 how to build a drawer using the quarter quarter quarter method. I like to refer to it normally as the half half half method because that way it can be half of any workpiece that you're using. In other words if I was using going to build drawers that were three quarters sides and back then I would do three eighths half of the three quarters. When you're using half inch material you use half of that so that's a quarter quarter quarter quarter what does that mean? That means that this dado stack here is going to be set a quarter of an inch wide a quarter of an inch high and a quarter of an inch from a fence. All right now before you start with a dado stack and all of that you just cut your raw pieces for your front and the back and your two sides and your base. How do you adjust sizes for the joinery because these things are going to kind of go inside of each other. You'll see that when I get further along. Well I want my drawer to be 26 and a quarter a scotch under that 26 and a quarter wide and then 18 and a half deep and four and a quarter tall and so what I do with the two sides is I go ahead and cut them at four and a quarter. I cut everything at four and a quarter for the sides the front and the back. I get that done first so rip it to four and a quarter then lengthwise for the sides I make them the full length so if I want 18 and a half I cut them to 18 and a half. So here's my two sides I take these two sides so I've cut them four and a quarter by 18 and a half and I mark them with a triangle. The triangle is facing me I have looked at what I want to be my show faces on the inside of the drawer and I have put those together as if it's the inside of the drawer and then marked it with a triangle. In this triangle the pointed ends will point to the outside the triangle's on the top so I know what's on the top I know what's outside and I know what's inside so I know everything and I know this direction too. So that one carpenter triangle tells me how I want these boards done. Size-wise for the front and the back you make an adjustment because what's going to happen is when you set this up your front and back are going to go halfway into the side so if I want 26 and a quarter wide I'm going to take off a 16th on each side for spacing so it will fit in tightly but still slide so 26 and a quarter take off way a 16th and a 16th that's an eighth so now it's 26th and an eighth and then when I put this side in it's not going to go all the way to the edge here it's going to go halfway into the side and so I want to take off a quarter of an inch over here half of the half and a quarter of an inch over here so basically what I do is size the length of my front and back and my base should all be one thickness less than what I want to be so if I want 26 and a quarter take away a 16th and a 16th now I'm at 26 and an eighth and then I want to take away the thickness of one of my work pieces so that's a half of an inch or four eighths I have cut my front and my back to be four to quarter by 25 and five eighths so you make the same adjustment for the front and back as you do for the base so I've got those pieces cut the other thing I like to do well a couple things I do I mark the two sides when I look at them and I say hey where's my where's my show faces that I want on the inside of the drawer and what's the top what I want to be on the top so I get it oriented that way and then I draw a triangle on it and that triangle is pointing in this case it's the front and back so I make the triangle point toward me and it's on the top and now it tells me everything I want to know by just putting that triangle back together if you want your drawer to be 18 and a half inches deep this panel is going to go underneath the the back but it's only going to go halfway into the front so instead of it being 18 and a half it should be 18 and a quarter it's going to go halfway into the front and the front is a half of an inch wide so your bottom side should be the same width as your front and back in in my case here it's in 25 and 5 eighths but the depth should be a quarter of an inch less so first I need to set this up and I only need to set it up once and that is I want this to be a quarter of an inch high I'm going to take a set of bars these are from iGaging and I like them a lot and I'm going to find the one quarter so here's my one quarter bar and what it is is one quarter here on the top thickness so when I lay this down that's one quarter let me raise my blade my saw stop is completely unplugged I don't want to do this kind of stuff with it plugged in it's close to a quarter as I can and we're going to test it I've also got that a quarter of an inch wide I know how to set up my dado stack to be exactly a quarter of an inch because I do these kind of drawers all the time so I have my inside and my outside and in my case I got two little shims inside there so my uh this is a quarter of an inch wide next what I really want is a tall fence so here's my tall fence and we're going to bring this over we're going to try to set this tall fence I'm going to move it forward so there's no cutout at the blade here and I'm going to move that over and I'm going to set it at a quarter of an inch now let me get some uh braces in there so this fence of mine is using match fit dovetail clamps I want them fairly near the bottom so it's pulling it tight across the bottom if I have it too high it it might pull the fence across I've got a number of videos about doing various uh jigs using the match fit dovetail system and the tall fence which is also a board straightener which is also a tapering jig so that fence is a good straight up and down 90 degrees which is important let me try to set it at a quarter of an inch from the blade so sometimes when you press down and tighten it shifts your fence one way or the other mine shifts my fence to the left a little bit so I kind of get it up next to it back it off just a hair come on back off and then when I tighten it down I usually find it moves it over that hair again so here it's rubbing but it's not so tight that it's moving it so I think I got a good measurement there okay so let's take scrap wood and first let's see if we can get a slot down here that's a quarter of an inch wide quarter of an inch deep and a quarter of an inch from this edge so get my uh saw stop plugged back in now for a little test run I'm gonna try putting or into my electrical outlet that runs my dust collection sometimes if I get a wide enough heavy enough dado stack the 12 or 13 amp switch there I overrun it when I start up and so sometimes I got to put it in my 20 amp electric when you do the real work it's important that you keep this pressed down over the blade the whole way because if you let it ride up then you won't be a quarter of an inch deep in that part well let's check it how do we do let's uh use a set of calipers and check the depth of that and that is right on one quarter very good let's check the width if you don't use calipers you're making a mistake learn how to use them they're they're absolutely fantastic so one quarter again and then let's check how far it is in from the edge and right on one quarter so I've got this set up for one quarter one quarter one quarter I'm pretty happy with it one of the cuts I'm going to do is going to be inside of the board of the side so these three cuts represent the three things that we're going to do for our joinery we're going to have a slot in the bottom of all four pieces for the bottom to fit into we're going to have on the two sides we're going to have a slot or a data in this case a slot is one running with the grain and a data was one across the grain so anyway we're going to have another dado here running top to bottom on the sides and then we're going to have for the front the back a tenon here and that tenon is going to be a quarter thick and a and a quarter in so everything is a quarter quarter quarter so when these kits put together that tenon if this fits right will go into this slot so this is where I get into do I do any adjustments well dang I'm pretty happy that's uh went in reasonably putting some blue on here might make that a little more difficult but I like that nice fit like that get my triangle lined up here so I know this is the top so I'm going to put that on the inside well my inside is the open part of the triangle so that helps tell me uh what where the inside is so I don't get the wrong orientation and the other thing is it's going to be on the bottom so I'm going to take my triangle mark here make sure the open part of the triangle is down because that's the inside and make sure the pencil mark is out here that way where it's going to cut is on the bottom all right so anyway those marks help me stay oriented I want them to be the open side down and uh the mark away from the fence we'll do that to all four of them first plug in the saw stop when we're pushing through here we want to keep it down we don't want to let it rise up otherwise we won't get the depth that we need you can see there we've got the uh we got this slot or groove on the inside and on the bottom and so this is the way that drawers will will go now the uh on the two sides and the front and the back front and the back of the sides we're going to put a dado going across but we don't change our table setup at all so on those two we're going to put a dado and that dado is going to go on the same face as this in other words down so I'm going to go down and just run it this way there's a couple ways you can do this uh one would be uh just to go ahead and because you can keep it up against that fence and it's pretty short I don't see much trouble with with it getting off sync the other thing I could do is put in the miter gauge and then change the backing behind it and that would protect against tear out keep it more secure but to do that these go down and up against that fence nothing should get bound up so let's give it a go just don't push it too hard against the fence so you don't get a lot of friction so our next cut is to put a tenon on here now we want the tenon to be on the inside so I want to cut a rabbit in in this part here I want to cut a rabbit here because I want the tenon on the inside because that's going to fit into the sides and then come out flush so to get that tenon on the inside so if I did it right there the tenon would be on the outside no no it's going to cut the rabbit on the outside and that's going to leave me my tenon on the inside and that's the way we want it so we want the inside face up against the fence and we can tell the inside by the open part of our triangle now I'm just going to pass this I've got zero clearance here this is a special plate I saved just for the purpose of I didn't turn on my microphone so up till now the microphone sounded pretty crappy but let's fix that going forward anyway and maybe you can see the difference hopefully that connected yep looks like it all right so there's a couple ways to do this one way is to because of the tall fence is to hold it secure on that tall fence and run it over because I got zero clearance there's no place where it can dip down inside of that groove and so that should be safe you could also have a device you could also you know do something where you use two paddles and pass over it and another option if you're totally uncomfortable with it and what you would like to do is pass it over this way then we want that tenon to be right on the end so what you would do is insert a quarter inch fiberboard in between the fence and the blade that way you could push up against it and there but I'm just going to go I'm going to cut it right here think about this again I want the tenon on the inside and the tenon is going to be where it's not cutting so I want to cut on the outside and here we go you may be wondering what this is this is from Duragrit and it's a 60 grit substitution for sandpaper I have cut the top off of it so it's thinner and then that way I can always have it right there in my main pocket of my apron and then when I'm dealing with plywood or anything with tearout I can get rid of it the second I'm working with it or when I'm dealing with factory edges I can sand those quickly all right so I've got these two all of the sides and the front and the back have all the appropriate joinery in them now let's talk about the bottom I want that same kind of a tenon on the bottom and I've decided that this is my nice face so I want to mark that with a triangle and we'll call this the front toward me so this is my orientation of that piece so I want a tenon on the top side or on this face side of the three sides and I don't need it on the back I don't want it on the back the back's going to be flush underneath the the back side so to get that tenon on the top side here I want my top to go against the fence so the outside edge will get cut by the dado stack and then that'll leave the tenon on the upside or the face side do not touch your fence do not touch your blade do not touch your height do not touch anything you can unplug it if you want to but don't do anything else because you may find yourself with something not fitting and then you need to come back and do some more joinery I can't tell you how handy this little dure grit thing is for cleaning up I didn't get a good oh okay that's just a piece that's not a solid piece that's just a little piece there so hopefully now again I don't want my temptation there was to move that fence out of my way on this slot on the back I don't need that I want to go underneath that so I want to cut this whole piece off so this is halfway through if I run it over this being careful to stay out of the way of this piece that might get lodged in there then we're good effective I could hold a piece here like this and that should keep it so I'm going to cut that off I'm not going to raise my blade or anything so right there was the advantage of the gripper being able to hold that piece secure so it wouldn't fly anywhere all right again I'm not going to touch this in case I have to come back so I'm going to go over and do my assembly now everything should be ready let's do a dry assembly first so this is going to go into there and this is going to go into here put those clamps on there to hold it then I can turn the whole thing upside down and then this will go into there and then I can slide in my bottom so that's all going to work great I haven't dry fit my bottom perfect so that's flush there just because of that design of having the tenon be halfway through and a quarter of an inch up for the slot and so it works perfect stay together baby and there is my drawer before I put it together I like to do some shaping to my sides here I can either do that after the drawers all together or I can do it while they're separate pieces I prefer to do it while they're separate pieces so I'm going to set up for doing that next this is done the quarter quarter quarter system is right here and this is done everything can fit together there's no way when you pull on the front that that front's going to come off because you've got that going into the side you have the stock the bottom for additional stability for everything that'll be glued and that drawer is rock solid all we're going to do now is add glue and add the braces I only need two clamps going the lengthwise to hold that all together while it dries and that'll be perfect okay so that is how you do drawers using the quarter quarter quarter method or what I prefer to call the half half half method and when you're using half inch plywood it translates to the quarter quarter quarter one half of one half if I was using three-quarter inch stock then it would be three-eighths three-eighths three-eighths which is how I would set up my table saw dado stack to be three-eighths wide three-eighths tall and three-eighths from the fence and then everything else would be done exactly the same way well that's my one way that I make drawers I use it almost every time I find it's so great particularly when I'm not just doing one drawer like this but when I'm doing you know 10 drawers or five drawers the same you get that set up once and then you just run everything through to to create fancy joinery it's called a locking rabbit joint this is but it's easy to do when you have a table saw with the dado stack so that'll be a wrap always remember you can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf small workshop guy signing off so I'm going to add a profile to my tops of my sides just looks better on the drawers to have some sort of design feature so I've got a great big straight bit in here and I've got the fence set so it's about three-eighths of an inch from the leading edge of this I've got a brace over here so that when I push this up against that spinning blade there's going to be a pretty good chunk there it would want to just drive it that way I've got this to keep it from coming up I've got this to keep it from going that way and then once I've got it under control I I'm just going to push it along and that part's easy till I get about halfway and then I'm going to flip it and do the same thing again and then meet the two up so that way only need a brace on one side and I want to make sure I'm cutting on the top of my board all right so there we go let's see how this works it'd be best to have this guide down but then that gets a little difficult for me to push through and I do want to have this push stick so I'm going to leave that up I got my safety glasses on and probably ought to put on my hearing protection eyed glasses hearing and here we go and so there's the design I'm after I think that looks really cool and then we're going to do some rounding over it as well