Easter in the Shop

Today I sacrificed a bit of daytime sports tv and made a mess in my shop. My kitchen drawers are part of a mass produced, and frankly not very well built, set of cabinets. And I've never been happy with any of the drawers. The sliders aren't full extension and the overall workmanship is just garbage. I should rebuild the entire kitchen! But short of that I have long thought about doing something to organize the silverware and knife drawer. This is the one I use the most and is the one I've hated the most for a long time. Nothing about this drawer is square, or plumb, or even equal. It's hard to see here but the divider wasn't even glued in plumb, centered, or square to the front!

Stuff slides around in here ... and it's driven me nuts! So it was a perfect opportunity today to put my new little finger joint jig to work. I had picked up some 1/2" thick hemlock the other day and today I milled it down to 3/8" thick and then cut fingers on them to create boxes that would custom fit my crappy drawer compartments. The thickness of the stock was sized so I could use the same 3/8" setup to mill the dados for the dividers. Right now I've left it all as a friction fit because I ran short of stock. So before I finalize it, glue it up and put paint on this I might grab some more material and add a couple extra dividers somewhere.

But this should stop all the rattling around and humbug of the last 10 yrs! And if it doesn't I'll just tear it up and build it again. I can see all sorts of handy uses for my finger joint jig already. It's no wonder my Pop loved them so much.

I also made a simple little Tommy MacDonald-inspired dovetail layout and paring block today. It's made of white oak for 1:6 pins. It was pretty amazing how much of a mess these two little projects created today!