[ Saw whirs, theme music plays ] ♪♪ Welcome back to "The Woodsmith Shop."

I'm Phil, and on today's episode we're gonna be building what we're calling a small hall cabinet.

It takes some design cues from some furniture that we saw in some Japanese houses not that long ago.

And what it does is contrasts two different shapes.

Of course, you get the big rectangle here with the overall size of the cabinet and then, on the inside, the shelves and the dividers that are going on.

Then, to offset that a little bit, on the front of the doors, we've added a rattan panel.

It's done in a circle to just play around with the square shape.

And then we've carried that on to the base, where the legs have been turned round.

You'll see how Logan does that a little bit later in the episode.

If you're ready to build along with us, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

It's time to build.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters.

Offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

♪♪ And by... Kreg, tools designed by woodworkers for woodworkers.

Create what inspires you.

Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

♪♪ And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Theme music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ We're gonna get started on the case pieces.

And one of the first things that we needed to do was to glue up some panels to get the widths that we need.

They're cut to the final width and final length.

Now we want to take care of a little bit of orientation.

I determined what were the best-looking faces, and those would be the outside of all of these panels.

Then I put them together, so these are the two sides.

And I drew a triangle on there.

And that triangle tells me which is the top end of the case and which one is the bottom.

And then, because it's split between the two pieces, I know which is the outside face of each of those parts.

And all that is gonna help us to be able to keep these parts in their proper orientation as we take care of the joinery and fit all of the pieces.

The first step is some layout.

So I used a marking gauge to scribe a baseline, which is just the depth of what those dovetails are gonna be cut to, and that matches the thickness of our parts here.

Then I'm going to take a bevel gauge and draw in the sides of the dovetails.

The bevel gauge sets the slope or the angle of the dovetail... so that we know where we're cutting.

The final thing to do is to scribble in the waste area, just because you can get going on your project and lose track of which side of the lines you need to cut to.

Now, to cut those, one of the key things here is that you want to keep the slope of all of those cuts as consistent as possible.

So I'm gonna do that here at the band saw.

There's lots of ways to get there.

The trick, though, is to hold that workpiece at the correct angle.

And I'm gonna use a special jig.

It's called the wedge.

It's just an angled piece of plywood here with a little heel down at the end.

That heel catches on the edge of my workpiece, and the opposite edge follows along the rip fence on the band saw.

So I can just feed it into the blade until I cut right down to the baseline.

The layout on our dovetails is symmetrical, so I can just flip my piece over and make a cut on the opposite side.

Time for a little fun with hand tools here.

The band saw took care of consistent and symmetrical spacing of our dovetail joints.

Now what we want to do is remove the waste.

The first step is to take a coping saw and cut away the waste in between those two cuts.

I'm gonna thread the coping-saw blade down into there and then cut along the baseline as close as possible.

The closer you get, the easier it is to clean up.

But it doesn't need to look pretty, and mine won't.

From there, what I'm gonna do is turn this piece sideways in the bench vise.

And then with a back saw, I'm gonna cut away the two outer corners here -- again, as close to the baseline as possible.

To clean those up, I'm gonna flip it back horizontal and then use a chisel and make small cuts, little nibbles, working across that shoulder right at the baseline.

Final step is to flip the parts flat on your bench and grab a mallet.

You're gonna pound away at the waste, again, working in thin cuts, working back to that layout line.

Right at the end, tilt the chisel toward you a little bit and undercut the joint for a tight assembly later on.

It's important that the other part of the joint, the pins, match the tails exactly.

So you can't really just lay it out based on the numbers in the plans.

Instead, we're gonna use the tail board as our guide.

Couple of ways to get us set up for success, though.

One is I clamped a cleat onto the tail board right at the baseline to help me register it against the pin board.

I've also put down a piece of masking tape across the top of the pin board.

Gonna use that kind of like an old machinist's layout fluid, except in tape form here.

So now I can bring these two pieces together, and I want to make sure that the edges are perfectly aligned.

I'm gonna use a knife, and I'm gonna scribe down each side of all the tail joints, working my way across.

Just make sure you keep good pressure on the pieces so that they don't shift while you're scribing.

Once that's done, you can lift off the tape that you cut through where the tails are, and then what's left is where the pins are gonna be.

So I'm gonna take a square and, with a pencil, extend the line from the edge of the tape down to the baseline to give me a guideline for where I'm gonna cut.

This time it's a handsaw to cut as close as I can to that line, working down to the baseline.

Then grab your coping saw again and remove most of the waste.

I'm gonna use a router to do the final cleanup on the pin board here.

And I have a setup where I'm holding that board vertically, and I have a backer behind it that has a couple notches in it so I can clamp it to the bench and then clamp the workpiece to the backer.

And then the clamps are gonna be out of the way.

The backer part is gonna support the router so that it's not gonna tip while I'm working.

And for the action, I have a pattern bit installed in the router, and that pattern bit is the key to making this work.

The bearing on the top of the pattern bit is gonna follow along the sides of the pins that I already cut, where the cutting flutes on the bottom are gonna grind away the waste material and leave me with a nice, flat surface along the baseline.

I'm going back to the vise here, and I want to do most to pretty much all of the trimming on this pin board.

Now, we have the tape here and I'm looking for places, like on this one and this one where I can see there's definitely some bare wood overhanging the tape.

Now, that tape is, I mean, pretty much our blueprint here on what we're gonna use as a guide.

So I can pare across the joint really carefully with my chisel in a few of those places and then check the fit again.

The next stage of our joinery journey is to cut dadoes on the inside of the case sides.

Much easier than the dovetails that we were working on.

To do that, I'm using a plunge router and a straight bit.

These dadoes are stopped before they get to the front edge of the two case-side pieces.

To guide the router, I've clamped a straight-edge guide to my two pieces.

And you'll also see that I have clamped the two sides together.

This way, I know that the dadoes are gonna be perfectly aligned when I rout them.

Two vertical dividers fit between the horizontal dividers.

On their ends, I need to form a tongue that will fit into the dadoes that I routed.

I'm doing that at the router table here with a straight bit, and then I used a test piece here to dial in the exact size of the tongue by adjusting both the bit height and the fence setting.

What I want is a snug fit with no gaps at the shoulders of the joints.

I'll rout that on the two vertical dividers, and then I'll do the same thing on the horizontal dividers so that they'll fit the dadoes on the case sides There really aren't that many parts involved in assembling this cabinet.

But once you start spreading glue on it, things can get a little stressful.

So a good idea here is to break up the assembly into several stages.

The first stage is to glue up the two horizontal dividers with the two vertical dividers.

So I'm gonna take a brush and spread a good coat of liquid hide glue in each of the dadoes on that horizontal divider.

That gives me the opportunity to get a good even coat.

Then I can fit each one of the vertical dividers into place, making sure they're positioned correctly.

Now, the two tenons that are on top get a coat of glue here.

Again, make sure that you get a good coat on either side.

You don't want to be sloppy with it, but you don't want to use too little.

Then that other horizontal divider can get set into place.

Watch yourself as you're dropping that down so that those tenons fit into the dadoes.

And then give it one last check for position, and then you can begin applying clamps.

I used four here -- two at the front, two at the back -- to make sure that the tenons were fully seated in the dividers.

Again, same thing.

I have one of the case sides laying down flat on the bench.

I'm gonna put some glue into the dadoes in the case side here, and then I can bring that inner assembly and set that down into place.

Next up is to attach the case bottom.

Here I'm spreading some glue into the dovetails, getting in between all of them.

You don't have to get all the surfaces, just the two sides, the long-grain surfaces of the joint.

Once you have that, you can fit that piece into place and then go over to the other end and apply glue and fit that piece in as well.

Things get a little bit harder to reach up here, but now you're gonna be spreading glue onto the pins of the top and the bottom piece in order to get ready for attaching that other side.

Don't forget, you'll want to apply some glue to the tenons on the two horizontal dividers that are exposed up there as well.

Then you can bring that other case side into place and begin fitting it on one end, into the dovetails.

Pull that down into one side.

I went over to the other side and pulled the other side in.

And then you want to make sure that your tenons are fitting into the dadoes.

Here, I use a scrap block and a mallet to help drive those parts down into place.

This can be a little bit of a tricky situation here, as you're kind of juggling four different joint surfaces.

Once everything starts to get seated, it's just a matter of adding clamps in different places to pull the joints together and keep them together.

♪♪ This hall cabinet features a base that has turned legs and rails that connect them.

What I like about this design is those rails, that have a round-over on the bottom, seamlessly terminate into the turned legs.

These legs are two parts -- oak on the top and walnut on the bottom.

We'll attach those together in a little bit.

But first we have to create that seamless transition.

And I'm gonna do this before we turn these round.

So what I have here is I have a 3/4-inch straight bit installed in the router table.

This is the exact width of our stock that we're gonna use for our rails.

So we're gonna make two passes here at the router table.

The first is gonna be with this wider bit to accept the entire profile of those rails into the leg.

Then we're gonna switch this bit out for a 1/4-inch straight bit, and we're gonna raise it up a little bit to create a deeper mortise for a tenon.

That's gonna be our physical connection between the rails and the legs.

Now that we have the joinery done on these legs, we can go ahead and join them with these walnut feet.

And in the plans, we showed doing this by turning a tenon onto here and then drilling a centered hole here.

And you could absolutely do that, but that requires multiple times at the lathe.

So instead what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the same setup that I'm gonna use to drill this hole, and I'm just gonna drill it in both parts.

That's gonna give me a place to install a dowel, and then we can go ahead and glue the two together, just like that.

Now, this isn't a structural joint.

This is really just to hold these two together and register them once this entire base is together.

And the glue between the dowel and the leg and the foot are gonna be strong enough to turn this at the lathe.

So I've set up a stop block and set the fence so that this Forstner bit is gonna drill a centered hole on this blank.

Now, this Forstner bit is sized to match my dowel, and when I drill it in both parts, there may be some little variance in the hole location.

So when you put them together and you spin it around, it may not line up in a few different orientations, but you'll find one that is close and that will work perfect and when we turn it down, that'll true up nice.

So after these leg blanks have had a chance to dry for a while, we're ready to turn them round.

So this is where we're starting, and this is our goal.

And this is a very simple turning.

This is just turning this square blank into a cylindrical leg.

But because it's simple, we do have to take some certain steps in order to ensure that all of the legs look the same.

So the first thing that I'm going to do is line it up in between centers.

Now, I've used an awl to punch the center point on both ends, and I'm gonna position this so that my drive spur is on the walnut side.

It's a little bit softer, so I get a little bit better bite down there.

And then I want to make sure that the spinning corners are gonna clear my tool rest.

But I do want it fairly close, because those corners are gonna quickly come off, and we don't want a ton of overhang once those corners do get taken away.

Okay.

There we go.

Now, I'm gonna approach this with three different tools.

The first is a spindle roughing gouge.

This will allow me to quickly knock off the corners and remove a lot of the waste.

And then, once I get those corners knocked off and I'm kind of down to a semicircular or semicylinder, I'll come in with a parting tool and a set of dividers.

This will allow me to set two different points on here at my desired dimension, which is 2 1/2 inches.

Now, once I have those two depth marks cut, I'm going to continue to work with the spindle roughing gouge till I get close, and then I'm gonna switch over to a freshly sharpened skew chisel and make some planing cuts to smooth everything out.

And if you're left with a few little lumps and bumps, it's not that big a deal, because what I do is then, on a simple cylinder like this, I use a piece of adhesive-backed sandpaper on a flat block, and we can turn that speed down and kind of smooth everything out with this.

Now that we have our legs turned to shape, we can go ahead and take a look at the rails.

Now, the rails have a round-over on the bottom side, and I cut that at the router table using a round-over bit.

Just made one pass along one edge, flipped it over, made it pass along the other edge.

What that leaves us is with a rail that fits into that mortise nice and snug.

So now what we have to do is we have to cut a tenon to fit into that deeper mortise that we made.

What I'm going to do is I'm gonna guide this workpiece along the auxiliary fence using this miter gauge.

I'm gonna make a pass along both faces.

And then I'm gonna stand it up and nip off the bottom side of that tenon.

Those joints fit together really nicely, so now we can go ahead and glue this up.

What I'm going to do is apply glue just on these tenons, and then I'm going to do this in two different steps.

I will do the two ends first.

And then we'll connect those with the longer stretchers.

♪♪ The two doors on the front of our cabinet are built with frame-and-panel joinery, specifically mortise and tenon, since we have a solid wood panel.

The first step is right here at the table saw, where I'm gonna cut a groove on the inside edge of the long stiles.

I'll do the same thing with the shorter rails as well.

Key here is to keep the same face of the workpieces up against the rip fence for consistent cuts.

To tackle the deeper mortises, I'm gonna do those with some stopped cuts over at the router table.

Then a trip right back here to the table saw to take care of tenons on the ends of the rails to fit those mortises.

The door panels for our doors have a tongue formed on all four edges.

This is dado-blade work over at the table saw.

The next step is to create an opening in the door that will be covered with a rattan screen.

To do that, we're gonna make a couple of different cuts.

The first is the outer circle, which will be a groove that will hold a spline material.

And then this inner one is the opening.

We're gonna do the outer one first because once we cut this away, we don't have anything in the middle.

To do all of that cutting, I made a simple router trammel jig out of just some hardboard that's attached to the router base with double-sided tape.

When I have the bit extending through, then I was able to measure for the radii of the two different circles that I'm gonna rout here.

I drilled a hole through the hardboard and then used that same bit to drill a center hole on my workpiece.

That way, I can use that bit as the anchor point for my router trammel, pivot around that as I make each one of the cuts.

The spline groove is in one pass as I go all the way around.

And then the inner hole is gonna be all the way through, and I'm gonna step that down in a series of passes.

Here's the rattan webbing that we're gonna use as well as the spline material.

Both of these need to soak in hot water for about 20 minutes to a half an hour, just to make sure that they're loosened up and flexible to bend around into that groove that we have and then also the rattan webbing to be able to fit down in there, 'cause what I'm going to do is place the rattan over the opening, and then I'm gonna use a wood dowel and a mallet and start tapping that spline down into that groove, working my way around.

Couple of things to note here.

Make sure you keep your rattan pattern going the same direction for both of the doors, otherwise it's gonna look a little bit weird.

But otherwise, a little bit of patience will pay off in the end.

What we need to do after that is let this dry.

As it dries, it'll tighten up and look really great.

After the rattan dries, put a fresh blade in your utility knife and trim the excess so that you're left with a nice-looking panel here.

That's not the last thing that we need to do on this center panel, though.

It's a good idea to apply finish.

I'm using some tung-oil varnish because this panel will expand and contract with the changes in the season.

In winter, when it contracts, I don't want to see a white line of unfinished panel there, so I put finish on that panel first.

It's not gonna get glued in place anyway, so I don't have to worry about that.

The door itself for the assembly is really easy.

All you have to do is apply glue to the tenons on the top and bottom rails.

Fit those tenons into one of the side stiles.

Then you can drop the panel right into that little pocket.

Put the other stile in place, lay it down, and clamp it up tight.

While that's drying, I took the time to apply finish to the base of the cabinet, just to take care of that right away, And then also to the case itself.

I started on the inside and then finished up by putting finish on the outside of the case.

Once the finish has been applied to both the case and to the base of the cabinet, you can bring those two together.

Pocket screws do the job here.

I'll just use a few screws on the inside of the base frame.

Drive those down.

The big thing here is you don't want it shifting around, so I took some time to center the base on the bottom of the case and then clamped it down so that it doesn't move before driving those screws, and you're ready to go.

What we're here to do now is to attach the hinges on the back side.

I'll need to drill out a mortise for that to fit into place and get screwed down.

I'm gonna use a little jig to take care of that.

It comes with a Forstner bit and then a fence that determines the offset.

All I have to do is line up the center point of the bit with my center line and then just drill it out and I'm good to go.

Last step on the doors is to attach some pulls.

To locate those mounting holes correctly, I'm gonna use one more jig.

This one registers off the edge of the door and the top of the door, so that I can drill the holes for the mounting screws.

♪♪ One of the best parts about the hinges that we're using on these doors is that they have some adjustability in them.

You can adjust them for their in-and-out, front-and-back, side-to-side positioning to dial in the fit that looks great for this cabinet.

And that's really what this cabinet's all been about -- some simple details executed really well.

It doesn't have to be flashy or over the top to make a great-looking project.

If you're ready to build your own, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

There, you can get started on all kinds of other projects, find some inspiration for something to build, maybe something even for your own shop.

Then we'll gather right back here for another great project in the Woodsmith Shop.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Announcer: If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week, you'll receive an e-mail with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

Sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition, with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD.

Or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters.

Offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

♪♪ And by... Kreg, tools designed by woodworkers for woodworkers.

Create what inspires you.

Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

♪♪ And by... ♪♪ ♪♪