Perfect Carcase Assembly

Let me give you some tips about getting a complicated glue up like this put together. This is a carcase I'm working on for a jewelry armoire and it's got a bunch of web frames. It's got six different web frames, all glued into dados. Couple things going on here. One is that I found, especially when I have half inch sides, this many web frames, it's possible to glue a curve into this thing. If you get the curve glued in good luck gettin' it out later, it's just not going to happen. So, that's what this piece is doin' here. This is a piece of Oak I've added. And what I did is I ran that over the jointer. So, I know this edge is perfectly straight. When I clamp that to the side it's then, in turn, holding the carcase side perfectly straight. So, great peace of mind there. That means I'm gluing together a nice straight carcase. The other thing I want to do is make sure that all of the frames are sitting in here square to the carcase. So, that's an easy check, I'm gonna do that simply by placing a square on top of the web frame, sliding up against the side of the case. Now, a couple things here, if you check it here and it's square and you machined all your parts correctly every opening that you check had better be square. If it's not, you got big problems. There's really no great resolution for that. If you check it and it's not square the easiest way to fix that is make the clamps do the work for you. So, for instance, let's say that the top of this is open right now, that I've got a gap at the top in order to fix that what I would do is start by just loosening one clamp. If the top is open, what I would do is loosen a clamp, raise my left side, lower the right side, and re-tighten the clamp. And what that'll do is it's gonna start pulling that top over to close it. Do that with just a little bit at a time, be conservative, don't over apply the pressure 'cause you don't wanna take it back in the opposite direction. But that's a great way to get the clamps to do the work for you. Make sure that everything's gonna come together nice and square so that when you're done you have a good lookin' carcase