Category: tool cabinet

Creating the doors and mortising in the door hinges

Originally I glued up the side pieces with the door width included.  This made sure both the doors and case were squared together and the gain matched.  After carefully squaring the back edges up, I trimmed off the door pieces. So now I have put the door pieces back on using the hinges.

I wanted to not be limited by hinges on the doors so I’m using .. yes, I know .. ugly piano hinges.  I decided to mortise them in to make sure they don’t interfere with drawers and to make the whole thing look a bit more finished.

The router plane sure makes some fun shavings when you set it correctly.  Now that the mortises for the door are in I know where the front of the dados for the shelves need to go.

Tool Cabinet – Putting together the case .. finally

Things have been extremely busy and I haven’t had much shop time to work on the the tool cabinet.  But today, I got the tool cabinet put together and edges trimmed up.

Inspector Kitten came in and declared the dovetails .. mediocre.  And a disappointment .. since they weren’t actually attached to any birds.

After this, I’ll start working on the interior joinery.

Then .. there will be another long delay while I put together my rip saw.  Pictures to come on that.

They’re all wasted …

Well at least the tails are.

I also used my newly acquired knowledge from my Handtool Essentials class to tune up the Skew Rabbet Plane.  Man, someone needs to do a video on that one.  First time set up is pretty tricky, but now it works wonderfully.

So here’s what I did to tune up the skewed rabbet plane:
1. Sight down the bottom of the plane and line the blade up with only a small bit of the blade showing.  The blade should be proud of the the body by about 1/32″ so that the fibers don’t push back and mess up the path of the plane (Chris talks about this here.)

2. Make sure the lever cap is snugged but not too tight.

3. Adjust the small blade set screws in the side of the body to keep the blade from moving side to side. It may make a lot of sense to take a quick peek at the instructions for the plane at this point.

4. Now … since the blade is poking out slightly proud of the body, you need to line up the nicker with the proud blade.  I (and Chris) use the a small straight edge to line these up.  The nicker can be moved by unscrewing the front fence rod and get a tiny screw driver to move it.  I actually use my Silver Sharpie to color the blade so I can see it.

So in theroy, when this is all done, the plane should work beautifully, but it took a lot more going back and forth between the steps.  Oy!

I’ve also been rearranging the shop.  I pushed the workbench up against the wall.  I wanted it to be closer to the new tool cabinet which will hand on the wall to the left of the bench.  I’m also converting my current cabinet to a most used hand tools set up (it had mostly power tool stuff in it before).