Why am I surprised?

[smorgasbord]

Black Forest has yet another video, but this section surprised me, although maybe it shouldn't have:


(Cued to start at 8:44)

The narrator talks about how they used to use solid wood cabinet backs and drawer bottoms, and had swelling of those bottom wreck the joinery. On the drawer bottoms, they show encapsulating the bottom in grooves on all 4 sides of the drawer. Duh, especially on large cabinet backs with the same entrapped construction. They've now switched to plywood.

Old Timers used solid wood drawer bottoms, with the backs ripped to width just above where the groove would be. This way they could even insert the drawer bottom from the back into an assembled drawer. And then attach the drawer bottom with some thin nails or screws with elongated holes to accommodate the movement.

I know we all have to learn, but I'm surprised that a high-priced cabinet shop like Black Forest would not have had a single woodworker there who could have pointed out the bad construction technique, and that they had to learn it the hard way.

 

[luvmytoolz]

Fantastic looking cabinet, I really enjoy videos like this. I do agree it's surprising about the mention of the use of solid wood for bottoms and backs from a professional cabinet making business like this.

A little more surprising was the mention just before the 31 min mark that he'd developed the sliding dovetail idea himself.

I'm pretty sure I invented the sliding dovetail when I was a teenager making my first solid timber cabinet out of some 40mm thick Batu! ;-)

And yes, for a first effort it was a very misguided affair, I learnt a lot about making things out of timber from that project.

 

[Michael Kellough]

I didn’t invent the sliding dovetail (read about it in Fine Woodworking magazine) but I too used it on my first furniture project. I built a table from pine and made breadboard ends using sliding dovetails. I knew enough about wood movement to accept the challenge of making sliding dovetails but had too little knowledge to know pine was a very poor choice of wood. There were always sharp corners of either the male or female parts of the dovetails snagging fingers or clothes.

 

[smorgasbord]

Well, with all the sliding dovetail inventors in the world, my claim to fame was almost certainly the discovery of short grain, in having used your sliding dovetails in carcase corners and having them self-destruct during assembly as the short grain end just broke off.

In this video, however, I see they've made the carcase boards very thick, so that helps.

EDIT: I also just caught them talking about "Texas hinges," which look like Soss hinges to me. Is there a difference?