Recently I finished working on 3 similar jewelry boxes. It's a design I have done before with a dovetailed box in the middle suspended between two vertical natural edge slabs. Rails across the top and bottom of the box are pocket-screwed into the slabs, and the pocket holes covered with some decorative pieces. The box houses a number of drawers, which may also have some natural edged drawer fronts, so the drawers are odd heights. The drawer slides are dadoed into the sides of the box, only glued at the front to allow for expansion / contraction.
After completing all of them, with the caps glued over the pocket holes and finishing complete it was with much chagrin that I noticed that the orientation arrow inside the box which ought to be pointing up was in fact pointing down. Oh well, flip it over, right? Except the slabs on this one were quite nice at the 'top' ends and not very nice at all at the 'bottom', with one of them tapering significantly so that the back rail was only partially flush to it.
However, on only this one out of the three the drawers were symmetrical. So theoretically I could put the drawers in with it upside-down. But there was no way that the slides were going to line up like that. But what is the harm in trying, right?
They fit almost perfectly.
All I had to do was lower two of them on one side by 1/32" or so. And I was able to just barely fit my LV miniature shoulder plane in between the slides. So it took all of 2 minutes to fix what would have been the biggest mistake I've made all year.
If you are anything like me, at this point you would now be wondering when the other shoe was going to drop, because that just doesn't happen without something else happening to make up for it. And I didn't have to wait long.
The next thing to do was to drill the holes in one of the other ones for the knobs. Take a drawer out, mark the center, drill the hole, put it back. That's a pretty simple task, eh? One that would really cause a problem if you screwed it up, eh? Yeah. On the 4th one I went from marking at whatever dimension minus an 1/8th to plus an
1/8th.So I got to sand all those drawer fronts down, make wooden pulls and glue them on, and refinish them. And all is right with the universe again.
Anyway, here are the three of them: