After the case bottom. case sides and the top of case stretchers are all glued up, we can now complete the joinery necessary for the front and rear drawer blades. The front and rear drawer blades will have 5/16″ x 2″, 7 degree sliding dovetail pins cut on them, the drawer blade pins will fit into a housed sliding dovetail socket that consists of a 7/8″x 1/8″ dado and a 5/8″ x 5/16″ x 2″, 7 degree sliding socket.
Since housed sliding dovetails are (ahem) fussy joints, a good tip is to make sure that the guide bushing is set concentric to the armature of the router, Dewalt includes a cone device with the 618 series router. Even with all this care, one still may need to touch up the width of the dado with a side rabbet plane..
First cut is the 7/8″x 1/8″ dado, we mount a 1 1/4″ guide bushing in the router and use a 7/8″ wide straight bit to cut the dado.
After the dados are all cut, next up is the 5/8″ x 5/16″ x 2″, 7 degree sliding socket. The router has a 5/8″ 7 degree dovetail bit mounted, we are still using a 1 1/4″ guide bushing..
The competed housed sliding dovetail socket..
Finally we use the same 5/8″ 7 degree dovetail bit, this time mounted in the router table to cut the 5/16″ x 2″ sliding dovetail pin on the end of the front and rear drawer blades.. A good tip here is to purchase two identical router bits, mount one in the router in the table, the other bit in the hand held router (I used Whiteside D7-625 dovetail bits)
