voiceover:hey, little guy, you ready to cut your panels to size? (squeaky noise) voiceover:not so fast. first, we need to take a few measurements. (upbeat music) marc:this is a really important part in the process when building with a plan. at a certain point, youhave to start letting
the parts that you've already built dictate the size of the partsthat come down the line. you see right now with thesepanels, here's one of my frames. if i put this together and measure, i may find that the distancebetween these things, just because of natural cumulative error, might not be exactly what's in the plan, so you want to account for that. instead of, at this point, just saying,
"okay, the plan calls for 32 and 3/4, "i'm gonna cut mine to 32 and 3/4." what i'm gonna do ispre-assemble this frame, lock it down as if it werein a clamped position, the way it's gonna be whenit's finally assembled, and take some measurements, and figure out exactly what those panels, as far as length and width are concerned, what they should be.
the first step in doing this, we have a middle piece here that we don't know exactlywhere that's supposed to go. we need to put reference marks so we know exactly wherethe center mark is, and we can put that railin the proper position. to do that, i grab one of my front pieces, and i mark it using myadjustable square here. go from each side and that'll make sure
whatever i put on the boardis perfectly centered. okay, the center mark here - i'm gonna do the samething on the right one. then, i wanna take my middlerail and mark the center point of the middle rail across its width. all we'll need to do from that point on is line up our pencil marks. let's assemble the frame. i have a clamp in place,
and that's gonna keep everything together, and i can get accuratemeasurements that way. i use my little adjustable square to get the actual depthof our grooves here, which happens to be a little bit more than the plan called for. i must have gotten just alittle aggressive on that. it's just a little bit more than 3/8. what i'm gonna do is lock that down,
and i'm gonna use thepencil and the square to transfer that mark tothe top of the boards - one on each side. also, i'm gonna put them on the middle, one on the bottom, and we'll do the top aswell for good measure, because we want to make sure we have all of the dimensions measured here. all of the marks are in place,
and now we can take an actual measurement. for instance, the length here - as far as the plan is concerned, it calls for 32 and 3/4 of an inch. i'm sure we're prettyclose, but you never know. sometimes, you may have done something a little bit differently. you don't wanna go cuttingthose panels blind. what i'm looking at here isjust a hair over 32 and 3//4,
so we're pretty close. in fact, i think i can cut the panels at 32 and 3/4 and call it a day. it's close enough. the real dimension we should really be focused on is the width, because the wood is goingto expand across the grain, not with the grain, and quarter-sawn whiteoak is pretty stable.
it doesn't expand a wholelot across the grain, but it still will have some expansion, so we wanna be able to plan for that. now, i'm just gonna measurefrom the other two lines that i created. that gives me roughly five and 3/4. the plan calls for a panel that would be, i believe it's 5/8, so we have a little bitof a discrepancy there
from the plan to what we have in reality. that's fine. we needed to know that. interestingly enough,that happens to work out in my favor really nicely, 'cause if i do cut thisboard to 4 and 5/8, that gives me an eighthof an inch breathing room, which will be a sixteenth above, and a sixteenth below this panel, so that this can expand andcontract with the seasons.
i'm gonna double-check myself here. i don't trust just one measurement, even though my pencil markshave this center board lined up where it should be, just to be safe, i'm gonnameasure at the top, too, and confirm that measurement. five and 3/4 looks good. even though the space is five and 3/4, i'm gonna cut my panels to five and 5/8.
keep in mind, if you're using plywood, you don't really have toworry about it so much. if it's five and 3/4, cutyour panel to five and 3/4. (jazzy music) voiceover:now, i can cut the panels. i'll start by ripping themto width at the table saw. even though the upper side panels are actually made from four quarter stock, this is still a goodtime to cut them to size.
i then cut the panels to theirfinal length at the chop saw. marc:the upper side panel, even though it's the samedimensions as the lower side panel, it's 3/4 of an inch thick. the reason they do this is because this is where the handle is gonna be attached, and they want some meat in there to be able to do that. not only that, the inner tray
that goes on the inside has to sit on a little ledge, andthat ledge is placed in a groove that we put on this board, so we need somethingmore substantial there. what we need to do now istrim around the outside, put a rabbet on all foursides that'll leave us with a little tongue that goesperfectly into our rail pieces. what's different about thisthan the other pieces is, before we had a centeredtongue in the middle
and we removed material onboth the top and the bottom. for this panel, we're only gonnaremove material on one side. and that will leave us withsort of an offset tongue. what that's gonna do isit's gonna make it look exactly like all the otherpieces from the outside. you'll have that little bit of a reveal, and the panel will look pretty good. from the inside, it's gonnasit proud of the surface. it'll all make sense aswe go through it later on,
but that's where we're gonna be able to cut our groove in there, which will allow the trayto sit on top of that. all you need to know for nowis we need to create a tongue, but it's gonna be offset to one side. i'm using the same set-upthat we've done in the past, with the auxiliary fenceand the dado blade. the blade is buried again. what i'm gonna do is cut across the grain
using the miter gauge, and then the long cuts i'll be able to do without the miter gauge. just like when you do raised-panel doors, there's a certain order. do you cut across the grain first, or do you cut with the grain first? since cutting acrossthe grain has a tendency to tear out more thancutting with the grain,
i wanna cut those first, because at the end ofeach one of these cuts, i get to turn it 90 degrees and remove that materialthat just tore out. it's a safer bet if you do it that way. the only other thing you want to know is, when you're making this cut, you wanna have the facethat you wanna stick out, the side that you wantvisible on the outside,
you wanna make sure that's up, because we're gonna beremoving the material from the inside face of the board. voiceover:i create therabbet on the ends first. then, i make the cuts with the grain. notice anything wrong here? i have a clamp that's justa bit too low at the end. it wasn't a problem on the cross cut, but for this rip, it's definitelygoing to be in the way.
once i realize this, i instinctively hold the work piece firmly against the fence, and shut the saw off with my knee. some may feel it would have been better to pull the piece away from the fence while pulling the piece back toward me, but from my experience, whenever you confront adangerous situation at the saw, it's best to hold thepiece firmly in position
and wait for the saw to stop. trying to move the work piece while in the heat of the mmoment can very well result in the exact disaster you're trying to prevent. marc:while i have thedado in the table saw, i'm gonna go ahead and create a groove down the center that's gonna hold that 3/4 inch ledgerstrip to support the tray.
if you look at the pictures in the plan, you'll notice that the inside edge of these upper panelsis actually chamfered, it gives it kind of a nice effect. the way it is now is okay, so this is completely optional, but i think it really does add just a nice visual look to the inside, softens it up a little bit.
what i have here is, the bladeis beveled to 45 degrees, and it's just barely coming out of the top of the table saw surface, 'cause all we really wanna do is clean off some of that extra material there, and cut it at a 45. what i've got is my miter gauge here. this is one of my extra miter gauges set up on the right side slot.
i've got my fence in place and a little reference block that tells me exactlywhere it needs to be. then, i can push it into the blade, and get that 45 degree cut. for the long edges, i'm just gonna bring the fence over, set it up - probably by eye and just make sure it looks okay -
and give it a pass on each side. before i do any assembly, i'm gonna sand all mypanels down to 180 grit. it's just a heck of alot easier to do it now than later when we've gota frame wrapped around it. most of you are probably wondering should i also bepre-finishing these panels. it depends. it's up to you really. if you're gonna stain it, i would say yes
because you don't reallywant to take any chances of that board shrinking down and exposing an unstainedportion of the panel. if you do that, justgive it a coat of stain, and usually i would giveit one coat of finish, and then do the assembly, because you don't reallywant the center panel to be that far off fromthe rest of the piece. if it just has stain and one coat,
then when you assemble everything, you could refinish the entirepanel and frame at the same time, and the center panel's only one coat ahead of the rest of the pieceso there won't be much of a difference in the sheenor the look of the finish. for me, these are relatively small panels. i don't think they'regonna move that much, and i'm not staining this piece. i'm not gonna do any pre-finishingto the panels themselves.
i may pre-finish the subassemblies when the full frame andpanel's glued together and already sanded. that i may do, but at least at this point, i'm not gonna do anythingspecial with the panels. finally, we can glue upone of our side panels. during my dry assemblies, i realized that with threeseparate rails like this, it makes it really difficult
to get all the piecesin position perfectly while you're racing theclock for the glue drying, so i've decided to startwith the middle rail. i'll put a little gluein the grooves here. now, i just line up my pencil marks. the same thing on this side. now i can add a little clamping pressure. don't hammer it home. just snug it up so that it doesn't have
a tendency to move anymore. now i'm gonna add my panel. this guy floats, so no glue. it might be a tight fit. if it is, just loosen thisclamp up a little bit, and that should giveyou enough wiggle room to squeeze that extra rail in there. now, your fingers are yourbest friends at this point, because they, very quicklywithout even looking at it,
let you know if this isperfectly flush at the top. finally, the big panel. the great thing about this is with these two clampedin position already, i can hammer up at the top and it doesn't really move these. that was the problem i was having in the dry assembly asi couldn't hit one thing without it moving somethingelse unintentionally.
give 'em all a good turn. now, i get to go eat dinner. voiceover:after dinner, i assemble the larger frame and panels in exactly the same way as the small ones. marc:now, i'd like to showyou just one more option on how you can make thistongue-and-groove joint, and that's actually with the router table and a special tongue-and-groove set.
this particular bit, this is one that i got from eagle america. it comes with multiplebearing sizes, multiple shims. the idea is you create a stack, and then you screw this nut on at the end. the concept here is tomake sure that the space between these two piecesis exactly the same as the space that one ofthese little disks here, one of these bits, would create.
i use the top bit here tocreate this groove, like so. the bottom bit just kinda hangs out below the surface of the table. once i have my groove, then i can go back and cut the tongue. the tongue is done by raisingthe bit up a little bit. you see i remove the material from above and below the tongue. when it's all said and done,
you're very, very quickly left with a pretty accurate joint, like so. this one is a little bit loose and i need to tweak myset-up a little bit, but you can get the idea. this works very quickly. you get both the tonguesand the grooves done in no time flat. the only thing that i will show you
that you need to do that'sa little bit different here is when you're tryingto create these tongues, running this over the routertable is pretty dangerous, i do recommend having something like a coping sled on hand. you can make these yourself, or you can buy these pre-made. this particular one isfrom eagle america, also. clamp this guy in, like so,
and now you've got something safe that you can actually runacross the router table and get this end grain routed nice you have this plastic material behind it that supports the fibers and stops them from tearing out as well, which is gonna be critical for this cut. with all the panels glued up, i can now do another dry assembly.
this time i'm gonna measurefor the bottom panel. that panel's gonna go into a 3/8 of an inch deepgroove all the way around, so i can actually just measure right from the work piece itself. once again, disregard what's in the plan because things may bedifferent on the actual piece. i just give myself a little 3/8 of an inch on this side, and i give myself about 3/8
on this side, maybe just slightly less. whatever that number isis the length of my panel. i'm gonna do the same thingacross this way for the width. voiceover:i cut the half inch bottom panel to width on the table saw. the festool mft is perfectfor cutting it to length. marc:we are giving thisdado blade a serious workout with this project. we need to go back to the dado blade
to create the groove thatgoes all the way around for the back panel. voiceover:creating thegrooves on the side pieces is gonna be a little bit unusual. remember, the upper side panel sticks out by about a quarter of of an inch, so i need to tape on a pieceof quarter-inch thick scrap as a shim to keep the piecenice and flat on the table. i then raise the dado stackan extra quarter of an inch
to compensate for the shim. marc:now, each side panelgets this little ledger strip that's gonna go into thegroove we cut earlier. just a little bit ofglue and some clamping should take care of that. again, this is to support the tray that sits on the top of the box. voiceover:nothing tricky here, just glue and clamping pressure.
marc:you might bewondering why i'm wearing a sponge bob birthday hat. if you look closely, you'll see it's actually a dunce cap. i screwed up and as my punishment, i'm going to wear thisfor the rest of the day. if you look closely here, we've got a little hairline gap. the reason for this gap is either
that the tongue wasjust slightly too long, or that the groove itself wasn'tcut deep enough in that area. the reason i'm wearingmy dunce cap is because that was something ireally should have caught during the dry assembly and i didn't. now we're forced to fixit or leave it alone, depending on your preference. you could just put a filler in there but as we know, fillers don'talways match up that great,
and over time, theycan work their way out. the other thing is, when you use a filler, it tends to get into thegrain around the area that you're trying to fix, expanding the eyesore a little bit, because it creates a littlebit of a finishing issue. especially with oak, thatstuff will basically get into all the little open pores and grain. it's just not a pretty sight.
what i'm gonna do isuse wood to repair this. it's a small enough area. it's out of the way, so it doesn't have tobe absolutely perfect, but a wood repair is gonna give us the most visually-appealing repair here. what i have is a very thinpiece of the white oak. this is just a scrapthat i had laying around from one of the cut-offs,
thin enough to fit insidethis little slot here. with a little bit of glue, i'm just gonna wiggle it allthe way down, and let it dry. once the glue sets up - that's just regular ca glueand a quick-set activator - you just break it off. now, i'm gonna, whatever way i can, cut away some of thisexcess material here. i've got this little razorsaw, which is pretty sweet.
if you guys don't have one of these, it's just a super, super fine-toothed saw that works great for anapplication like this, where we need to be really gentle. that's all right that we couldlose a little more there. then, i could use a chisel to getrid of the rest of this stuff. we can probably switch toa sander at this point. that's a pretty reasonable repair. i'm definitely happy withthe way that turned out.
i think i forgive myself. (mellow music)