Most of the case parts are between 12” and 13 1/2” wide and required two-board edge glue-ups. I don’t like having glue squeeze out of the joints and spread out beneath the clamping cauls, so I used some plywood scraps as spacers, taking care to keep them clear of the joint. One day I’m going to build a set of U-shaped sleeves that I can slide into position (straddling the joints).

The spacers kept the squeezed-out glue in a single bead, making it easy to remove after the glue plasticized.

After the glue dried, I cut the panels to their final sizes. I left the doors a bit oversized so I could trim them later.

The back is composed of three 1/4” plywood panels that fit into 1/4” wide, 3/16” deep grooves. The grooves on the top and bottom are stopped, so I couldn’t use my table saw to cut them. I turned to my router table instead.

Routing the grooves should have been trivial, but I seemed to have developed a case of the yips with my router table and 1/4” spiral upcut bit. For the second project in a row, the bit raised as I routed the groove, making the groove much too deep on one side. (I don’t know if it’s the table, the 1/4” collet, the bit, or my technique, but I need to figure it out. This problem is embarrassing, time-consuming, and dangerous.) I filled the groove with a strip of wood and decided to use the router hand-held with an edge guide instead of the table. That worked better, but I let the guide drift away in three places. It was not my finest hour.

To start fixing those mistakes, I used a slot cutting bit (on the router table) to cut away most of the affected areas flush with the bottom of the groove.

Then I finished and squared the cuts with a small saw and chisel. Finally, I glued in strips of wood to finish the repair (not shown). Fortunately, none of the repaired areas will ever be visible.

Once I got back on track, I drilled the dowel holes for the top cavity shelf and inter-drawer dust panel.

The rest of the case is held together with 3/8” diameter dowels. My JessEm jig made is easy to drill the holes for the corner joints. No measuring or marking was needed.

Interior (tee) joints (where the vertical dividers meet the top and bottom panels) were fussier. I drilled the edge holes in the dividers first and inserted dowels. Then, on the top and bottom panel, I drew a line exactly two inches (the distance between the jig’s front edge and bushing hole centers)  from the divider’s location and placed the divider on its side along the line. The edge of the divider acted like a fence, and the dowels acted as positioners.

After I drilled all the dowel holes, I could dry-fit the entire case.

The unglued dowels (augmented with clamps when needed) held the case together well enough to let me cut the doors and drawer faces to their final sizes. I used 3/32” thick spacers to fine-tune and test the cuts.

The dry-fit case also let me determine the exact width of the drawer boxes. I placed the slides and sides in the cavity and measured the distance between the sides.

I pre-drilled the locations for the drawer slides. There’d be no easy way to do it after the case was glued up.

I used my doweling jig to drill the shelf pin holes for the adjustable shelves in the side cavities. The jig and its indexing pin made it easy to drill uniformly spaced holes.

To simplify later assembly, I decided to pre-drill the door hinge mounting holes in the cabinet sides. To do that, I started by drilling the hinge cup holes in the doors. I have a setup jig from an earlier project that helped me set the fence and stops on the drill press.

I installed the hinges in the doors, then aligned each door with its corresponding side on my bench, clamping the door to a caul to keep it in place. (The door’s front face and the side’s front edge were both pressed against the caul.) That placed the hinges in the correct positions on the side, and I used a Vix bit to drill the screw holes. The benefit of this approach is that it requires no measuring or marking.

At this point, the case was ready for final sanding and either pre-finishing or glue-up. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.