Big Fingers

The next layer of the hall cabinet is a couple of open cubby holes. The left end will be a joint between a vertical and horizontal board. I could put a batten in the joint to make it strong, but it would look ugly. I wondered if a finger joint would work. I want vertical board to support the horizontal board and the horizontal board to stop the vertical board moving away from the joint. I cut the joint with the router to get the depth of the cut to exactly match the thickness of the board and to make clean, straight edges.

The top board is again supported by a batten against the wall so it will be anchored and the weight distributed. The joint will still be important. One key point of a finger joint is that it has a large surface area for glue to hold it together. My joint will have a very small area for glue as the fingers are very wide, so I may add some panel pins to improve the strength of the joint. They will be easy to hide under filler and paint. I'll decide at final assembly time.

The cubby holes will be too long and stuff will get lost at the back, so I'm going to add a false back to shorten the space. The assembled section looks how I want it to look. If you open the picture below to zoom in, you can see the finger joint, still unglued and unpinned. It will work well I think. The false back will be fixed to the battens you can see in the two cubby holes.

The last section is a cupboard above the cubby holes. Once that is done there's a few fiddly bits to complete, like the boxed in sections at the right end. Then the whole thing comes apart and is sanded and primed before the final assembly begins.