cut drawerfront within skirt with dozuki?

[Australopithecus scobis]

Greetings, I'm starting a nightstand of hard maple. The boards selected themselves; I just listened to them. The one that will be the skirt has a really cool figure with two symmetrical blobs. The skirt just has to be made with sequential pieces of this board.

So. I hadn't planned to make a drawer originally, but this board whispered to me that I ought to cut a drawer front from the middle of the skirt. OK, but I don't have a curved saw, veneer or azebiki. Will a dozuki do it? I can practise this cut on some pine I have laying around. I want to use a saw thin enough to allow some planing and scraping with a nickel left over.

Plan B is to make the drawer full-width, with two easy rips. But that lacks elegance, to say nothing of the fussy joinery to attach the resulting narrow pieces of skirt. Or, horror of horrors, I might have to buy a new tool!

[Dave Balderstone]

Then you need a saw with a kerf 1/3 to 1/2 (leaning to 1/3) the thickness of a nickle.

[Andy Dingley]

Get an azebiki - very useful saw. Mine lives in the "building work" toolbag, because it's handy for house repair stuff. I suppose I ought to have a "good" one too.

A dozuki would probably work here, if you have one with a bellied tip, although it's slower than you realise. Japanese saws have finer pitch near the handle, so the tip is probably just a single coarse tooth that's usable. I've done this for thing grooving, but it's amazingly slow. OTOH, you can find dozuki with thinners blade than azebiki

I'd expect this not to work as simply as you expect. Unless the cuts are also perfectly straight and smooth, you'll need clean-up space and that too will increase the kerf. I'd do it by accepting that it won't work and instead taking the apron into halves or quarters, centred on the drawer. I can then close the drawer surround up as needed, so that the drawer is a perfect fit, no matter how much I had to remove.

I'd rip it in half on the bandsaw, stopping at the drawer ends. Then rip the drawer separate with the azebiki. Finally crosscut down at each end with a fretsaw to free the three pieces. Maybe a thin dozuki for the second pair of crosscuts, once I'd removed the first half.

if you don't lose too much in the kerf, and you joint it back together carefully, then the joints in the front won't be obvious.

[Hax Planks]

A scroll saw sounds like what you want. Your initial drill hole can be very small and you can use some sort of a fence to insure straight cuts. Still, I think any way you choose to do it will be challenging. My vote would be to cut everything out with a bandsaw and reglue pieces back together as needed.

[Australopithecus scobis]

Thanks for the warning. Yeah, that midline rip should be hideable. No bandsaur though; ryoba instead, or maybe framesaw. Put a tenon on each half of the apron, instead of one big one that crosses the glue line, right?

I've been looking for excuses to get a fretsaw and a couple of azebikis. Woohoo!

[Patriarch]

Australopithecus scobis wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Let me get this straight: Your dozuki won't pass the nickle test?

;-)

Patriarch

[Australopithecus scobis]

No, no, the dozuki is as thin as a casus belli. ;~)

[Leuf]

It's hard to find the right pulley to fit on the handle, but once you do adding a link belt is easy and you'll be amazed at the difference. Make sure the pulley has less than .0005 runout though for best results.

-Leuf

[Lawrence Wasserman]

The customary method is to rip the skirt into three pieces, crosscut the drawer front from the center rip, then glue the top, center spacer/end piecs, and bottom back together.

[Australopithecus scobis]