What Mistake?

     

So here I am, on a roll and ready to breeze through some more stopped sliding dovetails. I've got the process down pat and looking forward to the challenge of hand cut mortises. I finish two of them rather quickly and sit back feeling good about what I've done. Wait... that doesn't look right. I laid out one of the dovetails in the wrong place. Yup, the ones for the front of the case. I'm an idiot.

     After cursing under my breath (Ryan was playing trains in the cottage next to me) I try to figure out how I was going to recover from such a stupid mistake. My first thought was to leave it and move the rear drawer divider up to match. Doing that wouldn't require a patch that may be seen, even if I would be the only one who would notice. It would, however, change the drawer sizes which would be kinda lame since I made an effort to design them to be graduated in size.

       In the end I decided to stay with my design and  patch it. I was skeptical at first, but I decided I could find a reasonable match to make it happen. As a result, I think it works and I have something new to blog about. Here is what I did...

     I used the same cutting guide to make a few pieces to fit in the errant dovetail socket. I'm getting better at being creative with the clamps.

     I glued all three in the socket, leaving the best fitting piece for last. The result looked a bit rough but I was optimistic.

     A little work with the block plane...

     ...and a scraper...

     ...crisis avoided. Now,  I just have to find some way to keep from cutting another dovetail socket in the same place!

     So there you go. I screwed something up, but instead of changing the design I decided to fix it and move on. Design proportions taking a priority? Maybe George Wilson is getting to me after all.

-RM