wrote in message
...
On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:04:30 -0500, "Leon"
wrote:

You know, I was thinking about all those hundreds of pieces for these
towers. Did you just dry fit or go immediately to glue up stage with
the first panel of a particular size to ensure that all the pieces
that followed were of the correct size? I'm guessing you spent
considerable time planning all of this out.

Swingman and I cannot stress enough how much Sketchup, Cutlist 4.0 and
Cutlist Plus make every thing so much easier. ;~)

I took the Sketchup master drawing, deleted out what I did not want to build
immediately and imported the remaining parts into Cutlist Plus through
Cutlist 4.0. This enabled me to only have to deal with parts that I was
immediately concerned with so I did not have an enormous pile of parts to
keep up with at any given time. I started with both outer panels, then both
inner panels, both back frames, and both front face frames. Then the panels
were all brought together by the 4 common fixed shelves on each tower.
Drawers next, doors next.

I dry fit the first of each style panel because I had a unique problem to
over come. Every panel had 4 common rails that had to all be precisely
orientated a specific distance from the bottom so that they would all
properly engage the 4 fixed shelves and their 32 Domino tenons. I built
spacer bars to insure that these common rails would all be precisely the
same distance from each other
during glue up and clamping. These common 16 rails for each tower already
had 2 mortise slots on their inner faces to mate with the mortise slots on
the 4 fixed shelves. Basically I needed to insure that the 32 Domino's on
the 4 fixed shelves were going to properly fit with the 16 rails on the 4
different panels. Because I used floating panels in the sides the rails
could be misaligned a given amount and that was where the spacer bars came
into play.

I dry fit each first of its kind panel to ensure that I could work the
spacer bars with the clamps. I had 18 clamps on the side panel glue ups.
The remaining mirror panels were immediately glued and assembled.

Then came the face frame with the extra drawer rails. This presented a
problem for my spacer bars for the 4 common rails previously mentioned.
Fortunately I had thought this out ahead of time and before any glue ups I
modified the spacer bars by adding added feet on each end so that the spacer
bars would straddle the drawer rails between the 4 fixed shelf rails.

And to affirm your suspicion, I did spend considerable time planing how I
was going to accomplish precise spacing of the 4 rails on the 8 panels. Any
rail being off even a "mm" would have meant that the domino tenons would not
have mated with the fixed shelves.
I did dry fit the completed 4 panels to the 4 shelves. This was just too
much to bring together and trust that each of my 64 mortises and 32 loose
tenons would all come together precisely. With 8 tenons in each shelf I
could afford to leave out a tenon or 2 in necessary, I was even prepared to
sand and make a tenon a bit thinner so that it would fit into a misaligned
hole.

Apparently all the planing and paying attention during the whole process of
milling the parts weeks ahead of final assembly worked out well. Both dry
fits on the first try resulted in all 32 tenons joining the 4 shelves to the
4 sides for each tower with a perfect no gap fit.

There was certainly a higher power working with me on this project. :~)



My second observation is that you must have a pretty sizable shop
there for storing all those pieces until you got to the full assembly
stage.

To bring up again what I previously mentioned, I did this in sections,
Sketchup allowed me to explode my drawings into individual component pieces
and only work on common sections at a time. I work out of my 2 car garage
that is mostly filled with equipment on mobile bases. The glue up of the
panels all took place on top of my TS.