Inbox Project: Part Three

 

Above is where I stopped last fall due to cold weather and frustration. You might be able to notice on the inbox drawers on the left, I routed grooves on the sides to fit over the wood drawer slides glued to the bases on the right. For some reason, several of those boxes twisted on me so the grooves were crooked. I also routed a groove on all nine of them when I only needed to do them on six, because the top drawers don't slide and are just screwed permanently in place. 

Over winter, I mulled over ideas on what to do to fix these problems but never came up with a good solution. Then this spring, knowing I need to come up with an answer to finish these, I studied the problem one more time. I realized that the grooves on the top fixed drawers weren't really an issue. They won't be visible from the front or even sides of the completed inbox. Only if you look from the back they might be noticed and I'm guessing someone will probably just assume they were supposed to be there.

The crooked grooves issue ended up working itself out. The wooden slides wouldn't fit into the routed grooves I had cut last fall so I decided to widen the grooves a bit to accommodate them versus sanding down the rails. I set up my router table again with more thought and support and widened the grooves in the drawers which removed the crookedness in the grooves I had before. Later with a coat of wax, the drawers operated as smooth as butter. Problem solved.

After two days of sanding, the three inbox units are above. The top drawer hasn't been attached and is just sitting on top of the middle drawer so hence, there isn't a gap there which makes it look wrong. But after I apply the finish to all the pieces, I will assemble it and it will look much better. 

One word of note since someone has expressed interest on them in my previous post, during the making of the drawer side pieces, there were some knots and defects in the cedar wood as is typical of that kind of wood. Those pictures have been lost, but in them I showed how I filled in/reinforced all the defects with epoxy to give each piece a smooth finish stabilize all the defects to the point of them being harder than the surrounding defect free areas of the cedar. I did this same thing on the first two I made years ago and in the end, liked the defects so much that I kept the one with the most defects in it for my own personal use.