marc: the wood whisperer is sponsored by powermatic the gold standard since 1921 (jazzy music) now that most of ourplywood pieces are cut we can start to take a look at what we're going to do for edge treatments. any place where you havean exposed plywood edge that's going to be seen
has to be taken care of somehow. now there are a lot of optionson how you can handle this and they really depend on whattools you have in your shop and just really the look that you want. now the quickest, easiestway to handle that is with some sort of edge banding a veneer like this for instance a very thin veneer and this one actuallyhas glue already on it.
and it's a heat-activated glue. so essentially you put thison the edge or correctly here you would put this on thefront edge and iron it on. and the heat activates theglue and you just roll it on and that's really it. you just trim the littlebit of extra material and you're done. now some people don't like this because the iron-on material
sometimes depending on, you know, whether it's a good quality material may come off in the future. so there's another option and this is the one that i'm going to use. that is to use actual solid wood. this is quarter inch thickwalnut that i'm going to attach to all the exposed edges. now the advantage of this is number one,
it's more durable. it's probably not goingto come off at any time. and because it's actuallya quarter of an inch. you can give a little bit more of a substantial profile to it if you wanted to round it over maybe put on a little chamferor something like that. now the difficulty here comes in where if you don't have a table saw
this becomes a very difficultthing to make in the shop. when you buy your lumber you're probably going to wind up having if you're limited in tooling and you don't have a jointer and planer you're going to have tobuy your stuff presurfaced. and when it's presurfaced stillit's really only going to be about five or six inches wide at the most. now trying to balancea circular saw on here
is going to be really tricky and trying to use a jigsaw you can do it but it's going to be a rough cut and especially on theones that are really long. it's going to get hairy . so just keep your mind open. look at all your options. go to your local hardwood dealer.
a lot of times they sell edging strips that you could pick up, youknow, buy them premilled. you could have, if you have a friend, you could always have someone else help you cut these. but either way, you do have options. just keep in mind that the plan is going to call for quarter-inchstrips of solid wood. so if you don't have this
you need to make an adjustment. let's say you're going to usethe very thin edge veneer. that's going to change the numbers for the actual width of the internal and the side structure vertical pieces. you're going to have to leavea little bit more material here because you're not takingup so much material with your edge banding. now the other edging thatwe're dealing with here
is the edging for the top and bottom and this has to be quitea bit more substantial. you can see it's aboutan inch and a half wide and three quarters of an inch thick. now what you can do for this stuff again, your hardwood dealer can certainly mill this up for you but a lot of dealerssell what they would call face frame stock
because normally that's about the size that you would use for a big cabinet standard kitchen cabinetry things like that which have an inch and a half face frame. so if you could buy somepremilled face frame stock you can get a whole bundleof this stuff and it's you know, it's really not that expensive. but all the milling work isdone for you ahead of time.
but this is exactly whatyou're going to need for all four sides of boththe top and the bottom. now you can see i'vegot my four cut already and i cut mine from afull piece of walnut here. so if you have the table saw that's going to be the way to do it. but again, just like the thin edge banding this is just as diceyif you're going to be using a circular saw to make this cut.
it's just really trickyto keep the saw balanced on such a small surface. so it's not really somethingthat i recommend doing and if you want this look andthis is what you're going for you may have to put out a few extra bucks for premilled material. but i really think that'sthe safest way to go. now each one of our vertical partitions is going to receive a piece of trim
in the front and one in the back. now technically you really onlyneed to put it in the front. because that's really allthat anyone is going to see. but i don't know, for me it just bugs me knowing that there's anexposed edge in the back. plus, i like to have itas protected as possible. plywood raw edge like this, the veneer can very easily just crack and pull off. so just for the longevity of the piece
i really like to have thefront and the back covered. so i'll show you how i do one and it basically is the samething for all four of these. alright, so here's the plan. nice bead of glue on that end. and i spread the excess onthe piece of edge banding. okay and i center the edge banding. just use my fingers for reference there. and i get some blue tape.
now the blue tape if you don't have areal good set of clamps the blue tape could reallybe the only clamp you need. okay, i just make sure it's attached at the center point here. and i pull both sides down. quite a bit of force. and that actually actsas a very quick clamp. so in a pinch it's reallyall you need to do.
and obviously if you can clamp it down that's a little bit better. but like i said, if you're in a pinch that's not a bad option. now what i'm going to dois just use these to hold the edging in place untili put it in the clamps. now what i'm going to do is take the panel with both pieces of edging on it's pretty well secured with the tape now
and i want to lay it inside my clamps. but there's a littlebit of a strategy here. first of all, i only havefour clamps of this size. so i have to use a call. okay, now this material willallow me to put pressure along the entire jointwith only four clamps. also, since the edge material overhangs both sides of the ply it's important that we don'tjust rest it right down
on the bed of the clamps because the gravityalone will actually force the edging material up a littlebit higher than i want it. so i'm using two scrap pieces of wood here and they will raise theboard up high enough so that there is space under here and it doesn't affect the edging at all. okay. push it all the way forward to the front head of the clamps.
and start bringing them in. and after about 15 or 20 minutes i'll come back with a putty knife and i'll scrape awaythose droplets of glue. if you wait too long,they're going to get hard and then you may wind uppulling wood fibers with it which is never a good thing. if you start to scrape it off too soon you may wind up spreadingit into the grain
which is going to causea problem for finishing. it's going to stop the finish from absorbing into those areas. so the other option is to use a wet sponge and try to clean it off that way but again, that justreally dilutes the glue and spreads it evenfurther than if you just wiped it with a dry cloth. so i think the best option is to just
let it get to the point that it skins over which is about 15 or 20 minutes and then we can easily scrape itoff and it doesn't spread. now i know some of you may be wondering why not just use a brad nailer. it's a lot faster, right? well here's the thingwith the brad nailer. it creates holes. and for me personally theextra time that i spend
with this clamping method is roughly equivalent to the extra time i would have to spendfilling all of those holes and sanding them back and still having to deal with the fact thatthere are filled holes in the face of this workpiece. so it's the ultimate quality at the end i think is better doing it this way. and it's really not a whole lot more work
what it may wind up takingis a little bit more time because you may not have enough clamps to do all four pieces in one shot. for me, it's worth that extra time to wait to have what i consider to be a better quality product in the end. now with our four dados cut it's time to think about the back panel. now the back panel on a piece like this
normally would just be full length it would cover the whole thing and it would probablybe inset into a rabbit that goes around the entire perimeter. now what we're going to do today is a perfect example of whyi love doing this stuff. the fact that i can makea piece of furniture that suits my needs and does something thata furniture manufacturer
might never even think of doing but it's a little creature comfort that makes a difference inhow i utilize this piece. what we're going to do isinstead of one big panel it's going to be three separate panels. the two on the outside are goingto be pretty straightforward just into a rabbit andflush with the back. nothing special there. but the middle section is wherewe're going to change things up.
i'm going to bring the backpanel in about four inches and i've already put a line here to mark exactly where that's going to go. so we'll have the back panel up here creating a pocket in the back. now if you've ever installed wires behind a television set or tried to get one of these new low profile tvs or low profile pieces of furniture
up against the wall it becomes pretty difficultbecause in most cases you've got a surge protector back there which you should have for all of your high quality components. and now how do you getthis piece of furniture all the way up against the wall and really take advantage of the fact that you just bought this expensive
flat panel television. it doesn't make any sense. we buy these really thin tvs but the furniture sticks out this far. so i want to minimizethat as much as possible. and i want this piece of furniture all the way against the wall. so the way that i'mgoing to accomplish that is to build a pocket back here
and in this pocket is where you can put the surge protector all the plugs for all the components will hide in this little pocket here and you can push it rightup against the wall. so, again, it's just a great example of why we do the things that we do because this is our piece of furniture. we can build it any way that we want it
and to me, i think thisis a cool little feature that i'm really going to enjoy. now the way that i'mgoing to cut the rabbit and then also the groovethat goes across here and then another rabbit on this side is using a plunge routerand the edge guide. and i have a little straight bit in there. the reason i'm doing it this way instead of using something like this
like a rabbiting bit is the plywood that i have is actually a little bit under a quarter inch. actually it's significantlyunder a quarter inch. so i don't really havethe right sized bearing that will get my rabbitingbit to work the right way and give me the right depth that i need. so a straight bit and an edgeguide works just as well. (router running)
now the glue on our edge banding is dry and we have to trim itdown so it's nice and flush and looks like it'sjust part of the panel. now there's a few thingsthat you can use to do this and it really depends on how much overhang you've given yourself. if you have a lot, you want to go right to a block plane. set it pretty aggressively.
just make sure you don't gouge your veneer and start removing the material. now as you get closerand closer to the surface you want to back it off a little bit so you take just verynice light thin shavings really nothing very heavy and once you get down even further you don't want to really push your luck. so you want to go to something that's
less aggressive and less prone to tear out and a card scraper is goingto be perfect for that job. so for me i need to get started with the block plane and we'll go from there. (planing and scraping) now the final thing to do is to trim these little overhangs with a flush cut saw. now a flush cut saw isa very flexible blade
with no set on the teethso that you can put it and register up against the surface without actually damagingthe surface while you cut. so i'm going to use my fingersand let the blade slide under my fingers likethis as i make the cut and the side will register the blade in just the right location so it cuts this off perfectly. that's it.
now that the edge bandingis on our middle pieces and our side pieces we can continue thisrabbit all the way around so that the back panelwill sit in nice and flush. now we discussed earlierthe recessed back panel that's going to be inthe middle compartment you can see here we've gotone of the sides in place and what we're going to have to do is create a groove that's going to go
in the bottom panel up the side panel in the top panel and then down the other side panel. so this way the back panel sits securely and creates that recessed pocket for us. and the way we're going to do that is basically like we did with the rabbit except for this time i'm going to use
the quarter inch plywood bit the router and a straight edge guide. now before you make thecut on the inside divider you want to make sure thatyou double check yourself and make sure your orientation is correct because it's very easyto mess up at this point. the side that has the rabbit in it already you're going to be routing now
on the opposite side of that. so here's my rabbitand i'm going to set up so that i can run my groove across here on the opposite side of the rabbit. now the final bit ofrouting to do is the groove that goes in the frontfor the sliding doors. it's one single groove thatspans the entire distance and it's at a little bit infront of the middle dividers and then the ends, the actualend points of the groove
are going to run right into this dado. so when we do this wecan set our straight bit and plunge down right into the dado and use the bottom ofthe dado as a reference. because we want the same depth. use it as a reference and then we can start the router andgo all the way across. same setup though with the router with the edge guide and the straight bit.
now as i mentioned before cutting the trim for the outside edges of both the top and the bottom can be pretty tricky ifyou don't have a table saw. so, once again, see if you can find some precut material at your lumbar supply and if you do have a table saw you can make your life a little bit easier by getting surface lumbar
it's presurfaced on all four sides and all you need to do isrip these nice clean strips. okay and that's exactlywhat i'm going to do here. so now we have our four short pieces and our four long piecesto trim out the top. so the way these are going to be attached one will come this way and i'll just use ashort one as an example the other is going to come along this way
and where they meet at the corner we're going to want to mitre that corner just so it looks reallynice and professional. now there's a few ways that you can cut these miters. of course if you have a table saw you could do it there. if you have a miter saw, that's probably what i'm going to do.
now if you don't have those things there is a very old school method of using one of these guys. it's a miter box. now the miter box has a little lip on it so that you can actually put it up against a work surface like so and grab your workpiece. now you notice the miter boxhas different angles in it
for different mitered cuts and it has these little plastic doodads that pop in the holesand you just twist them to lock your workpiece inup against your back fence and then you just start sawing. (sawing) now regardless of how you make your cuts it's very important to measure properly and make sure the marksare in the right locations
these things are actually alittle bit tricky to get that on and it takes a little bit of attention. so it's important to get themright from the beginning. now what i like to do isi start with a workpiece that already has a miter cut on it. because really, if you think about it, you can cut one almost blindly. just cut it near the end of the workpiece so you don't happen to cut it too short
if one is already cut then i can use that for reference and line that up at the very corner and now i really only have one corner here to worry about with the workpiece. if i try to measure them first or transfer the locationshere on both sides and then go cut them both perfectly it's actually just makingmore work for myself.
so, with one precut, iline everything up and then i transfer the locationof the front right here. now another thing i'll do is i'll make a line that shows the angle because when you're upthere a lot of times you can sort of get disoriented in which direction to make the cuts. so if i put a little pencil mark there now i can't forget it.
now before you make the cut it's not a bad idea to transferthis line all the way around. because sometimes youget up to a miter saw or even your miter box and sometimes you're more comfortable cutting it one direction or the other. so this way you've gotyour line on all sides so whether you're cutting it this way this way
with the saw this way or the saw that way it doesn't matter. you've got a guideline to work from. so let's go make our first cut. (saw cutting) alright, let's see how we did. it looks like we're about asixteenth of an inch off now. that actually was intentional.
i very rarely make a mark or a measurement and try to aim exactly for that mark. because there's a certain amount of error that's going to be built in and that error meansyou're either going to be a little bit proud which is fine because we can trim a little bit more but what if you're not? what if you're under?
and once we're too short there's nothing we can do with this piece. so i always go a little bit over and i'll make two orthree trips back and forth until i get that exactlywhere it needs to be. okay, one more light cutand we should have it. (saw running) that looks perfect. so this guy is done.
i'll mark that with a number one. i'll mark this spot with a number one. (jingly music) and that way i always have each part matched to each adjoining section. okay, we'll do the samething for the rest of it.