Finishing Touches
Once you have the case assembled and glued up, you can add drawer guides to the drawer installation and clamp them up.
The drawer guides and knee blocks are the final steps in the construction of the lower case.
For the highboy base drawer and apron diagram and materials list in PDF format, click here.
The knee blocks — which allow you to complete the lines of the leg knees — are glued to both sides of each leg at the knees, with the exception of the back sides of the two back legs which are left without knee blocks.
You start the formation for the knee blocks the same way, by making bandsaw cuts on two adjacent faces.
Like the cabriole legs to which they’re joined, these blocks are bandsawn in two adjacent planes, then finished with hand tools. I do the preliminary hand tool work with the knee block screwed to a bit of vise-held scrap. I then glue and press-fit the knee block into place. After waiting for an hour, I go back to that knee block and fair it into the leg’s knee with a paring chisel and sandpaper.
Use the same hand tools for removing the saw marks on the knee blocks, shaving them as smooth as possible.
The various drawer guides should be glued to the sides of the drawer runners at this time. Because it involves so many clamps, it looks much more complicated than it is.
Once you’ve got all that done, take a deep breath, because next issue we’ll move on to the drawers and the upper section of the highboy.
