Nailing it Together
2013.12.05
Now it was time to nail the chest together with traditional cut nails. This is where using cheap and readily available wood came back to bite me; pine 1x12 boards always end up cupping in my shop. In theory, you should be able to just hold a couple boards together with a crooked arm and start driving nails. But I had to resort to some fussy clamping. Probably I should have flipped the sides before cutting the rabbets, so that the boards touched at top and bottom and bowed out in the middle; but still, warped is warped.
I nailed the sides to the ends with 4d rosehead cut nails.
With the back nailed to the sides, I ripped and trimmed the bottom board until it slid into the dados. Then I began nailing the bottom to the back, using 6d fine finish cut nails left over from the tool chest build. I chose the finish nails because the heads are small enough to (barely) fit in the quirk of the bead detail. I used a nail set to drive them home.
After I had merrily nailed the bottom to the back, I turned the chest over and discovered I had made a mistake. In ripping and planing the bottom board, I had neglected to account for the end rabbets on the front board. I had left the bottom flush with the notch on the ends, when it should have stopped about 1/4″ shy.
So I tried to figure out how I could plane and or saw the bottom while nailed in place, and somehow end up with a straight edge. At length, I decided it would be much easier to plane a rabbet on the bottom edge of the front board to match the rabbets already on the ends.
With that resolved, I nailed the front board in place.
Beads