Society of American Period Furniture Makers
The E-Interview Series: The Bombé Chest with John Davis


Figure 25. Side profile of chest showing drawer dovetails.
Figure 26. Fitting the drawer sides.

SAPFM Do you shape the drawer face maintaining the right and left side flat and then shape them after the convex concave sections of the drawers are completed?
DAVIS The final shaping was very tedious and the drawer fronts moved a bit after they were shaped. I went through several iterations of scribing off the beads and shaping the front to the template. Note that the pencil is “behind” the bead because the drawer pattern doesn’t match the front of the bead but should follow the field between the beads. We considered shaping the drawers, fine tuning them after they stabilized, then scribing the drawer blades off the drawers with the dividers adding enough to account for the bead; we opted for the fitting the drawers to the blades as shown.

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