Final Details | Serpentine Chest of Drawers Build Part 6

Welcome to my shop and welcome back to my series in which I’m building this serpentine chest of drawers.

Last time we built the base, and this time we’re taking care of all the last little details to wrap this thing up. Again, I want to say a big thank you to Triton Tools for sponsoring the series, and continued support of the channel as they have over the past several years. This time, we’re going to take a look at the handheld Oscillating Spindle Sander. Portable, handheld, take it wherever you need to. But for now, let’s hop into making a top of this thing to top it all off. 

Here are the boards for the top, which we had selected back in the beginning. Now we can do the final layout and start getting these milled up and into a top panel. The case ended up at 36 inches wide and 22 inches deep. I’m thinking I want a one and a half inch overhang on three sides, and a half inch overhang in the back. That would be a 24 by 39 inch panel. 

Over here, I can get my 24 inch width and remove this little bit of sap from the bottom, and I should have some curl down here as well. I will probably have a little hint of sapwood here in the middle, which I think might be kind of cool. It’ll depend on how things end up once it’s all milled. 

Let’s cut this thing up and get it a rough milled. Once it’s milled up, that will give us a better idea of what we’re actually looking at. 

This certainly looks promising. 

I’m going to run this through the planer and take us down to final thickness, and then we’ll get that glue seam prepped for glue up, and then get these things into the clamps to make our panel. 

Here is the top panel, all nice and ready to go. I have been playing around with the intended overhangs with this, and I’m getting a little bit tight I think. This panel didn’t end up quite as wide as I was thinking it would, and I also have this band of sap up front, which I don’t really want there. It will be removed with the curve, but I don’t want a point of sap at the high point of the curve potentially peaking through. So I’m trying to eliminate the sap on this front edge. I’ll have some sapwood along the back, which I think is going to look pretty cool, because we have some sap accents in this piece already.

So I’m reducing the overhang on the back to three sixteenths of an inch, which I think is going to be fine. It’s not as traditional as you normally see, but as long as you have a little bit of a step, that distracts the eye from it being absolutely perfect. In theory, you should have no issue with wood moving because the top and the sub-top will move in unison. But if there’s any difference, this little step will hide any inconsistency. 

I’m going to start with an inch and a quarter. I’ll make my cut lines, and make the end cuts with the track saw. There’s a decent chance that these are not going to be perfectly square to the edges, which doesn’t really matter, because I can lay that track right on that line and cut exactly where it needs to go. 

For the curve along the front, that is going to be a different offset than everything else we’ve done so far. Since there’s only one of this curve anyway, I’m just going to work back to the line. It doesn’t need to be perfect because it doesn’t need to match up with anything. We have an inch and a quarter of offset, so if it’s a little bit off, it’s not going to be noticeable at all. 

So while I’m cutting a serpentine profile into the top, let’s take a look at Triton’s Portable Oscillating Spindle Sander. This thing is going to be great for two big use cases. First off is going to be taking the tool to the work. Sometimes we have really large pieces that you want to cut some curves in, and being able to actually take the tool to the piece of wood is a lot easier than trying to take a big piece of wood to a stationary tool. The other use case for this is going to be someone in a smaller shop. You can very easily set this in a vice, or you can use the included hardware to mount it to any table. If you want to be able to do some spindle sanding, but you don’t have the room or the need for a full size benchtop unit, a smaller unit like this is going to be a really great space saving fit. A feature that this sander has that the benchtop ones don’t is variable speeds, so it allows you to really dial things in so you can really fine tune the amount of material that you’re removing. It comes with four drum sizes, which just like on the benchtop machines, are going to be very easy and quick to change. Another nice little thing in the box is an edge guide. This allows you to set the depth on the drum. If you’re trying to do some final work on an edge, for instance, you can set the amount material to get removed and quickly and easily and mindlessly go ahead and sand your profile. That is the Portable Oscillating Spindle Sander, a great addition for any shop. 

Here it is with the top for the first time, and down on the floor which is the perspective it will be viewed from. Next up is an edge profile on the top panel. 

I have a door edge bit, and I made a full length sample, just to get a better idea of what it would look like at a longer length. I’m kind of digging that profile, so that is what I’m going to go with. 

A tip that might help when you’re trying to pick a molding profile out is that if you put some mineral spirits or some solvent on it, it will give you a better idea of what it’ll look like with some finish on it. 

So it is finally time to get into some finish, which is super exciting. The case was pretty much finished prep through the entire project, so it’s all been ready to go since it was put together. I did spray off any sawdust with compressed air, and I wiped the surface down with some mineral spirits, which is going to accentuate any defects in the surface and remove any last little bit of sawdust or dust that’s on the surface. That gives you a nice way to preview what’s going to happen when the finish goes on, gives you a chance to correct anything if anything needs to be corrected. 

I’ve shown this finishing process so many times in my videos, so I’m going to show the wood coming to life this time, and answer some of the general questions I’ve been getting on this finishing process over the last however many years I’ve been sharing this. So this is going to be the intricacies of wiping varnish application. 

There’s two categories of topics: the applicators and the actual finishing products. I often get asked what I use to apply finish. I use cotton cloth rags. You can buy these at any Home Center in the paint department. It’s just bulk cutoffs from a T-shirt manufacturer or something like that. So it’s T-shirt material, and you can cut it to whatever size you want. It’s going to say lint-free or low lint, but it’s going to have lint. So there is a little bit of prep work for using these cotton rags to get that lint out of there. First off, I cut my pieces down into about four applicators. As I’m cutting this, it creates some frayed edges, and I kind of ruffle them up a little bit to loosen and release them. If you think about it ahead of time, cut all your pieces and run them through a wash and dry in your machines, and that will help to remove a lot of lint. I typically don’t have that kind of forethought, so I take some compressed air and blow the rag out. You’d be surprised how much stuff comes flying out of these rags. 

Next: the fishing products themselves. I like to use Arm-R-Seal. Now over time, as finishes are sitting around they will start to degrade. You can use some Bloxygen or a StopLoss Bag or something like that to help prevent it. Regardless, if you have some negative space in your can, it’s going to degrade, and it’s not going to apply the same way as a fresh can will. For a project like this, I’ll go out and buy a new can. The old stuff can still be used, and it works really well for your seal coats because you’re not worried about application quality at that point. When it really becomes an issue is when you’re trying to do those final builds, and you’re trying to have no streaks in your finish. So the oldest can I have lying around is what I use first to get rid of it, and it becomes a sealing product. That brings in another question I’ve gotten over the years too, which is why I don’t use a separate sealing product. It’s just to have less things around, that’s really about it. You can buy a separate sealing product if you want, or you can just use the same product. It doesn’t really matter. I use the same product because it helps me get rid of the old stuff. On that first coat, the wood’s super thirsty, so it’s going to get rid of a lot of finish, which is nice, and you can save your good stuff for the top coat. 

Otherwise, you’ve seen me do this process many times, so it’s the same as always, we’re going to do five coats. The first one to two coats are just a seal coat. It’s going to penetrate into the wood and form the initial layer. Coats three and four are build coats, and the fifth coat is going to be the final touch up finessing coat. The fifth coat doesn’t really do anything except fix the sheen on the fourth coat. 

It’s been two days now, and I have four coats of finish on here, and I’m getting ready to apply the fifth coat. With this finishing process, the last coat is probably the most important. You can put on as many coats as you want to get the build you want. Right now, the case is close to the final look that I want for the sheen, so with one more coat, it will look like I want it to. So the final coat is essentially a fixing coat. At this point, we have a pretty good surface, but it has some dust nibs in it. If you have any streaks or anything like that, this will be the step that removes all that and makes everything perfect. If you have been doing a good job of sanding between coats, and you have a lot of dust nibs, on this coat you can sand a little more aggressively if you want. I usually sand a little more aggressively because I’m not too worried about what I’m going to do to the surface. That last coat is going to go on really thin, and that is going to cause it to dry to the touch very quickly, which means it’s going to have much less chance of having dust nibs settle in it. 

Let me wipe this dust off of here, and then we can apply the last coat. The cleaning step is also more important on this coat because you don’t want any little nibs and junk in your finish at all. On the previous coats, it wasn’t that big of a deal because you’re going to sand between coats and get rid of any imperfections in the surface. After this one, we’re not going to really want to have to sand too much. By having a nice, super duper clean surface, you’re going to save yourself a little bit of heartache. 

So on this coat, I like to just give my applicator a little dose of mineral spirits. That’ll pre-moisten it and cause it to absorb less finish from the can. Then I shake the varnish to make sure I get all of the flatteners off the bottom. (That’ll make some people crazy, but it’s not going to put any bubbles in your finish if you’re doing a wipe-on varnish.) 

I have a little bit of finish on the applicator, and I’m going to just get the surface wet. I’m not trying to build anything right now, I’m just trying to get a little bit of finish on top of here to fix the sheen. The thinner the finish goes on, the faster it dries, the less time stuff has to settle in the finish. It took me about eight minutes to go around and finish everything else, and now the side panel is already dry to the touch. 

This has been sitting for a week now and it’s fully cured. Now I can go around and start seeing where I have any more defects. This is going to be a very tactile experience, just looking for any more dust nibs that might be there. There’s a little bit of a rough spot on this foot, so I have some thousand grit sandpaper, and I’ll do some light sanding. I’m not trying to change any sheen at this point, just trying to knock off any rough spots. 

So this is all good to go for some of these final assembly work. Yes! 

Let’s start getting some backboards together next. So I have approximately 36 inches wide here to do, and we’re going to do shiplap. I have a couple pieces of maple here which I will cut my five boards from. I’m going to break this thing down and get them rough milled. Our final thickness on these is going to be 5/8 of an inch thick. As usual, I want to work that thickness down over the course of a couple of milling sessions because we’re going from solid four quarter inch down to 5/8, so we’re going to be making a lot of chips. 

Here are my planed down backboards, down to size. I have some hardwood on the outsides, which will go against that walnut. I think that’s going to look nice. For the final width on this, we’re going to do a shiplap. So we’ll have these boards lapped over each other, and we’ll have an eight inch gap in between. So we’re going to take our total width of our case, we’re going to remove the four gaps here. So that’s going to be a half inch, and then we can divide by the five boards we’re going to have in there, it’s going to give us our width, and we’ll be able to remove the lap on either side, and it should fit into our case. At least that’s a theory. 

So I’ll take this over to the saw and rip them down to final width. For me, that’s going to be about seven and a half inches wide, and then from there I can start making the actual half lap type joint. So it’s going to remove half the thickness of the board, which will be five sixteenths, these are five eighths of inch thick, and then they will be a half inch wide so that they overlap by three eighths when we have that gap in between them for movement. 

Here’s our five backboards, all pretty much ready to go. Normally I wouldn’t apply finish to these, but I think to keep the uniformity with the rest of the case, I’m going to go ahead and put a coat of finish on these. 

And that takes care of the backboards. And I only messed up the screw hole locations once, but we won’t talk about that. 

We’re getting down to the last little details now, so we’re onto hardware! I’m going to do these Bail and Pull style, Chippendale-ish pulls from Horton Brasses. I’ve been using their stuff for 10 years now, and they’ve been a sponsor for almost two years now as well. To celebrate this build, they sent out every single finish of their hardware that they offer. I’ve never seen them all laid out side-by-side before, so it’s cool to see all these different ones here. 

I normally use the light antique finish. It’s a nice middle-of-the-road look, but obviously they have a lot more different styles. If you want to do just a simple bright brass, those will patina over time if you don’t give them a coating or anything. 

You have lots of interesting options. I will put all these onto the serpentine chest to show what they all look like, at the end of this blog. To follow through with the hardware installation, we’re going to go do the light antique and kind of go from there. 

The serpentine shape of this makes mounting the hardware a little more difficult than on a flat front because now I have to deal with this curve. So, we will bend these things into the shape. If you had a much more severe bend than this, you may want to do that with a form. I’m just going to bend these by hand and put a little curve into the hardware so it rests down into the curve or onto the curve. 

I’m going to start laying these out and getting them all in place. And then drilling some holes through the drawer fronts that I spent hours trying to make look right. That’s always a little scary, but it’s part of the process. 

For the escutcheon, I drill a hole that’s a little bit smaller than the nail, which gives a little bit of a friction fit. When I do the final installation for these, I’ll put a little bit of CA glue down the hole before I drive the nail. 

On to drawer bottoms. Not a whole lot of crazy stuff happening here. I have a couple boards which I’ll be gluing together to get the width that we’re going to need for the drawer bottoms. I get two drawer bottoms out of this pair. So at this point, I’m going to chop these things up and we’ll get our rough boards milled up. 

Here are the panels for the bottoms all ready to go. These are seven sixteenths of an inch thick, which is 16th of an inch less than this distance from the drawback to the bottom on the side, so that the panels won’t rub on the runners as the drawer is coming in and out. 

With the panels all made up, I’m going to start with the easiest thing first, which is going to be to crosscut them to length to fit between the two grooves. Then we need to remove some material along the edges to make them fit into the quarter inch grooves we have in there. There’s a lot of different ways to do that. Typically I do a beveled panel where I cut a bevel on the three sides so that it fits into that groove. This time we’re going to do a raised panel because I do have that serpentine curve on the front, and I don’t really feel like putting a bevel that’s along a curve. 

So we’re going to do a raised panel here at the router table. I have a panel raising bit, which basically produces a bevel with a tongue. 

Now we just need to do the crazy front. So I’m going to flip the bottom over, bring in the drawer box, and trace the curve right onto my drawer bottom. 

With that drawer bottom in there, next we can work on getting it cut to the right width. So we’re removing the material we need removed in the back of the drawer so that it stops where it’s supposed to stop. That drawer bottom’s going to act as our drawer stop. Because that bottom is oriented so the grain expands and contracts the same way as the case, the whole case and drawer bottom will expand and contract at roughly the same rate, which will keep the drawer at the right stopping point at the front of the case. So we need to remove whatever material we need for this drawer to go all the way back past the bead. I have a combination square here, and I’m going to go pretty conservative. The quick measurement here is an inch and a sixteenth. 

I will take this drawer over to the table saw and rip this bit of the drawer bottom out of here. I’m going to go conservative at this point, and then I will fine tune things with a hand plane. 

All right, now all my drawers stop where they are supposed to, and it’s time for probably the most satisfying part of the entire project: waxing the opening. I have some paste wax, and I’m going to rub that onto the drawer runners on the case, and then on the sides here where the guides are. That is going to make the drawers slide in and out much more easily. You can also apply some wax to the bottom of the drawer sides if you want. 

There’s one last little thing that I’ll do, and that is attach the drawer bottoms to the drawer back. I’ll cut a little slot in the back of the drawer bottom, not deep enough so you can see it from the inside of the drawer. That is where I will secure it in the back with a screw, and that slot will allow the drawer bottom to float in and out behind that drawer back, and that screw will just help to keep the drawer bottom in place and also support the weight in the back of the drawer. 

So here the finished serpentine chest of drawers next to the dressing vanity. Two pieces of furniture from the same tree. Two very different pieces of furniture overall, so it’s cool to see two completed things out of one stick of tree that was just chilling in someone’s yard. 

As promised, we’re going to run through different hardware options on the serpentine chest, and we’ll see which one ends up being the favorite. Here we go. 

So starting things off is the bright brass finish. 

Next we have the semi bright. 

Next is the light antique, which is what you saw me put on earlier. 

Next up is the antique finish. 

Then dark antique. 

And then jumping over to the nickel finishes, we have the polished nickel

And the satin nickel. I’m going to go with the satin nickel. I think it does a nice job of complimenting the walnut without fading into the background too much like some of the other ones did. I haven’t used a nickel finish on a piece of furniture before, and I’m liking this overall vibe. There is another (slightly more ridiculous reason) why I’m sticking with satin nickel. That is because it was the last one I put on there, and I don’t feel like swapping hardware again. But I have all the other ones so if I ever want to swap them, I can do that at any time. 

I am super thrilled with the way this thing turned out. This has been on my list of things to make for a very long time, so I’m really glad I was able to finally get a chance to try this out and execute a design. And I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Also, it was a really good learning experience as far as what it takes to make a non-flat front chest of drawers. It takes substantially more effort to go from a flat front to a serpentine front. Overall, I’m really thrilled with the design. I really like the way this flows together as one curved thing that goes from the top all the way down to the floor with the curved feet and that transition molding down there. It’s a really cool piece of furniture. Every time I make something that started back with a journey some time ago, it’s cool to reflect and to know that things like this come from trees. It’s obvious, but if you remind yourself about it every now and then, it has a little bit of a deeper meaning to it, which I think is pretty darn cool. 

Because this is the second piece of furniture from that tree, I thought this time we’ll highlight the dressing vanity class over in the Guild. Again, if you like more in-depth woodworking content, definitely check out my classes in the Guild. 150 videos spanning over nine different classes, and this time we’re featuring the dressing vanity. That one is a very interesting build because it really helps you work on your accuracy in your joinery and layout. There are several waterfall joints in that piece that are all incorporated in that miter joinery. So not only do your miters need to be absolutely perfect, you don’t have a whole lot of margin for error as far as the joinery goes, because you need those joints to come together with as little material removed as possible so you get those perfect waterfall joints over the corners. A lot of really interesting case work in that one, and you get some dovetail drawers, and some fun exploration of design when making the mirror assembly. 

And again, I do have a set of plans for the serpentine chest if you want to go down that road and try it yourself. Lastly, I want to say another big thank you to the sponsors. Big thank you at Triton Tools and Horton Brasses for continuing to support the channel and being long-term supporters of the channel. It’s cool to have some amazing companies backing this content. 

That is going to do it for this one. Thank you as always for watching, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments about the serpentine chest, or anything back in the shop, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have, and until next time, happy woodworking!