Candle Rack Continued (Part IV)

Time to get back to work on the candle rack (I'm still not happy with that name). Last time I worked on the dovetails and now I needed to make the dados that house the drawer dividers. After that, the case could be glued.

First the layout. I made sure to mark which side of the line the dado was supposed to be on. It's too easy to make a mistake if I don't do that.


I didn't actually lay out the lines with the sides in this position. I marked them separately and then book matched them just to double check that I had everything right.

I prefer using a dado plane to create the dados, although there are a lot of other ways to get the job done. To guide the plane, I nailed a batten across the stock aligned with the layout line. The batten must be to the right of the plane, as the left side has the depth stop. I had to be sure the stock was oriented correctly so that the small nail holes from the batten were located on the inside of the drawer openings.


Job complete:


The Gramercy holdfasts kept everything locked down tight - they are great. I used the medium shoulder plane to tweak the bottom of the dados, which were slightly out of square. I need to reshape the iron of the plane a bit to fix that problem. It was a replacement, and it isn't quite right yet.

One more check:


At this point, I glued up the dovetails, then measured dado to dado to determine the divider width. After that, I cut the dividers to the correct width but left them deeper than needed. This allowed me to leave them proud and plane them flush, front and back, after glue-up.

Hey, it's starting to look like something!


Next I'll work on the back, the angled candle rest, and then on to the drawers.