[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] We have a project doubleheader on this episode of "The Woodsmith Shop".

We're going to get things started with Logan building a wall cabinet that he designed and features a Japanese lattice technique called Kumiko.

You'll create a variety of pieces that fit together in a really cool geometric way.

Then we'll also look at the joinery for the project, and then we'll turn to another small wall cabinet.

This one here in Red Oak.

It features a really cool cutout pattern on the side that's made in a way that you might not expect.

There's a lot of solid wood details here, really simple joinery, and it's a fun project to build.

Both of these would be great weekend projects, something that you can get done in between larger projects, or if you have a long weekend that you're looking to have some shop time for.

If you want to build along with these, the plans are at our website 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.

♪♪ ♪♪ So the design of this wall shelf has a couple of different things going on.

Let's look at those.

First, the sides have these angles on them.

And that kind of makes this shelf pop off of the wall.

And they kind of seem like it's coming out of the wall.

Into those sides, we have two shelves, and they're asymmetrical, so one's a little bit bigger than the other one.

Now, of course, this is all kind of leading to what I consider the centerpiece of this.

And that's that Kumiko designed panel in the center.

It's made out of a bunch of strips of basswood, and I'll show you how to make that in a little bit.

But first we got to -- have to make the frame for that.

And that's going to be the shelf itself.

Okay.

I've set up a Dado blade here at the table saw.

And I have my miter gauge set up with an auxiliary fence.

Now we have to cut the joinery to attach the shelves to the sides.

Now, each shelf is connected to the end side by a Dado, and the other side by a half lap.

It's just really a deep notch.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the rip fence to position the part that's going to locate where either that notch or that Dado is, and then I'm going to guide my workpiece with the miter gauge.

Now, I've set up the Dado blade using a router bit, a quarter inch router bit, makes a really nice setup block, so I've set it up at a quarter inch.

Now, what I'm going to do here is create a through Dado.

In the plans, I used a stop Dado, but through Dado is going to be just a whole lot easier to cut.

And it will look just as good.

Alright, now that we're done at the table saw, I have all of the joinery cut for the shelf.

And as you can see, this kind of gets a little bit of a jigsaw puzzle.

So, the first are the shelves, and I notched those as well.

So those fit in to one of the notches on the sides.

And then the opposite end is going to fit in to the matching Dado.

And this little bit longer shelf does exactly the opposite.

On this side, we have a notch.

Kind of a half lap joint.

And then they fit into dados just like so.

Now, obviously, those notches aren't deep enough.

The table saw blade with that Dado stack in it just won't lift high enough to fully cut that notch.

So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to head over to the bandsaw, and we're going to cut those notches just a little bit deeper.

And while I'm there, I'm going to go ahead and cut the shape of the sides as well.

Now, the bandsaw has left us with these two little curves.

I probably could have nibbled away this waste at the bandsaw, but because of the grain orientation on these parts, one good chisel whack will actually remove all of this waste.

So I'll just drop the corner of a chisel into both those curves.

Match the two up.

There we go.

And that takes care of the waste.

So now, we'll clean up the inside.

And I do that by holding a chisel blade tight up against the table saw curve, 'cause it's nice and smooth, and that's what we're trying to line everything up with.

And then I will slide that blade down till I feel where that bandsaw cut start.

'Cause it's just a little rough down there.

And then I'll just push that chisel down.

Okay.

And as long as that chisel is sharp, that's going to cut it right up perfectly in line with that first notch we made.

Now, there's a little bit of chip out and stuff in the bottom of that notch, but I'm not really going to worry about that because that's not a mating surface.

I'm not -- Actually cut that a little bit deeper, so these two parts don't really bang together there.

And really, what we want is when the two parts are together, that front face is nice and flat.

Bring this guy in and check out how everything looks fully assembled.

The focal point of the shelf is this Kumiko panel.

Now, Kumiko is a Japanese style that creates these lattice work pieces that are really geometric in shape.

This one in particular is the Asanoha hemp leaf pattern, so there's three of them in this panel.

The cool thing about these is that this entire thing is held together by tension.

There's no glue holding any of these parts in, so this requires some really precise trimming and fitting to get everything to fit and to get everything spring loaded in place.

So the first thing we need to look at is really the framework and how this geometric pattern is made.

So if we look at this square, we have four quadrants.

And each of those quadrants has a latticework of parts that, together, make this Asanoha pattern.

But we have this frame around it, and those are the pieces that are running both horizontally and vertically.

And to make those, we're going to half lap all these frame pieces together.

And we'll do that at the table saw.

While we're at the table saw, we're also going to create a bunch of strips like these.

Now, ripping strips that are really narrow and thin -- these are about 3/8 by an eighth of an inch thick.

It can be a little tricky because you don't want them to bind in between the blade and the fence.

So this is where I use a thin ripping jig.

It's simply a piece that attaches to the miter bar slot, and then you can slide your piece up against it, position your fence, make a cut, and then just keep inching over.

And that roller ends up becoming your fence that you are cutting these good parts from.

So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to step over to the table saw, and we're going to rip some of these parts.

The first thing I'm going to do, though, is create some half laps.

So I'm going to lay out these half laps where these horizontal pieces cross these verticals.

And we're going to create curves there.

And those are going to be half depth.

And then we'll go and rip these strips apart.

And from those strips that have the half laps in them, three of them will become our verticals.

And the rest I'll cut down for these horizontal pieces.

Cutting a bunch of extra of these frame pieces works in our favor.

We need three long ones for these vertical pieces, but then the spacing works out that you can take extra of the long ones and cut them down and use them for these horizontal cross members.

And that's what I'm doing here.

Now you see those half laps just slide together, kind of like they did on the shelf itself.

And everything here is just a friction fit.

And this makes up our entire framework and the basis of our Kumiko panel.

So now, we have our framework done.

We have four quadrants, three pairs of four quadrants each.

Now we need to create our angled pieces to go in and fill those out.

Uh, so to do that, we are going to use these guys.

And these are guide blocks for Kumiko.

I have three of them total.

I have one already clamped in the vise.

And then I have two here.

And the thing that's cool about these is they're simple.

They're just hard Maple.

But they have an accurate angle cut at each end.

This one's 60 degrees.

This one's 30 degrees.

This one's 22 1/2 and 67 1/2.

And then I have a 45 degree here set up.

But they also have these grooves in the edge that have these sliding fences.

So these are actually position stops.

So once we dial in the length of our parts, I can set this and lock it in place.

And then all we have to do is pair our part with the right angle based on the angle of the guide block, and they should all fit really nicely.

But the first thing that we're going to start with are going to be these angled pieces.

They go from the center of the four quadrants out to the outside corners.

Now, those are simple 45 degree cuts, and they're cut on both faces of both ends.

That gives us a 90 degree corner that tucks right in there nice and neat.

So what I'm going to do is grab one of my strips, and I'm going to give myself a rough length.

We'll go right in there, and then I'm just going to use a little pull saw miter box to cut it to length.

Okay.

And now what I need to do is I need to miter the ends.

And I'm going to start with one end first.

And I'm not going to use the fence because I know I'm going to have to dial in this length.

So with this guide block, I'm going to use a longer paring chisel.

And I'm going to hold it on the guide block angle.

And then I'm just going to kind of nip off this corner.

What I'm going to do is I can push with my hand, but I actually find it easier to put my ribcage into the chisel handle and just kind of push like that.

Okay.

But now I can see I'm a little long.

And I'll mark approximately where my corner is.

Now, with a part like this that's super long, I'm going to start up top and just kind of nibble it down until I get down to that base.

This basswood works really easily with a sharp chisel.

Okay.

There we go.

Now, that's the fit I'm looking for.

That is a nice press fit and doesn't fall out when I pick out -- pick up the frame.

After I have all these 45 degree pieces in, now we have to start working on these diamonds.

And this is the next part of this Asanoha pattern.

To do these, we have to cut a couple of angles.

These parts have a 67 1/2 degree angle on one end, and then the other end has a 22 1/2 degree angle on both faces.

And that tucks right in to the corner here where those 45 meets the cross members, and together, those combined make this little half of the diamond that fit.

So I'll show you how I make those.

So I'm starting at the 67 1/2 degree angle, and I'm just going to pair across just like we did on the other parts.

Okay, there we go.

And then we'll take that over here to the 22 1/2 degree.

And as you can see, this is a much steeper angle.

So what I usually find works well here is to angle the chisel a little bit up and make a slicing cut.

Then you get these little fun chips coming off.

We go all the way down to the block.

And then we flip that around, and then we pair the back side to make that nice sharp point.

After creating all of these diamond pieces, we need to make the tension pieces that hold them in.

And to do this, we actually have to take all of these diamond pieces back out, because that 67 1/2 degree bevel that we made that creates the point of the diamond, we actually have to knock off about 1/3 of that bevel using 67 1/2 degrees again, but in the opposite direction.

So I set up a block here with a stop, and I'm just going to take just the point off of that bevel.

And the combination of that 67 1/2 degrees, along with the 22 1/2 degrees that the sharp ends are sitting in, will yield a small little 90 degree corner for that tension piece to fit in.

So now, we just have to create the little tension piece, which is beveled at 45 degrees on both faces of both ends for 90 degrees.

And then that guy will slip right in there and really lock everything together.

There we go.

So that tension piece, we'll leave that in.

And now, we just have to do the same with all the other squares.

It's going to take a little bit to get all of this done.

But once you're all done with it, you end up with a panel that looks like this.

And then you can go ahead and install it in the shelf.

And for this shelf, what I ended up doing is gluing the shelf together.

And then I route a rabbit around the backside.

Then you can either let your wall show through, or put in a painted panel behind it to really make this pop.

Our second wall shelf project is this Arts and Crafts inspired one, and there are a lot of really cool features in such a small package.

What we're going to focus on, though, is creating this cutout detail on the two sides here.

It's a bit of a woodworking Rorschach test, in the fact as what do you see here?

I think there's some people who saw, like, wheat motif, very popular one.

I'm from Wisconsin, so I see pinecone, and other people might see, like, a cornstalk or Christmas tree.

Whatever it is, it's a really fun detail to make.

If you want to build your own version of this wall cabinet or the one that Logan's been working on, the plans are at our website WoodsmithShop.com.

The sides of our wall cabinet are made from a single board, but we're going to start by cutting that board into some smaller pieces.

We're going to have two wider strips on the outside, and then a real narrow strip right down the middle.

That allows us to create the notches on the two wider strips that will create the details.

Now, the key here is starting off with the right kind of blank.

You want something with really straight grain like this red oak has.

That way, when we glue all of those pieces back together, the glue lines are going to flow right in with the grain lines.

Something that has a flat sawn look just isn't going to work the same way.

The other thing that you want to do is to draw some triangles on your pieces, so that things don't get out of order.

I can very easily put these back together in their correct orientation once all the strips are created.

we're going to leave that thin center strip aside for now and focus on the two wider pieces.

Over at the bench, you'll want to spend some time with a ruler and a couple of squares to lay out the angled arms of our cutouts here.

Then I take the extra step to color in each of the notches locations, that way I know which side of the layout lines to cut on.

I'm going to do that here at the bandsaw.

I'll make a cut down each side of the notch, staying pretty close to the line and making them careful.

And then I'll make a couple of curved cuts to remove the waste.

Finally, I'll wrap things up by using the bandsaw blade as a rasp to kind of clean up and square up the ends of each of these notches.

Once the notches are shaped on the wider pieces, the center strip just needs to be cut down to the final length.

Now, what I did is set up a miter gauge and a stop block to cut the bottom pieces first, and then keeping everything in order, I next cut the top piece and then trimmed the middle one to size.

Again, the idea here is that once everything gets glued together, it's going to be pretty seamless.

So I'm ready to do that.

And I'm going to raise everything up on a spacer here, 'cause it's going to make it easier for me to apply clamps.

So what I'll do is apply some glue to the strips.

Then on the middle ones, I'm just going to hit the two little lobes in the middle.

After taking the clamps off the sides, I sanded them nice and smooth.

And as you can see with this red oak, the glue lines are practically gone.

Now, the next step was to trim the two side pieces to length or some overhanging parts on the center strip.

So I did that real quick here at the table saw, then switched out for a Dado blade so that we can cut a series of three dados on the inside face of each of the sides to hold the top, the bottom, and the shelf.

Now, the key thing here is that you want to create a left and a right.

So on the end of my two boards, I've drawn a triangle, and the triangle points towards the front of the project.

And then the insides of the triangle show the inside faces.

After the dados are cut, the next thing we need to do is make a rabbit along the back edge to house the back panels and a couple of hanging cleats.

Now, the big thing here is that you want to make sure that you're cutting it on the back edge, which means one of these pieces is going to go through the -- what I would consider the normal way.

And then the other one has to go through the blade upside down, so to speak.

Our last joinery detail to take care of on the sides is to drill the clearance holes for the screws that will reinforce the joinery here.

Now, to save a little bit on the layout work, what I've done is put a small drill bit in the drill press here, and then I'm going to just eyeball the center of the Dado and drill this tiny hole along each edge of the side pieces.

Then when you flip it over, you'll see that it creates just that little pilot hole there.

I can switch out to a forstner bit then, and then drill a shallow counter bore that we'll use for the plug.

I spent a little time with a square and a pencil, squaring up lines around the holes that I drilled over at the drill press.

What I want to do now is use a chisel and a mallet to square those up.

And the order here is important.

What I want to do is score the cross grain line first, so I'll line that up right with my pencil line.

Give it a couple of taps just to get that line started.

Do the same thing on the other side.

And now, when I go to make the long grain cuts, I'm just going to nibble my way back to the layout line in a couple of passes here.

These are shallow cuts, so it doesn't take long to do, but you want to take some care while you're cutting because this is a pretty visible part of the project.

There's a few other details that we needed to tackle here.

One of those was to head over to the router table and round the top and bottom corners on each of the sides.

I did that with a template and a flush trim bit.

Then at the table saw, I used a Dado blade and cut a Dado that's centered on the length of the bottom and the shelf that's going to hold a drawer divider later.

We're not going to add that now.

We want to take care of the assembly, which is pretty straightforward.

I'm just going to run a bead of glue in all of these dados.

Once the main glue up of the shelf is done, there's a few other things that we need to take care of.

First of those is to attach the top and bottom cleats.

I glued these in place because that's what you're going to use as the mounting surface to attach this to the wall.

At this point, you can also put a little bit of glue into the dados and slide the middle divider into place.

And then now that the glue is all dry on the ends, I reinforced the corner joinery with screws.

You want to drill a pilot hole 'cause we're working with oak here, and then you can drive those screws in place.

And then, as you remember, we covered them up with really small plugs.

We'll trim those flush a little bit later on.

The last construction part that I want to take care of here is to enclose the back.

And we're using individual panels here instead of, like, plywood or something.

It gives it a better look, and they have a shiplap joint on it.

And by that, I mean there are opposing rabbits that are cut on each edge of the piece.

So you can slip those in place and then space them evenly across.

A couple of washers come in really handy so that you have consistent spacing as you go along.

The last piece just caps everything off and is held flush to the one side.

To attach them, I'm going to use pins, with a couple of pins at the top and the bottom.

Don't forget to draw a line across where the shelf is going to be, 'cause you can attach those there as well, just to keep things from rattling around.

Wrapped up the work on my wall cabinet.

There's one more detail to take care of, though, if you want, and that's to add a pair of drawers down on the bottom here.

It actually works pretty well as just open cubby spaces there.

I have a video on making drawers.

It's at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

That's also the place to find plans for the projects that you saw in today's episode.

You'll also find other videos and tips and ideas to help you become a better woodworker.

Then, after spending some time in your shop, we can get back together here and 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.