Making arched drawers
Bill Tindall, E.Tn.
Fitting the arched drawers
Arched drawers provide variety to the typical chest of drawers. Making them is little different than an orthogonal drawer.
PIC1
Step 1 is to get, not fit, the drawer into the opening, side to side. A shooting board is ideal for this task as small increments of material can be removed to get an acceptable fit. At this point I want the drawer front to just fit the opening. There are advantages to have a loose, friction fit at this stage. (the drawer won’t fall out on the floor during the fitting process) 
I will plane the drawer sides for proper clearance after the drawer is assembled.
Pic 2
Once the front can be slid in from the back, the arc is marked and band sawed.
Pic 3
Hand tool use has taught me that I can work at higher accuracy with the power tools. If one can routinely split lines hand sawing dovetails there is no reason that the edge of a line can’t be kissed with a band saw. It makes the following steps easier.
After band sawing, the arc is spoke shaved. Well not. While most might file or spoke shave away the band saw tooth marks, I use my trusty hand plane. Try it. Use a smooth arcing motion and the chips fly. The mass of the hand plane makes this task much easier than spoke shaving and vastly faster than filing with no need for an expensive file. After planing the surface is refined with a fine file or sand paper.
pic 4
While I want the side to side fit to be snug I strive for a near final vertical fit because it is harder to refine the vertical fit on a finished drawer.
