The joys of rabbit joints

So a few weeks ago I decided to get some quotes on new kitchen cabinets and they came in exactly where I expected, which is to say, way more money than I want to spend or even can afford. Not only that, they were made out of woods or finishes I just didn’t like.

My grandfather built his own kitchen cabinets years ago and he made them out of pine.

I asked one cabinet salesman if I could get pine cabinets.

“No,” he  replied. “It’s too soft.”

Now I banged my head on those cabinets more than once when I was a kid and I don’t recall any of them being soft.

But I wasn’t exactly thinking of pine, anyway, I was thinking of larch, which my house is full of. I have larch beams and larch floors and I like the warm tones of the wood.

Now everything I’ve read says you shouldn’t make cabinets out of solid wood and that is true, but I can face them with larch, at least I think I can (my grandfather faced his with pine and they’ve held up for oh, I dunno, 70 years or so.)

So I’m thinking of maple plywood for the frames and larch for the faces and so far, (and I am not making this up) I have made exactly one drawer for the old cabinets.

It took me three weekends, on and off and I’m still not quite done.

At this rate I’ll have my kitchen completed a day, maybe two, before I die.

Now I must admit I’ve been trying to perfect what they call a “locking rabbit joint.”

Wait, what’s that? My wife says it’s a rabbet joint. Whatever.

All the tutorials say it’s a strong, simple joint that easy to do. That might be true for someone who knows what they’re doing, but I didn’t even know what a router was up until a few weeks ago. And a dado blade? Forget it. A dado is an extinct bird, isn’t it?

At any rate, the drawer came out OK, which is to say it’s actually square in all the corners and might actually work. Still, I made it out of fairly cheap plywood so it’s not exactly the prettiest thing in the world, in fact it’s quite ugly, but I figured practicing on a $100 sheet of hardwood plywood didn’t make any sense.

When I finish up this ugly drawer I’m going to try to make one out of solid wood, might even try cutting my own dovetails, but first I want to practice on my “mortar and tendons.”

Easy peasy.