Carcase Assembly

The past week was concentrated on completing the carcase assembly frame and have the joinery completed and fitted.  It is a cabinet carcase with dovetail at the 4 corners. Last post covered the dovetail cutting process all done by hand and now was time to fit all 4 corners of the main assembly.

Tool Cabinet Carcase dry fitted

Tool Cabinet Carcase

It has been a while that I cut dovetails and it really showed and fitting them was a pretty experience.  A bit too much gaps to show but  still tight enough for the structural side of things.  It holds pretty as we speak and it is only dry fitted.

I checked for square in all 4 corners and all was good.  Just one corner that I saw some small amount of light, maybe 1/64 to 1/32 which to me, is not worth playing with, fearing to change something and make it worst.  Will adjust the dimensions of the other components if required.

Shelf

Towards the lower end, there is a shelf that is through tennonned in the carcase assembly which will stiffen the whole assembly.  Although the main wood is cherry, I did not have wide enough boards to cover the shelf in one piece but had a maple board from another project that was a left over and for the most part, was large enough

For the most part, it was a clean board except for one corner that had a broken/damaged edge.  I decided to go ahead with the board as one edge was going to be going towards the back of the cabinet which will be hidden once all assembled.

tool cabinet shelf

I may need to adjust the placement of the tenons on that edge based on the plans but that should not be an issue.  It's length was derived based on relative dimensioning of the carcase assembly that is now dry fitted

Next Steps

Next steps is to fit the shelf and the joinery with the through tenons in the carcase. Will then be able to glue up the carcase and start working on the external doors for the dimensions.

Will also be ordering the hinges for the external doors so that when they are completed, I will at least be able to hang them.  I may not be ordering all the hinges that the plan calls for as I have not finalized the tool placement inside the cabinet.  Some internal hinges I might forgo altogether as I might not be going with the storage options as is. Part of the customization of the storage based on the tools that I have.