Knitting box #5: cutting the drawer tails

I’ve just finished cutting the tails out with the hand saw. Here I am working on chiseling the tails to the lines that I marked out with a marking guage. I had some troubles getting them to fit with no gaps and realized that I hadn’t chiseled enough of an angle out so that the edges fit snugly. After doing that they fit great. I have the faces of both drawers matched so that it hopefully looks like they come from the same board. I marked inside the joint with numbers so that I knew what went where and sanded all parts to 220, paying special attention to the front faces as that will always be seen first and longest.

I like to knock out the pieces with a chisel but realized that I needed an 1/8th inch chisel to fit in the small gap up front in the middle pin section. Of course this is not something that can be had easily ( locally ) so I just dug it out with my 1/4” staying far away from the tails on either side.

Here are the two boxes without the bottoms in them yet. I am deciding whether to use plywood or use the maple that I have and make it solid with the upside down bevels all around and the cut out in the back. Maybe someone wants to give their opinion on that?

-- LAS