Case drawer lay out
Bill Tindall, E.Tn.
Everyone needs a place to store their socks. With that fact in mind, it is surprising that we see so few case pieces being built on this forum. I have had a steady diet of them the past few years, providing sock storage for daughters and granddaughters.
Maybe we don't see many because they are not easy to build and for a beginner to get right. Over the course of building various chest of drawers I have found ways of making the outcome more reliable (described below) or faster (to be posted on hand tool forum).
The biggest challenge in a case piece is to wind up with the drawers in one plane(that would be geometric plane). I use a fool proof method.
I clamp the two case sides together face to face as they will be oriented in the case. If they don't mate perfectly I know one or both are out of square and/or size and adjust until perfect.
I size a rank of drawers by a technique common in period furniture. The drawers increase in size by one drawer blade thickness, top to bottom. This approach leads to attractive, functionally sized drawers. It also leads to a trivial way of laying out the rank of drawers. Set one divider to the thickness of the blade and a second the height of the top smallest drawer. Now every drawer height is some combination of these two dividers.
With the sides clamped together one just starts at the top of the case marking the top blade with a prick from the divider leg in the front edge of the clamped together sides. Next the height of the first drawer is located by the other divider, followed by a prick to locate the next blade. The next drawer height is the height of the first plus a blade height. This height is located on the front edge as the sum of the two divider settings. Etc. down the edge until all the drawers are located by pricks of the dividers legs. Stick a sharp pencil in each hole made by the divider point, slide a small square against the pencil and draw a line across the case front edges to mark the location of blades and their corresponding drawers. Foolproof!
At this point the location of the drawers and blades are shown by pencil lines on the font faces of the case sides. These lines need to be transferred to the interior of the case sides to locate mortises or dovetails for the blades. And these locations need to be reliably transferred to the back of the case for the same purpose.
Lay the two sides on the bench with the back of the case side edges together and the inside of the case sides up as shown in the picture. With a straight edge connect the blade locations on the inside of the case sides, front and back, and mark. Done and there is no opportunity for an error to creep into this layout.