Undoing past mistakes

The home front has been pretty quiet lately. Ariel had a test to study for last week, so I spent last Sunday in the shop. This week I was able to get back to the bench at home and get some work done. Some, but not much. It's amazing how slow some of this seems to go sometimes.

Since I brought the small chest of drawers home, it's been wobbly. It's solidly glued up, but it still rockes back and forth on the bench whenever I did anything. The reason why is pretty simple: it came from a big beam of poplar that I resawed a couple of years ago. Every other board from that beam had given me huge hassles. It had been kiln dried, but when it reached equilibrium, it had some wonky internal tension that all came out when I cut it up. So, the sides of this case, 2 years later, were giving me a hard time. 

This week, I started fitting the two drawers that I've dovetailed so far. I got about 10 minutes in before I realized that I had a problem. Somehow, the inside of my nice, square case was tapering in, and the drawers were getting wedged. It turned out that the side was bowing inwards from front to back. More hassles with the wonky lumber.

To take care of that, I stood the case on its side, and slid a jack plane carefully in between the drawer dividers, so plane the inside of the side flat again. Once I was done with that, I planed the bottom flat, too, figuring it was high time I got around to doing that.

So, lots of shavings produced, but it was a one step forward, two steps back kind of day. At least the case sits flat now.