voiceover:the woodwhisperer is sponsored by powermatic, the gold standard since 1921 and by rockler woodworking and hardware, create with confidence. marc:the project seriesyou're about to watch was taken from the woodwhisperer guild archive. now, the wood whisperer guild is the paid membership portionof the wood whisperer site and it's changed a lot over the years.
when we first started itwas really just focused on just whatever random topicsi could come up with, just extra video content. since then, it's evolved into a very project-focused series of videos that we do a couple times a year. for instance, right now,we're working on this chair. it's a greene & greeneinspired adirondack chair and the videos coverevery possible detail,
multiple ways of doing things. it's just a really fun experience and especially if you'rejust learning woodworking, seeing it laid out this wayis really, really helpful. now the interesting thingis, the video you're about to watch is on thewall hanging tool chest. now that was something that was before we came up with the guild build idea so essentially this chest was really
the inspiration for theguild build concept. so you'll notice we go through a lot more in terms of, you know, sortof describing the logic behind the planning, thedesign, and also showing all the mistakes and all the bad decisions that i made and having you sort of walk through that process with me. eventually that idea blossomed into what we now know as a woodwhisperer guild build.
so i hope you enjoy this series and if you want to learn more about the wood whisperer guild, go to woodwhispererguild.com. thanks for watching. (upbeat music) now believe it or not, this is where most of my projects start,right in the kitchen. the kitchen table is nice and big,
there's plenty of room to spread out. i've got my laptop here, i've got all my drawing materials, my big giant crazytriangle, and all my notes and all i need do is start drawing and i've got the computerright here for reference. if i want to use sketchup, i can do that too. now there are a couple different ways you could take this project.
you could try to justmake a really beautiful wall hanging cabinet oryou can go all the way on the other extreme and designit purely for functionality. maybe even do something in the middle where it's a little bit of both. you know, for me, i'm justkind of tired of design rules. in fact, design ruleskind of make me sleepy. nicole:well, good morning, class. today we are going to talkabout the golden ratio.
it's 1.6180339887, blah, blah, blah. a plus b over a equals a over b equals this little thingy. a plus b is to a as to a is to b. so one more time, a plus b is to a - mr. spagnuolo, are you listening to me? (ruler smack) marc:you think this iseasy to sit through? what don't you try it?
1.6180339887... now for most people, there's a hump at the beginning of the project that's a little bit difficult to get over. sometimes just getting itgoing is the hardest part. so what i like to do is listall of the things that i know, the things that areconstants because once you get those down they help guide the things that you don't know
or point out the thingsthat you don't know. it makes them more obvious. so let's go over that quickly and i'll show you some of the things that i know that areabsolutes at this point. overall, we want this whole thing to pretty much be plywood. i'm even gonna let theexposed edges just show because i'm kind of curiouswhat it might look like.
if i use like a baltic birch, it's got a lot of little plys in there. that's not the uglistlooking thing that i've seen so we're going to leave that exposed. we're going to have some shelves. there's going to be 2sides and a center divider. i'm going to use 3/4inch plywood everywhere except for the sliding doors in the front. the reason for that is number one,
we want it to be very strong and number two, the back panel, where we might be temptedto use a thinner material, is actually somethingwe're going to drill into and we're going to put some dowels and things like that for storage so we want that extramaterial to work with. now let's break it down into its parts. the top, the bottom, and the sides.
now the sides and the middle are going to connect to the top and bottomvia mortise and tenon joints. the top and bottom, i'mthinking at this point, will be double ply, 2sheets of 3/4 inch plywood, giving you about an inchand a half in thickness. why? i don't know. i'm going to do somethingwith the top and bottom that i haven't quite figured out yet, but we'll get to that later,
but hopefully it will look cool. the back panel, we just talked about that, is going to be 3/4 of an inch. we also have to have that back panel inset by about 3/4 ofan inch so that there's a 3/4 of an inch gap in the back and the reason for that is we're going to use a french cleat forstorage and you need at least 3/4 of an inch clearanceif you're going to use
a 3/4 inch cleat in the back. the shelves are going tobe dadoed into the sides. so the center panel and the 2 sides on their inside facewill have various dados at different locationsfor each of the shelves. we're also going to have to make sure that the center divider, that the dados on the left chamber and the right chamber are actually in different spots.
we want to stagger them because if you put a dado on the right and a dado on the left you may just wind upcutting that board in half. the sliding doors will be 1/4 inch ply. i mean, if you have somereally nice material or a different species,go ahead and use that because it's going to look great. if you just have a baltic birch case, throw some walnut doorson there or something.
that's going to look awesome. and now the 2 things thatwe don't know at this point are the overall dimensions, length, width, and depth of this cabinet, and, of course, the interior arrangement. now this is going to be very different depending on what youwant to put in yours. i'm going to store some planes and a few different hand tools,
we'll get to that, but my arrangement's gonna be very different than yours. so just keep in mind what tools you have, what things you want to keep in there, and just rearrange thatinterior to suit your needs. so the only thing left to do at this point is to go out to the shop, take some measurementsfrom the actual tools, and use those as a guideto tell us how big,
how deep, how tall, howwide, all that good stuff. so let's run out to theshop and do just that. now you can see i got a pretty good amount of stuff on the wall already, all of my chisels, files, some saws, scrapers, things like that. i'm very happy with thestorage as it exists now. what i really want to put inmy tool cabinet is my planes. i've never quite come upwith a great storage solution
so that's really what i'm after. so, of course, i've got allof my planes on the bench here and the idea is i want to know what are the maximum dimensionsi need to be concerned with. i've got my #7 here and that's going to be the biggest plane in my collection. so i want to know what the length is. that's going to dictate what each half of this cabinet is going to be.
this would be in one half and, of course, i wantit to be symmetrical so the other side of the cabinet has to be about the same width. i need to know - see, i'm going to store them in on the shelf like this so, of course, the side toside width of this plane is going to be important 'cause that's going to be the height of the shelf
and if you go from the bed to the top of the handle area here, that's going to dictatethe depth of the cabinet. so all of these are numbers that i'm going to need to write down. all these other planes, i might be able to fit 2 on the same shelf, you know? this is about 22 inchesif i remember correctly. take a quick measurement.
yeah, it's 22 so, of course, i could maybe put my 2 smoothers on the same shelf. okay, but really what we're looking for is the maximum dimensions. we're also looking to figure out are there some really unusual things that we're going toneed to store in there. let's go take a lookat my old tool cabinet and i'll show you some of the other things
that i'm going to tryto fit into this one. now you have to excuse thecrappy lighting in this spot. i'm kind of in a dark corner of the shop. so this is the old cabinet. you can see i've got my block planes, shoulder planes, some spokeshaves. those are all things i'm going to want to store in the new one. and another thing i find really handy
to have in the toolcabinet is my drill bits. i like to make these littlethings that you can pull out and it's really nothing more than a 2 x 4 and some holes drilled into it, but i like to store those in this cabinet. i really haven't found a better place or a better way to store these things so what i'm going toneed to be concerned with are which sets i'mgoing to include in here
and how tall they are because you can see you need a good amount ofspace to fit some of these, like these boring bits up here. the forstners are a little bit shorter. my brad point bits, things like that. you just gotta make sure you know exactly what you want to put in there, take some measurements, give it a little bit of breathing room
'cause you never know, you might buy a new set in the future. but for the most part, that's really it. the big planes, theselittle guys, little scraper, a couple of these neat little ones that i've gotten from lee valley, you know, and the bits themselves. other than that, that's about all i really need to store in mine
so, of course, the inside of my cabinet is going to be a reflectionof the tools that i own. but we can talk as a group and figure out storage solutions for any unusual stuff you might want to putinto your tool cabinet. now armed with those measurements and all the things that wealready know about the project, i'm going to hop on sketch up and i'm just going to use it to work out
a few different thingsin terms of proportions, just double check and make sure everything looks right. i'm not going to render thisentire thing in sketch up. honestly, it's too time consuming and when you're just building a square box sometimes i think it's unnecessary. so i like to go in and just make sure my dados are spaced nice and evenly,
work out the locations of the shelves, make sure that the proportions of the top and bottom decorative pieces look okay, and maybe even experiment a little bit with different designsfor that top and bottom since that's probably the only place we're going to get reallycreative with this project. if you're good at sketch up and you really enjoy using it,
you can do this whole thing from beginning to end on there. for me, it just takes too much time. i'd rather just use it and get the heck outta there and start building. so let's hop on the computer. now i'm just going touse the rectangle tool to create a few boxes thatrepresent the tool chest. let's do 1 section at a time.
i don't really know the height, so let's just say about 30 inches and the width we wantis 22 and 1/4 inches. notice that i'm entering the dimensions with my keyboard at thebottom right of the screen. now i'm using the rectangle tool to draw the 3/4 inch partition that'll be between the 2 sections of the chest. i can then add the second30 x 22, 3/4 inch section
and then the 2 outside walls of the chest. and just for the sake of visual reference, let's use the push/pull tool to pull out the sides in the partitionjust a few inches. now what i'm really looking at here is the total width. i added these numbers up before, but for some reason, it wasn't until i saw it in 3d space that it hit me.
46 and 1/4 inches is just too darn wide. it's almost a full 4 feet. so it's back to the drawing board. so horizontal storage, out. we need to come up witha different solution. how about vertical? well, if we store these vertical, you're going to have alittle bit of a safety issue. you've got to make surethat it's nice and secure.
now i saw this idea on the internet and i wish i could givecredit to the person, but i don't rememberexactly where i saw it, but they were stored vertically and not on any kind of an incline, basically right up against the back panel and there was a littlewooden clip that you could rotate around and hold thefront end of the plane in place. now i'm thinking, if youcould put a little groove
in the bottom panel aswell to catch the back end, put that into the groove,pull this thing around, and now that's gonnabe pretty darn stable. i'm actually really happy with that idea. so vertical storage, unlessyou have endless wall space, vertical storage seems like the way to go if you have these longer planes like this. so now i'm looking at the arrangement, putting everything flat onto the bench,
and seeing what i cancome up with that would be a logical solution for theright side of this cabinet. okay, so let's mock upthe arrangement here. i'm going to use my purpleinlay here as a guide, pretend that's the bottom of the cabinet. put the #7 in first, #5, i'm gonna give them about a 1/2 inch, maybe a little bit less,between each plane. here comes the #4.
i get to this point and number one, i want room to expand soi do want some space here. i don't want to go all theway to that 22 and 1/4, but, you know, i'd likea little bit more room just in case i pick up somemore planes in the future. for now though, i think i can take my blum smoother and lay it this way. that's going to look really cool and it's still going to be less
than the 22 and 1/4 that we had before. and let's see what we're looking at. it's about 19 inches. i think i can get away with 19 and 1/2. let's say, just to be safeand for easy calculation, 20 inches and even at 20,when you multiply it by 2, i'm actually losing 4 and1/2 inches on the total width which brings this down to amuch more reasonable number. the other thing that ihave to work with now
is all of this extraspace is just going to be a flat panel that i can work with which means i could add some of my more oddball things into this area using pegs, you know,maybe put some shelves if i feel so inclinedto try and figure out a way to put them in there, but at the very least, with peg storage, i could fill up all this extra space
and it's going to look prettydarn cool at the same time. so i think this is agood working arrangement that we can now go with so let's head back to the computer. now we're going to do the same thing we did last time, only in this case, we're restricting eachcompartment to 19 inches. now the total width isonly 40 and 1/4 inches which is a 6 inch differencefrom the previous design.
now another thing i liketo use sketch up for is to determine thelength of my side pieces. i'm just going to make a very rough sketch of the arrangement from a side view. so starting from the rear, we would have a 3/4 inchgap for the french cleat. and now this rectangleis going to represent the back panel at 3/4 of an inch thick. next we have a 6 inchinternal storage space
which should be plentyfor our biggest plane. and now i'm going to drawin the sliding doors. i'm giving myself anextra 1/8 inch clearance and then i'll draw thefirst 1/4 inch door. now we'll have a 1/4 inchgap between the doors and then here's our second 1/4 inch door. now just to be a little more thorough, let's draw in the grooves that the sliding doors will ride in.
these are going to be about 1/4 inch deep. and now from the back tothe front of the door, we have 8 and 3/8 of an inch. now for the actual sidepieces of our case, we're going to want toclear those sliding doors by about 1/4 of an inch. so i'm going to call theside pieces 8 and 5/8. the final thing i need sketch up for is to help me look at a few possibilities
for our top and bottom. so i start by drawing a rectangle that represents the case itself, which we know now is 8 and 5/8 inch deep by 40 and 1/4 inches long. the top and bottom willextend past the sides by about an inch and a half and past the front by about 3 inches. then i draw the outer rectangle
which represents the rough bottom. now remember, i'm by nomeans a sketch up expert so when i'm experimenting like this i typically do things that arenot considered best practice in the world of sketch upand i really don't care. i'm just trying to geta ballpark visual here and i know what i needto do to get that done. so i think what i want to do is add a gentle curve to the front
and i start by making reference marks 1 inch back from each front corner. i then take the curve tooland i tap each reference mark that i just created and thenbring that line to the front and you can see it givesyou a nice curved line. i just erase the littledog ears on the corner and i've got a pretty good representation of what i'm going for. now just to get a better visual,
i'm going to use the push/pull tool to extend the center rectangle upward. and now i can see howthings are going to look. i'll also extend the bottom down about an inch and a half since that's really the thickness that i want. and that looks pretty good. now here's where you canstart to play a little. let's see how things look if we
maybe add a curve to thesides as well as the front. using reference points and the curve tool, we can get an idea of whether or not this concept even has merit. now someone may like that. i don't think it's what i'm going to use, but you can see how youcan play with these things and just push and pull anddo whatever you need to do without ever cutting woodand you have a pretty
good idea of what works and what doesn't. now i've got just about every dimension and every number i could possibly need to build this piece. the one major thing that i haven't covered yet is the height. now we know that the largest#7 plane requires 23 inches. it's actually 22, but i wantto give myself a little bit of extra clearance and that's going to be
our vertical internal dimension is 23. now i can go with that number, but i could also go a little bit taller. so this is one of thosecases where i do like to go to a design ruler, adesign rule of thumb let's say and use something like the golden ratio to determine what wouldbe the optimal height. now if you're not familiarwith the golden ratio, definitely look it up.
you'll see it's referredto as the golden section, the golden rectangle. it basically refers tothe relationship between two sides of a rectangle interms of how long they are. so let's say this was 1 inch, obviously it's exaggerated,this side is 1 inch, and you want to know what would be the optimal or mostvisually pleasing length for the long end and what you would do
is multiply by the golden ratio number, which is 1.618 and a bunchof whole other numbers, a bunch of numbers thati don't really count. i just go 1.618 and call it a day. so you can use that math to determine in a situation likethis, when it's flexible, i could have the heightwhatever i want it to be, it's not a bad idea to do it. so let's just see what it gives us.
we know that the totalwidth of this cabinet, basically using the top because it's going to extend a little bitfurther than the case itself, so 43 and 1/4 incheswide is where we're at. so i'm going to take 43 and 1/4 and in this case i'mgoing to divide by 1.618 because the side to side dimension is actually the longer dimension. i don't want it to betaller than it is wide.
so i'm going to divide by 1.618 and the number i get is 26 and 3/4 and that's total height fromthe top to the very bottom. now the top and bottom actual pieces are going to be 1 and a 1/2 inches thick so if i take 26 and 3/4and i subtract 3 inches, because each one is 1 and a half inches, that leaves me with 23 and 3/4 of an inch and that's my internal space.
well, that's fine becausei really only need 23. so if i get 3/4 of an inch more and i hit that goldenratio, why the heck not? so that's exactly what we're going to do. and now really, the only thing left to do is gather the materialsand start making our cuts. and we'll do that next time. nicole:is to a is to b (laughs) marc:my hands smelllike rubber bands. what?
smack it like you're madat me and it's my face. (laughs) marc: hows my acting skills?nicole:terrible. marc:little less face, please. will i win an oscar? marc: how about a daytime emmy? nicole:no. nicole:that's not very attractive. marc:really? is that what i'm going for in my videos, is attractiveness?
when did that become a priority?