[ Power saw whirring ] ♪♪ Welcome back to the "Woodsmith Shop."

Today we're taking class outside.

Well, sorta.

We're building two projects for outdoors.

We're going to start with a gate for your garden.

You can set it up wherever you want, whether it's on a fence line into the garden, or just in the middle of your yard as some kind of Ozymandias.

The next project is a tall garden tower, A perfect trellis for vines to wrap around with.

Chris is going to show you all about it because he's taller.

And then we're going to have Logan turn a finial up on top.

Both of these projects are made out of cedar and use waterproof glue to make sure that they'll stand up to the test of time.

These are low cost materials, and they're really easy to work with.

So let's 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 -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... ...Titebond Wood Glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by...

Here at Grizzly, woodworking isn't just our business, it's our passion.

We love what we do.

Thank you for the opportunity to support "Woodsmith Shop" TV.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ The garden gate is a pretty simple project, and that's part of the appeal for it.

Now the parts are joined with mortise and tenon joinery, but we're taking a different approach here.

On cutting that joinery.

We're going to do the mortises at the table saw, which might sound a little weird, but it involves installing a dado blade here.

Now I have it set for about 3/8 of an inch wide.

And what I'm going to do is make two passes so that as I make one pass, flip the work piece around and make a second pass.

What that's going to do is increase the width of the dado to get to the final size that I'm looking for, and it's also going to center the dado on the two pieces.

Now the stiles for the gate are pretty big, so I want to make sure that I have a consistently sized groove all the way through here.

So I've set up a double stack featherboard that will apply pressure to the work piece, holding it against the rip fence as I make each pass.

Now, you might be wondering the fact that what I've done is simply create a big groove, not mortises.

We're going to turn this long groove into mortises a little bit later, but while I have the dado blade set up and in this position, what I want to do now is cut some more grooves on the three rail pieces.

I've lowered the dado blade slightly.

It's still a relatively deep groove to cut a groove on the top rail and the middle rail.

Now that groove needs to account for a slight curve that we're going to add a little bit later.

So that's why that one's a little bit deeper.

Then I'm going to lower the dado blade again, this time to about a half of an inch, and cut that groove on the bottom face of the middle rail.

And on the lower rail, these grooves are going to capture the solid panels that are in the bottom part.

The second part of the joinery is forming tenons on each end of our three rail pieces here.

Now the process is similar with a couple of exceptions.

First of all, I'm going to guide the piece with a miter gauge here.

And then I've used the rip fence as an end stop so that all of my tenons are going to be exactly the same length.

I left the same dado blade in.

You could go with a wider one.

I just didn't want to mess with changing it out again.

I'm going to make several passes across the face of the workpiece to form a rabbit.

Flip the piece over.

Do the same thing on the opposite face.

Boom, tenon.

So after that, it's just a matter of making sure that they all fit.

And then we're ready to head back over to the workbench.

Here's the thing.

You can create the mortises and the stiles any way that you want.

So if you have a method that works for you and you're comfortable with, go ahead and use that.

But what we're going to do now is transform these really deep grooves into a set of three mortises in each of the stiles.

Here's how we're doing that.

I have a set of strips that match the width of the groove.

Now there's a smaller one for up here that I can just drop in and glue in place, and then a larger one for the bottom section of the gate.

So if I just fit these in here without glue, you can see now what's going on.

It those strips turn this into a shallow groove with the three mortises that accept the long tenons on the rails of the gate.

So what I need to do now is just glue those in place.

The plans show where to locate each of the mortises and how long the strips need to be.

You can also use the tenons themselves to lay out those positions too.

For this to work, you want to have a good glue coverage.

So I'm going to put a bead of glue right down in there, and then on each of the faces of the strips.

Alright, One last thing to be aware of.

Sometimes when you're cutting such a really deep groove in a piece, that can release some tension so that the sides of the groove will flare out a little bit.

If you found that to be the case, once you have the strips glued in place, just pull a couple of clamps across here so you get a solid glue joint.

And so these pieces are flat and square again.

Alright, while the glue dries on the stiles we can turn our attention to the three rails.

There's a few things that we need to do to take care of these.

Actually, the bottom rail with the groove and the two tenons, that one's fine.

We'll just set that over to the side.

It's the top and middle rail that we need to focus on.

I'm going to cut an arc in there just to throw a little bit of a curve on this project so that it isn't too blocky.

Now, I've located the center of both of these pieces and marked the height of the arc that I want to draw on here.

Now, the way to draw that is by making your very own shop drawing bow.

It's a thin strip of hardwood here, and I've knotted a cord on one end, goes through a hole, loops around, and then I have this shop-made toggle.

It's just a thin strip of wood with a couple of holes in it.

What this allows me to do is now I can flex the bow, pull down on the toggle.

And it will create and hold a nice arc shape, so that when I have one that matches the curve that I need so that I can align it with the top of the curve and have it end on each end here.

Hold it in place.

And now I can draw it really easy without having to ask for some extra help here.

I'm going to head over to the band saw, cut this to shape and then smooth out the surface.

We're ready to move on to the lower panel for our gate here.

It's made up of four individual pieces of half inch thick cedar.

Now, what I've done is arranged them in the way that I want them to look.

Drawn a triangle on it just to keep myself from getting confused later on.

Now these pieces will be connected with tongue and groove joints.

So the thing is, is that you're going to cut in two steps, one for the tongue and then the other one for the groove, the grooves we're going to do first.

However, since the two outer ones will be housed in the grooves in the outer stiles, they don't need either a tongue or groove.

For the other ones, I'm going to mark the left edge of these three pieces that will receive a groove, and then we'll come back and then cut the matching tongues.

To make the grooves, I have a flat-topped rip blade installed here, set to the height, and then I'm going to use the rip fence as a guide and then make these in one simple pass.

Here's the setup for cutting the tongues.

We're back to our old friend, the dado blade here installed, but this time I've added an auxiliary fence to the rip fence.

That way I can adjust the fence to leave the amount of dado blade that's exposed to match the width of the tongue that I want to create.

I have the three pieces here that I want to form the tongue on one edge, and I've indicated that edge with the circle, again, just to eliminate confusion.

You'll make a pass along each face which forms the tongue.

The key here is consistency.

So I'm going to use a push pad to keep firm down pressure on the pieces as they go across the dado blade, so that I get a smooth, evenly formed tongue along the entire length.

One of the things that sets this gate apart are the cutouts in the lower panel.

I fit the four pieces together here with the tongue and groove joints, and the cutouts are in the shape of a ginkgo leaf from the tree.

It's a pretty common craftsman era motif.

So what I've done is printed out the pattern on some paper and then attached it to a piece of thin hardboard.

So what I can do now is position it wherever I want on the panel here.

Now, to make things easier for the cutting, what we've done is on the plans shown the cutouts happening right on seams.

So there's no, like, dropping a saw blade into a hole or something like that.

It's just cut from the edge once you pull everything apart.

So the middle one is right here.

I'm going to take a pencil and trace around it.

Now to shape them, I'm going to start off using a jigsaw to cut out as much as the waste as I possibly can.

The thing here, though, is that we're working with Cedar.

That can be a little splintery.

So depending on how the blade is cutting, you might want to stay a little bit farther away from the layout lines, just so that you have that opportunity to clean up all of those splinters and get a nice smooth edge.

From there, I'm going to go to rasps and files to get as close to the layout lines as possible, and then I'll clean things up with a little bit of sandpaper.

Either just fold it in half or wrapped around a thin stick so that I can get a nice smooth even shape here.

One final thing about that is you're looking for a cutout that looks good.

If it doesn't get quite to the lines but still has a nice smooth appearance to it, just sand off the pencil lines and you have it done perfectly.

There's a good part and a bad part to working with cedar.

The good part?

It's nice and soft, so that shaping these ginkgo leaves goes pretty quickly.

You're going to feel a little bit like a superhero.

The bad part?

Like I mentioned earlier, it's a little splintery.

So you're going to get little places where it's going to tear out, but hold off on the panic for just a little bit.

What you want to do is fit all four of the pieces together and take care of where this top lobe meets.

More than likely, you're going to have to do some fine tuning on that part of it.

Then once you're satisfied, start going over it with a power sander.

I began with 100 grit, just to make it easier to fix all the flubs.

And as you can see, I think it ended up looking pretty great.

At which point we're ready to begin the assembly process.

What I did is applied glue to the tenons on the upper rail and the mid rail.

Make sure you get both sides, brush it out nice, and then fit it into the mortises in one of the stiles.

Once those are in place, you've created a pocket and that will hold this upper panel, which is really just a glued up panel that's cut to size.

Slip it right into place.

Then I can start adding in the lower panel pieces one at a time.

You just drop them into the grooves in the middle rail and then that one stile.

That gives you plenty of opportunity to just fit these pieces into place.

Use a mallet, tap them so that they're perfectly aligned.

And then once you have all four of those in place, put some glue on the tenon on the lower rail, brush both sides, tap that into place.

And that brings us to where we are here.

So all I need to do now is apply some glue to these tenons and bring this other stile in.

Alright, the last step here on the gate is to reinforce the joints here.

Now we use plenty of glue, and it's waterproof glue.

But anything that's going to live outside is going to see some stuff.

So what we want to do is give it the best chance to succeed.

And the way to do that is to pin those joints with some wood dowels here.

Now we're using white oak, and that's a really weather resistant material as well.

So what I'm going to do is grab my glue bottle and I'll put just a little bead running down the inside, and then I can feed the dowel in, give it a little twist.

And just for a little flair, I have the dowels cut so that they're a little proud.

Adds a little textural detail to this project.

So after getting this other one put into place a quick final sanding here and we can call this gate complete.

Our garden tower has four sides and they're all identical.

Each side is going to have two legs, a rail, a center support and a lot of lattice.

So we're going to start by making the legs.

I've got a blank here.

It's a nice piece of cedar, 1 inch thick.

But we need to do a little work to it.

The first thing we're going to do is we need to cut lap joints for all of the lattice.

And to do that, I've got a simple jig here that's going to make it a whole lot easier.

In my router I have a top bearing router bit, and it's going to ride within these parts of my jig and create perfect lattices.

I've got it set up to cut three.

We're going to move the jig over and complete six full lattices.

So let's go ahead and get that done.

Our next step is going to be to cut another lap joint, this time for the bottom rail which is going to join our two legs together.

So once again I've got a simple jig.

My top bearing bit makes it easy.

Alright, the lap joints are done.

So now we need to trim the ends.

I've already trimmed the bottom at 9 degrees, and now we've got a long end to cut on the top.

So I'm going to use the band saw for that.

And before I assemble everything, I'll probably trim it up a little bit with a block plane.

Now, that'll complete the right hand side for one frame.

So we need three more right hand sides, and very important here, we need a total of four left hand sides.

So we got to flip all the jigs and do left hand sides, because it doesn't work too well to come out with eight right hands.

With the legs done, it's time for us to make the rails.

Now there are four steps to making them.

First one is I'm going to use the dado head.

I've got a stop and I'm going to go ahead and make two cuts to make sure the cut is exactly centered.

And what this is for is the center supports for our lattice.

When that's finished I'll swap out the blades.

And I'm going to go ahead and trim each end at 81 degrees.

Next up, back to the dado head.

And we're going to go ahead and cut out enough material off the back side of this so that it fits nicely into our legs, into the lap joint that we cut previously.

And the last step is I'm going to strike a nice, gentle arc along the bottom of the rail, and we're going to band saw it out to give it a little bit of flare in a good look.

Okay, the next step, after cutting our legs, our rail and doing a little bit of notching here for the lattice, is that I've made a simple jig to hold everything in position.

We have four of these sides to assemble and they need to be true.

We can't have them leaning one way or the other, or there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when we go to assemble our obelisk.

So I want everything to be true and the same.

I've got a board down here and a couple blocks nailed down, holds everything in its place.

What I have been doing is I've added two center support strips, Y2.

We're eventually going to glue these together, but we have these lap joints that come in and intersect.

And you can see I've cut one half of it.

It's a whole lot easier separating this into two strips that we can cut and deal with each angle independently, and then we'll glue them together, works great.

To get our lines, to get our locations, I've just taken a piece of the lattice, which is 3 quarter by 1.

I'm laying it in this notch that we've previously put in the leg, and I'm just making two pencil lines.

So simple.

Easy.

Everything is going to fit because as you know, when you build things, you can rely on plans and dimensions to a point, but then you just have to build to the project.

And that's what we're doing now.

To cut these notches, rather than using a table saw because it's going to be a little bit tricky for me to peer over and see exactly where everything is, I'm just cutting these by hand.

You can't see it, but I've got a little mark on the back here indicating the depth of my cut at a quarter of an inch, and I'm just going to... ...use a fine tooth saw.

So next step, I'm just going to take a chisel and pop out these pieces.

Alright, once those are out, you can just take a knife.

And I'm just going to clean things up a little bit.

Alright, so you can see we have our notches in place now.

And with that done, we're ready to head to the table saw and start trimming the ends of our lattice strips to fit.

Well, it's time to start fitting the lattice.

So what I've done is I've cut two lengths of lattice strips, the longer one for the bottom three pieces, the shorter piece for the upper three.

All of them need their one end clipped to meet at that pair of center supports that we were just working on.

In order to get that angle, I've used my bevel gauge and I've transferred it to the miter gauge here at the table saw.

I'm not worried about what the angle is.

I just need it to fit, and so we're just going to transfer angles from here on out by marking from the project.

And so let's go ahead and clip one end on each of these pieces.

With all of our lattice pieces cut to length, it's time to go ahead and nibble out the ends so that they fit nicely into the lap joints we've created.

I've got a dado on the table saw.

I've got my miter gauge set.

It's just a little bit of work and we'll have these fitting precisely.

Well, it's time to glue up our frame.

I've got all my parts cut.

We're ready to go.

So I'm going to use a water-based glue, but an exterior rated water-based glue.

We've got good strong joints.

I'm also going to use a micro pinner just to help clamp things together.

Now, being exterior, being cedar, those little pin nails are not going to last forever but they're on the inside.

They're going to do their job, and they're really not going to be visible.

First thing I want to do, I'll clamp my end, and I'm going to go ahead and glue this rail in place.

Alright, next step.

Our two center supports need to be glued together.

Now while we want a good glue joint, I don't want glue squeezing out everywhere.

So I'm not going to be overly generous.

I'm going to go ahead and put some glue on the inside face of each leg.

And I want to put a little glue on this lap joint down here.

And now I'm going to put a pin in the middle of our two supports here, just to keep the face even.

So it's time to put our lattice in.

So one piece at a time here.

I'm going to go ahead... and get those in.

I'll do both the right and the left and work my way up here.

Okay, that completes gluing up our frame.

Let's give it a few minutes to dry and we'll take it out of the jig.

Well, there we go, a completed side.

What's left?

I need to sand the face a little bit even up the joints.

I'm going to trim the sides, and then I'm going to make three more exactly like it.

With those four sides done, I'll make some quarter round, a finial and we will be ready to assemble our garden tower.

Well, I've got the four panels all done and it's time to think about assembling.

To do that, we're going to need some quarter rounds.

So I've got some 3 1/4 inch quarter round, and that's what's going to join the corner of each of these panels together.

First step, I'm going to go ahead and glue the quarter round on the edge of two of the panels.

And I'm going to use a few nails here to help clamp it in place as the glue sets.

Alright, well, next up to assemble our obelisk, I'm going to apply a little glue on the face of the quarter round that I've applied to this panel, and we're going to start assembling this.

♪♪ ♪♪ Alright, that's our basic assembly.

Once the glue sets a little bit, my next task is going to be to level out the top, because I've got a little plate up here which will support our finial.

And with our cap in place, it's now time to turn a finial.

♪♪ ♪♪ One thing we haven't talked about much is the finish for these two projects.

Now, considering where they're going to live, outside and exposed to all kinds of weather, my recommendation for finish is nothing.

If you start getting involved with a finish for something like this garden tower or this garden gate, you're going to end up with a lot of maintenance.

Almost every year you're going to have to sand and reapply a finish.

If that's something you want to do, then go right ahead.

But otherwise, I think that the way that these projects and this type of material ages over time only enhances their beauty.

Another great part of these projects is the way that you can customize them.

For example, on the gate, you can change up what those cutouts look like or no cutouts at all.

You could even leave out this panel and have an opening there.

The same thing with the tower.

You could change the lattice or depending on what you want for the finial up on top.

We chose to turn one, but you can also see a video on how to cut one out just at the band saw.

That's at our website WoodsmithShop.com There you'll find project plans, videos, and all kinds of fun facts to help you become a better woodworker.

Once you've learned even more about woodworking, we'll gather right back here to build another great project in the "Woodsmith Shop."

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ 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.

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 -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... ...Titebond Wood Glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by...

Here at Grizzly, woodworking isn't just our business, it's our passion.

We love what we do.

Thank you for the opportunity to support "Woodsmith Shop" TV.