Bending and Mounting the Drawer Pulls - A Little Metal Working For Me

I received the drawer pulls today from Ball & Ball.  I ordered the antique brass color since I can make them shinier if I choose by buffing or brass polish.  I will see after I stain the drawer fronts and case.

I have to bend them to match the curves on the drawer front.  That is a 12" radius.   With the practice on earlier pulls,  I just bent it by hand.   But this brass is pretty thick and I can not bend it by hand.
I will need to make a jig of some kind to bend the escutcheon and bails to match the curves.  I tried to bend it on the drawer fronts but that did not work.  So I made a smaller diameter circle jig to bend the plates on.

It is a solid block which is 10 inch diameter which is slightly smaller then the curved fronts.
I placed the brass on the block and used my strap clamps to do the bending.

I can get quite a bit of pressure using these clamps to do the initial bend without kinking the brass plates.  Once they are attached and clamped I can use a hammer to pound them to shape by tapping on the cloth clamps and not dent the brass.  All set ready to remove the clamps.

Once the clamps are removed. The brass springs back to the larger drawer front diameter and fits very well.
But the bails do not match the curve so I have to complete the same process and bend the bails so they fit the curve.

Here I have this one fitted to the practice drawer front.  Everything seems to fit ok.   Now I have to bend the concave drawer front hardware.   This turned out to be simpler than I thought.  All I had to do was turn over the escutcheon plate and place the shinny side of the plate on the jig and the curve is reversed.  So I bent those two.

Now that they were all bent, I had to drill the holes in the drawer fronts.   I had made a jig for drilling in an earlier video, so I was all set to drill the holes in the convex drawer fronts.

That went well for the four convex drawer fronts.  But I needed a jig for the two concave drawer fronts.
I figured that I could use the same jig but need to adapt it in some way.  As it turns out it was pretty simple when you think about it.  I just mount them at the same angle and drilled the other side.  Worked perfectly!

I then attached all of the hardware and put the drawer fronts in the case to see how it looked with it all mounted.  It is looking pretty good!

One last thing, I did have to bend the bails on the two concave drawer fronts to make them smaller because the radius makes them closer together.

Now I have to remove all of the hardware and begin to finish the dressing table by staining the wood.  I have decided to use the potassium dichromate. So that will be the next step.

Here is today's video: