Stopped grooves

[Adnick]

What's your best method for making stopped grooves by hand? This happens to be for drawer slides, so it's a lot of stopped grooves.

So far my preferred method is: drill the stopped end to just under the width and depth, then cut groove with a plow plane and clean up the drilled end with a chisel.

Have not found any revelations on YouTube yet, so I thought I'd ask....

Thanks,
Andy

[JimReed@Tallahassee]

When I make stopped grooves for period furniture drawer fronts, I make through grooves and then glue in an end grain piece on each end. Much easier and really hard to see after finishing. I make the grooves on side rails full length. Once the drawer is assembled, the front one is invisible and the rear one needs to be open for the floating bottom.

[Rob Young]

When I make stopped grooves for period furniture drawer fronts, I make through grooves and then glue in an end grain piece on each end. Much easier and really hard to see after finishing. I make the grooves on side rails full length. Once the drawer is assembled, the front one is invisible and the rear one needs to be open for the floating bottom.

This would be the easiest method.  

For a side-hung drawer with an applied front, no need to stop the groove.  The drawer front does the work.  For an inset drawer, if the construction is half-blind, again the front does the hiding.

If you can't hide the groove with the drawer front or with a plug, the method described seems reasonable.  Get a router plane and you can use it to finish up the end of the groove nice and level and clean (knife fibers on the walls first).  Some router planes have a fence and could be used for the whole grooving operation.  But a plow plane is faster.

[Adnick]

Jim, Rob:

Thanks much, did not think about inserting a glued block....

Have 3 banks of drawers, 2 are half blind and 1 is through dovetails, made the drawers before I had decided on a slide method, so I caused my own problems ;-)

I'll post the project later...

Andy

[JimReed@Tallahassee]

Here is one of the drawers from my cherry secretary. The wood block is easy to see.




As you can see, the wood block is the least of my issues to fix. To begin with, the dovetail fixture slipped and almost broke through the front by the time I figured it out. I had to plug the holes and do over. Then there was glue squeeze out. All I can say is that the piece is still *under construction* and should look much better when it is finished. When will that be? Well, I started it in 2004, so the completion date may not be soon.

[Rob Young]

I was thinking he is talking about this sort of groove for doing a side-hung drawer.

[Adnick]

Rob:

That's what I settled on for this project.....still learning, thanks again to both of ya.
Andy

[EricU]

pretty easy to have that groove coincide with a dovetail