Buidling a Sharpening Center Cabinet - page 2
Here's an exploded view of the cabinet - 3/4 inch by 3/8" deep rabbet on the top, dadoes for the bottom, a half inch rabbet on the back for the 1/2 inch ply back and shelf and #10 biscuits for the dividers. Went with bicsuits because the dividers (parts 4, 5 & 6 in the illustration below) can be meausre directly from the partially dry fit assembled cabinet. Cut the dividers to fit the opening, slip it into it's space, check for square and mark the parts the other end of the biscuits will go in to. No alignment of dadoes, no cutting the divider for the opening plus the two dadoes it will fit in. Makes glue up time a little more interesting though since
TIP:
Whenever possible, I try to measure things directly with two sticks that slide over each other, adjusted to fit the desired opening and clamped together to hold that measurement - no trying to read a tape and guessing at 1/16ths or 1/32nds and no pencil marks to deal with. Set one end of the sticks against the closest tooth on the miter saw blade, slide a stop up flush against the other end of the sticks and cut. No "leave the line, take the line or save the line" issues, no cutting on the wrong side of the line etc.. And I cut parts that fit.
I put five or six coats of wiped on dewaxed garnet shellac on the both sides of all the ply parts prior to cutting the rabbets, dadoes and biscuit slots. That avoided getting shellac in the dadoes etc. and screwing up the fit when it came time to assemble this thing. The dadoes and rabbets where cut on my router table which has the JoinTech Cabinet Maker System precision positioning fence. Need to widen a dado by 3 to 5 thousandths? No problem. With it, I can route precise dadoes up to about 16 inches from an edge. Turn the piece around and I've got another 16 inches of reach. That means I can put dadoes, or for that matter dovetails slots anywhere on the side of anything about 36 inches wide or tall (assusming I'll never need dadoes less than 4 inches apart). Set the fence and cut very accurate dadoes in one or twenty identical parts. Handy, very handy.