Home Improvement:
Leigh Jig
Theres really nothing else as stout, configurable, and accurate as the Leigh jig. I snagged one of the last D1600s for sale after it was discontinued. This photo is from the leighjigs.com site. One of the cool things about the Leigh jig is that it has available templates that make a strong interlocking joint that appear way more contemporary and organic.Contemporary Isoloc
Joints
They are called “Isoloc” joints. Check out the Leigh page on these joints to see the crazy patterns that they can make. We used “Bears Ears” for the front drawer joints and variable pitched dovetails for the rear. The picture above is one of our actual drawers
This is another picture from the Leigh jig site, but
the pattern is the same Bears Ears that we used in
the kitchen. the piece of wood in the jig would be a
drawer front or back. the routing here is like routing
dovetail “pins”
Dovetailed Drawers
Yet another tool to buy!
If you are even thinking about building your own
cabinets, get this book. Robert Lang’s Complete
Kitchen Cabinet Maker is the reference. Don’t start
buying any tools or wood until you’ve read the whole
thing. It’ll save you so much!
This shows routing the analog to the dovetail “tails”,
which would be used as the drawer sides. Can you
picture flipping this over itself and onto the board in
the previous picture?
Never pose while routing!
More drawer parts waiting for assembly
Parts are glued and clamped into a right-angle jig to
ensure that they wind up properly aligned before
sanding and finish.
...or drink beer! Fully milled parts like these come
our incredibly fast with the jig once you get into the
production hang of it.
Lots of drawers in very little time. I left out the
boring steps of cutting a groove to receive the
drawer bottom plywood and also the preparation of
the back piece which is milled to allow the draw
bottom to slide in from the rear.
Here’s a drawer in the island. Note the complete
lack of visible slides and also the full extension of
the drawer to the face of the cabinet. Thank you
Blum Tandem slides with soft-close motion
(Blumotion).
I’m sure I’ll cover this on another page, but we set
up a temporary kitchen by building the future kitchen
island in our basement and powering it temporarily.
Since it had an induction cooktop and there was
already a wet bar, we had no lack of cooking
capability.
Making drawers yourself lets you plan exactly which wood will go into the drawer and of course it’s a chance to
show off your woodworking skills. Real woodworkers cut their dovetails by hand, but with at least 23 drawers to
build (27 was the final number), I opted to use a jig. Even when you buy high-end cabinet with dovetailed
drawers, chances are that the minimal wood used will have joints in it. Doing it yourself means that you can plan
a single board to map to a single drawer with no joints running down the sides. Also, you can create attractive
variable spaced dovetails or something crazy like these....
