I'm slapping together a night stand for my cousin out of crap I have lying around the shop, and I'm using the project as an excuse to try out some stuff.
Carcass is "hardwood" mystery meat 7-ply from Lowe's. Joinery is all dovetails; lower shelf and mid frame are sliding dovetails, upper frame is half-blinds. I did that to see if I could. Answer: Barely. The sliding dovetails were fine but the half-blinds wanted to blow the plywood apart.
Face frame is rift sawn traumatized pine. That's what I managed to salvage from a damaged section of 8:4, and judging by the growth rings that tree had been through at least one divorce. The curve on the bottom I laid out with a bowed spline. First time I've actually done that. It's attached to the carcass Norm style, with Tite-bond and #10 biscuits.
Tomorrow I'll build the drawer.
it looks great! thanks for sharing your experience with the half blind dovetails in plywood. do you think you would have gotten better results with better plywood? Baltic Birch?
That tree had a few awful years, a couple of the growth rings got really narrow, and around those narrow growth rings there were a lot of pitch pockets, and a third of the board had a crack running along it. I started with a rough sawn 2x8 and managed to get the face frame of a night stand out cutting around all the damage.
I counted at least 15 growth rings outside of that before I ran out of board, I wonder if it was the 2003 drought?
Oh I'm sure baltic birch would hold up to joinery a lot better than this stuff does. Especially the innermost plies seem to be very low in quality, I think it's made out of kudzu and politics. It held up do dadoing and tenoning reasonably well but I had to do the half-blinds as all climb cuts, if I tried any conventional cuts it would start blowing apart. Baltic birch is a lot better made, maybe appleply if you can find it.