kissin' the bottom of the comb. Draw a pencil line. Now, this is a straight bit instead of a dovetail cutter. And once again, we're gonna set the bottom of the bit to take away the pencil line, router's unplugged.

Now, the cutting action on this one is a little bit different because router's spinning clockwise. If I simply come into this space and start cutting and move across left to right, which is our normal cutting direction, it's possible that we would get some chipping in the face. Probably not on this poplar I'm workin' with today, but almost certainly in a maple or oak, anything that's chippy, birch. So what we wanna do is initially enter these sockets with what's called a climb cut. What that means is I'm gonna go in with the guide bushing held more against the right side of this opening.

When I feel the bit engage the material, I'm gonna very gently go from right to left. Once I've got that initial penetration into the face of the material, then I can come back and start doin' left to right, left to right, left to right. So watching this sequence of cuts is gonna be really important for you to make sure that you understand how we're gonna do that climb cutting to prevent chipping. So I'm over on the right side of the socket. Turn the router on.

Then I'm gonna come in, feed to the left. Maybe do that twice. Then I can come back and do a more standard left to right until I feel the guide bushing bottom out inside that opening created by the template. Singing the same tune here, let that come to a complete stop. There's a lot of router bit stickin' out.

Very easy to pull a spinnin' bit through the comb at that point. Now, we for sure wanna do a visual inspection here before we take things apart, and I can see already I screwed up. When I look at this socket, it's all good. The wall here or the edge of my full pin is parallel to the comb itself. This side is good.

This side is good. This one looks good. But when I get all the way down to the end here, this is kerflooey. Right here, the pin itself is curving back in, curving back in. What that tells me is on these, I didn't cut deeply enough to finish this.

That's gonna be a huge problem when we try to assemble the joint. Comin' over one, that's more subtle here, but it's the same issue, I got a little bit of a curve. So I need to get back on the jig, do some more cutting to clean that up. So I'm gonna take care of this right now by re-cutting those two. That's better.

Now, this comes out, and the acid test is will this go into it? Yes, but it's pretty tight. Let me get on the bench over here. It's just a little bit tighter than I'm comfortable with. So what we need to do is make a really, really small adjustment here, what adjustment?

The comb needs to go back just a little bit. Remember that as the comb goes deeper onto the jig, the sockets get wider. I'll pull this apart. The other thing I wanna check is I'm gonna just put a corner of the board into the socket, and I'm lookin' for end grain projecting past face grain right there, to make sure our cut is deep enough 'cause we can still make that correction if we need to. This one looks just fine.

All right, now, we currently have the comb parallel to our material. So what I wanna do is control, moving it back equal amounts on both sides. I'm gonna move this about a half a turn on that knurled knob, half a turn on that knurled knob. And again, check your owner's manual to see where that adjustment is. It has to have it, but it's executed a little bit differently from jig to jig.

Feel end grain to face grain, that seems good. And it's just second verse same as the first. I'm gonna mark the one that's dangling down here, so that we know that's the first one that we cut. So I don't accidentally compare the same end twice. Give it a visual, I did better this time.

That's much better. There's our completed dovetail. Let's review a couple of things. We have end grain projecting past face grain in both directions, just the way we want it. Now, in the big picture, what you'll do is you'll glue the joint together, and then come back with a sander or a block plane and bring that end grain down flush so it looks like you did it perfect right from the start.

The other thing we need to talk about is the way the parts go into the jig. And now that we've got a joint complete, it'll be easier to see that. It's a little bit different than the half-blinds. So let's review. It's all about the boards going up against this stop.

When we had our tailboard in here, this edge was against the stop. Then when we cut the mating pin and socket board, this edge was against the stop. As a result, when we put 'em together, we wanna make sure that the edges that were against the stop align when we put the joint together. So what that means is we're gonna take this tailboard and do this to assemble it into the joint. What that means is that the outside of the drawer is facing forward when we cut pins and sockets, the inside of the drawer or whatever box you're makin' is facing forward or out when we cut tails.

So the two are opposite of each other. On our half-blinds, the inside of the drawer or the inside of the box was always facing out. So you need to keep that in mind when you're lookin' at your pieces, if you're choosing which face is gonna go where, we need to make sure that you keep that in mind so that we have the right face in the right spot, and we have this alignment that the stop creates out here on this edge. With dimensioning, 'cause we've talked about that on our other joinery, it's really easy with through dovetails because the length of the board remains the same. The joint goes all the way through this board, all the way through this board.

So when you're calculating a drawer side, if it was through dovetails front and back, the length of the side would be simply equal to the overall length of the drawer. If it was pins and sockets front and back, same thing, the overall length of your front and back would be equal to the overall width of your drawer. So the math is a lot easier with through dovetails than it is with the half-binds and the drawer locks. That takes care of now adding through dovetails to your dovetail arsenal. Another great way you can put drawers or even just boxes together.

You have seen a drawer lock get cut over on the table saw usin' a dado head. Now I wanna show you how you can do this on the router table. What I like about introducing you to this is that everybody's got a different set of tools in their shop. Maybe it is never your intention to buy a dado head. Maybe you don't own a table saw at all, and all you have is a router table.

So this is another approach to making the drawer lock joint. Here's what we've got so far. First, router's unplugged. Second, I've got a slot cutter that's already in the table. Remember earlier we talked about the importance of the size of the cutter, in that case, the dado head has to marry into the thickness of material that you're workin' with, same rule applies.

1/4-inch slot cutter, 1/2-inch material. We can get bigger slot cutters, we can go to thicker material, but in this case, 1/4 and 1/2, this always being twice as big as the cutter. Now for our setup, we got a couple things goin' on here. First, I'm gonna talk about the height of the bit. What we're gonna do is set the height of the cutter so that it's even with the top of our material.

I'm just a tiny bit too high there. I'm gonna bring that down. And as usually happens in these cases, it's easier to feel it than it is to see it. So I just keep runnin' my finger across the top of that carbide until I have happiness. Let's try that.

Next thing is the position of the fence. On this particular slot cutter, it's a long way from the tip of the carbide to the ball bearing, so this is not our registration point. We'd cut all the way through our material if you did that. We wanna set this cutter so that the distance from the tip to the face of the fence is half the thickness of our material. I'll bring this forward and bring in my friend, the bar stock, in this case, 1/4-inch bar stock, bridge the hole in the fence.

I lock the back and that lets me pivot, which gives me finer control than moving the entire fence. And then I'm tappin' the fence until I get it to where the cutter is even with this outside face of the 1/4-inch bar stock, Which gives me my 1/4-inch depth of cut setup, just like that. Now, our cuts are gonna be really similar to what you saw happen on the table saw. One piece is gonna get fed like this. That's gonna result in a tongue on the bottom of the piece.

The mating piece is gonna get fed with its face against the fence. That's gonna result in the dado that we cut across that piece, gonna do this cut first. I'm gonna chase that board with a backer board. And the reason for that is that's gonna help keep this square so it doesn't walk as I'm cutting it. It also provides support on the off feed side so that when the bit exits, I don't get a lot of chipping over here.

Let's see what we've got, which is put the two together. Luck is a wonderful thing. This is exactly what we're lookin' for. Slip that in with hand pressure. When we pick it up, they stay stuck.

I never get this right on the first trial. You must be a very good group getting me this kind of help. Here's what we've got goin'. If this is too tight and we can't get the tongue to slip into this dado, then, that's how that board was cut, the bit would need to be made just a little bit lower in the table. That would make the tongue smaller.

If at this stage of the game, when we put these two together, it's too loose in there and it's too wiggly, in other words, when I go to pick 'em back up, they don't stay stuck, then what we would have to do is raise the cutter. That makes the resulting tongue a little bit thicker. That very quickly completes our drawer lock joint usin' the slot cutter. However, remember when we did the table saw, I said we can take this one step further? With one setup we can do everything including the groove.

Lookin' again at our pieces, here are our inside faces. So if you wanna do an entire drawer on here including the groove setup, the next step would be, this face goes against the fence, and this face, meaning the tongue side is against the fence, is gonna be what allows us to do our groove cut. And that would complete the process we need to make an entire drawer if we had that drawer lock cut on all four corners. Nice, simple way to do this if you've got a 1/4-inch slot cutter for your table, again, remembering thickness of our material, twice as big as the size of the cutter. If, like we talked about on the table saw, when you make this cut, if the tongue is the right size, but you've got fuzz or slivers up here on the top, that's 'cause your material is still too thick.

So you'll need to take care of that and tweak the thickness. That takes you through a drawer lock cut similar to what we did on the table saw performed here on the router table with a slot cutter. We're still working here at the router table, and we're still gonna cut a drawer lock joint, but this time we're gonna do it with a bit specifically designed for drawer locks. So here's kinda what we know so far. We can do a drawer lock with a dado head.

And then we can use the dado head for other stuff, too. We can do it with a slot cutter. And that can also be a multi-purpose bit. Or we can do it with a drawer lock bit. The drawer lock bit is purpose-specific.

This is all it does, but you'll see when we create this, it gives us a little bit better interlock between the two pieces. So it's not a must have, but it's great to know how to cut this joint with the specific cutter. When you buy the bit, and we've got this specific one sourced for ya on the PDF that comes with the video. But if you get some other cutter, you do need to be aware that the bits are sized depending on what thickness of material they'll work with. So commonly the manufacturer will say, "Well, this is good for material from 3/8 to one 1/2 inch, "one 1/2 to 3/4-inch," somethin' like that.

So you wanna make sure you're gettin' a bit that's gonna work with the thickness of material that you're plannin' on making your drawers out of. While we've got the bit way up out of the table and the router table unplugged, I wanna talk about the geometry of the cutter. There's a real important part of the bit, and that is this spot right here. We're gonna talk a lot about this inside corner and the relationship between this inside corner and the top of the table. Here's what happens when we cut with this bit.

This part of the bit where the carbide is stickin' out is gonna create a groove. This part, what remains from the inside corner down to the table is gonna result in a tongue. So what I'm gonna say when I'm raising and lowering this bit getting it to the right height, is that I'm tryin' to get the distance from the inside corner to the top of the table to be the same as the distance from this corner to this corner. Once we do a test cut, it's gonna be way easier to see what we've got, but that's the ballpark I'm shootin' for when I get started here. All right, only way to really make this happen is to get down and get funky, get down here where I can look through the router bit.

And as I raise and lower, I'm estimating again, lookin' at this relationship between inside corner to table, and corner to corner tryin' to get those two to match as best as my bifocals will allow. We'll try a test cut there and see what happens. Next thing we need to do is locate the fence. As a good starting point, we can bring the fence forward until the distance from the face of the fence to the tip of the cutter is equal to half the thickness of the material that you're workin' with. Once again, we'll do that with the bar stock.

That looks pretty good right there. Now, it's not a huge surprise as far as how this whole thing is gonna come together. We're gonna feed some of our parts face down on the table. We're gonna feed our other parts face against the fence. And then I'll show you what we've got.

Now, the theory would be this piece fits into this piece, and we've got a couple things goin' on here. One, just a little bit loose, let me look at it. It's a little bit loose. It's a little gappy down in there in the joint. Let's talk about the way this joint gets cut.

This was our horizontal piece, so... As I raise the bit, this tongue on the bottom of the joint is gonna get larger. That's gonna make its fit into this piece tighter. Same thing here. As I raise the bit, this tongue gets larger.

Obviously they'll both be the same size, which also increases the snugicity, increases the tightness when these two go together. The groove that comes from the bit, this part right here, that's always the same size. That's cut by that carbide that projects out of the bit. So we can't change the internal. We can only change the external.

If the joint is too loose, raise the bit. If the joint is too tight, which would be it's somewhere up here and I can't close it, lower the bit. The other thing we need to look at is are the parts right relative to each other? So what I'm lookin' at is this offset right here. The end grain of this piece does not meet the face grain of this piece.

That tells me I didn't cut deeply enough. So we gotta make two things happen. We've gotta raise the bit. We have to move the fence, how much? Here where we have a little loosey goosey situation, this is a direct relationship.

If the gap that you see here is a 32nd of an inch, you would raise the bit at 32nd of an inch. This is a halvsies situation. If the offset is an 8th, you would move the fence a 16th. So let's see if we can make this happen. I'm gonna raise the cutter just a little bit 'cause it's not off by much.

I'm gonna move the fence back. Now, one of the things I'd like to know is where am I right now, so that if I move the fence back and I really screw up, I can come back to this position. Low-tech way to make that happen, gonna I put a line on the table and a line on the table. That's my current fence position. What I need to know or what I know is I need to cut more deeply.

So the fence has to move away from the front of the bit. I'm gonna do that by loosening just one end, move the fence back a little bit watching its position relative to the pencil line. That helps me with just how much of a move I've made. Tighten that back up. And recognizing the geometry of this is such that, if I move the fence a 16th of an inch here, it's less than that here.

So that's cool because that lets you really micro-adjust your setting. I'm gonna guess I gotta go back just a little bit more. When I'm done with this, I'd like to see the end grain of one board projecting slightly past the face grain of the other. Just like we talked about on the dovetails, through dovetails. All right, get a mark on these so I know they've already been viewed.

And we'll do this all over again. All right, so I moved the fence too far. That's too much projection. As far as the fit of the joint goes, oh, that's lookin' pretty good. Look how they're stayin' stuck together.

So when it was loose on this side, when we did this, the parts wouldn't stay stuck. That's been one of our tests all along. On this side as far as friction between those components, they're actually hangin' together. Lookin' at the fit right there, that looks really good. So the only thing I've gotta do is move the fence forward a little bit from where I was.

Almost feels like I'm comin' back to the same spot, but it's just a little micro-adjust. And we'll start with two fresh pieces that have to be exactly the same thickness as the pieces that you were workin' with previously. We'll talk more about that thickness business in just a second. All right, now I went just a little too far. And I'll tell you what.

That's pretty common for me with the drawer lock bit. It's a little bit fussy to get set up, but I'm gonna give you some tricks once we get through this first time to make this go a lot better the next time. Now, because we're not changin' the height of the bit and we haven't taken enough off, I can actually run the same pass or the same ends I just ran, I can run those again. So the lesson out of that is that if you've overcut, if the cut is too deep, you gotta use a fresh end every time. If the cut is too shallow, you could recut that same end like I just did.

Now we're there, yay, finally, he says. It's giving us just a little fingernail catch where my end grain sticks past the long grain. Now, couple things. The height of the cutter producing the interlock between these parts is specific to the bit. What that means is that this setting, this height of bit is always right for this cutter.

What does that mean? Save this piece. The next time you're gonna use this bit, you bring this up against the profile. Change the height of the bit until the bit slips right into that profile. And you're gonna be really, really close to having the bit height right on the first try.

As you change thicknesses of material, again, working within the parameters of what this bit is capable of cutting, as you change thickness of material, the only thing that changes with these setups is the position of the fence. The more you use it, and the more of these gauge blocks like these you keep, the more stuff you'll have in your hand so that the next time I use 1/2-inch or 9/16 or 5/8 material, I've got boards I've already done this cut with, and I can get to this point faster. And one of the things I talked about is that the drawer lock does provide a different interlock between the pieces. So you've already seen what we did with the slot cutter and the dovetail bit. On this cutter, the interlock we get, I think is a little nicer.

One of the things I like about this is it's cool-lookin'. It looks like it's really complex to cut, but once you've worked through the setup on the bit, it's not too bad. This is a great lock to have on the back of your drawer boxes. Like I said, because I think it looks cool. We also get a gain where as I'm closing the joint, because these parts are tapered and wedge-shaped, they climb against each other as I pull that closed, which really helps close up the joint and make it nice and tight.

So the drawer lock bit gives you another whole approach to makin' the joint. One of the things we've talked about with all our different cutters is how does this affect dimensioning a drawer or a box? This component, which is the part that was fed horizontally on the router table is the part that will always be a drawer front or drawer back because when I pull in this direction, I can't get 'em to come apart. That's what we want. When I pull in this direction, they do.

So if this was my drawer or front or back, it'd be very easy to separate the joint. Dimensionally then, what that means is that the length of your front and back are equal to the width of your drawer because this component goes continuous from one side to the other. On your drawer sides, they butt into the front and the back leaving this little ear right here. So in order to determine the length of your side, what you'll need to do is measure the thickness of this piece, which will vary depending on the thickness of your material. That will get taken away from the overall drawer box size, in order to give you the length of your sides.

When you do your test cuts, it's imperative that the test cut material is exactly the same thickness as your drawer box material because the fence position is affected by the thickness of the material in order to get a good fit. Once this is set up, it's a really cool and really fast way to make corners. This is the drawer lock that I use most often. A great way to put drawer boxes together. So this gives you one more approach in your joinery arsenal to doin' rock solid, quality corners on your drawer boxes.

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