The next task for the box was to cut the grooves where the panel will slide in. The only somewhat appropriate tool I had for this task was my Millers Falls #67 router plane. This is more or less a copy of the Stanley router plane, but without the fence. Unfortunately, the fence is what I really needed. So I decided to make one. The first attempt was just a piece of wood attached to the bottom through the hole in the plane sole. That didn’t work very well.
I decided to get a little more serious about this, and made a combination shoe/fence out of masonite and a strip of yellow-poplar.
This was a nice excuse to use my overly expensive countersink to keep the brass screw heads below the various mating surfaces.
It’s still not the easiest tool in the world to use; to cut a groove, you must move the adjusting nut down between passes while keeping the blade in the same lateral position. You can accomplish this by doing the adjustment while keeping the blade inside the groove you’re in the process of cutting.
There’s just one bit that you can’t get with the shoe/fence attached, and that’s the very end of the stopped groove on the pinboards where you start the cut. There’s a “swimming pool-like” recess there that you need to cut deeper (see the first photo above at the bottom right). To get to that, just remove the shoe/fence and cut in the opposite direction. You don’t need the fence for this because the shallow groove that you already cut guides your blade.
So now I have the four sides and we’re nearly ready for assembly. It’s probably time to complete that bottom panel.
Galoototron 
Ooo, dovetail boxes 🙂 I recently bought a Stanley 45 Combination Plane — not having a box to put it with all its bits and bobs into, and needing an excuse to use it (to plow grooves for top and bottom panels, of course), I proceeded to design a box. Measuring things up I decided on roughly 12x9x8″ (to fit the plane setup with long rods, a rack of cutters, and other bits). Common white pine, dovetailed, of course. I haven’t cut dovetails for 40 years, but whatever, I’m in. Bought some adequate white pine at HD, and let that sit in the basement for a couple weeks. It warped, of course, so I cut it to slightly oversize lengths and got out the planes, and reduced 3/4″ warped boards to 5/8″ flat and true. All good so far, but I’m happy I started with white pine, thank you, and not maple. I chanced on https://layout.computer/ (thank you Greg) which was immeasurably useful in laying out the dovetails (or chairs, or casework, as your case may be). Time for a dovetail: cut the tails in one side, transfer the result to the pin side, cut those, chiseled and filed things clean, and fitted it together. Not perfect, but damn, this is easier than I remember. Lesson: I need a proper bench that won’t bounce when I tap a chisel with a mallet.) Took it apart to plow the grooves… which I cut straight through the dovetails so in hindsight I’ll have to glue in some blocks to cover. All the “bottom” grooves were fine, working off the index-edge of the base, but the top is too far from the index edge for my fence to reach, so I cut the upper grooves by indexing off the “top” edge. Lesson: don’t assume the boards shrink proportionally, because 3 of the 4 worked out fine, but one joint ends up with the grooves mismatched by 1/8″. Grr. Patch in a run of 1/4″ pine, true up the “top” edge, and plow again. Now we’re cooking with gas.
Today I started cutting the tails for joint #2. Don’t pine shavings smell just lovely?
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