so besides shooting, editing, color grading and producing all of our videos here at the homestead, i'm also in charge of infrastructure and that means i'm always working on, designing, building or fixing some sort of project. i decided since i'm doing all this stuff all anyway, i might as well make videos about
it and share them all with you, and on some larger builds put together a complete set of plans and make them available for you to download and follow along or do your own version as you as you want. so that's what we're going to do today. i'm going to build another workbench that's more of a utility bench and the
plans are down below in the description. you can download that pdf, follow along, they include a complete set of shop drawings, building materials, costs, the parts lists, the cutting diagrams, everything you would need to build a complete project start to finish. so it will be a little similar to this bench which i just finished for the drill
press, bandsaw and bench grinder. it will not have this upper area with a shelf for the light because i'll be putting it in a place where i can hang a light from the ceiling. instead of having two drawers it will have a bank of four drawers with a little bit of a different design. now this is going to be designed simply for utility and inexpensive, we want to
be able to use it and beat it up and not worry about hurting anything, and so our budget for this is around 60 bucks. just like you wouldn't hook a bench grinder up to your corian countertop in your kitchen and sharpen your mower blades on it this is what we want that bench to be for. there's a lot of ways to build a
workbench and there are a lot of fancy joinery and exotic woods and things you can use when you're building a woodworking project. this is not that. if you're an experienced woodworker or a tradesman this probably will be a boring video for you because it's real simple... and that's what we want. so right now i'm going to go get the
materials from the lumberyard. going to need a 4 by 8 sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood for the countertop and the lower shelf. we're going to need a four-by-eight sheet of half-inch plywood to build all the drawers, and the rest or two by fours... and some screws. ok i got all my lumber got my six 8 foot
two-by-fours, one ten foot 2 by 4, three-quarter-inch plywood ripped in half at the store, half-inch plywood cross cut in half... well not in half but, crosscut at the store. so one of the advantages i guess of buying your lumber from a big box store, the blue one or the orange one they'll make a couple cuts for you on
those large panels for no charge and it's easier to break them down and transport them if you can get them to do that for you which is good. first thing i like to do before i start a project is refer to my plans and label all my raw materials and then cut them, and then label all of the parts that are made from the raw materials, that
way if i get interrupted at any point during the project and i have to go do something else i can come back and i can see what i've already cut and what i've already done so it's easy to pick up where i left off. so it's the next day. i had every intention of getting up this morning and starting this build and then i was on craigslist last night and i
found this sander that i've been wanting to get so i've been spending the day going after this sander. cleaned it up a little bit, put a new disc and new belt on it... works perfect. good deal. now we have four pieces cut for the long sides of the shelf and the lower shelf these are 91 inches long, labeled to the
cutting diagram and the part number. now we'll cut and label the six legs. and lastly we'll cut the four end pieces for the top frame and the bottom frame for the lower shelf and the top countertop. these are 21 inch pieces. ok now we have all of our frame pieces cut and labeled, got our four end pieces for the countertop and the lower shelf, four
long pieces for the long end of the countertop and the lower shelf, and our six legs. got them all labeled so we know where to pick up if we get sidetracked. ok now i'm going to put together the frame for the countertop and the frame for the lower shelf using the four longest pieces and the four shortest pieces i
just cut. and they're pretty easy they're a two foot by eight foot rectangle. i've got the pieces laid out so if there's any crown in any of the boards they're facing up. i'm going to lay out my first corner and square it using the 3-4-5 method and clamp it down and screw it together. ok i've got my long end clamped down and i want to square up my corner here. if you
don't have a framing square, or even if you do, you can always use the 3-4-5 method to square up any assembly, and it works on it doesn't matter if it's a small box or a 50-foot wall it always square up corners. it's based on the pythagorean theorem if you remember geometry but just remember 3-4-5. you take your shortest end, measure that, which is 21 inches, and divide
that by three, which is 7 inches. we multiply that seven inches by four, go up your long end. so 28, make a mark at 28 on the outside of your assembly. and then you measure from corner to corner, or from the corner from the opposite corner to your mark you should have a multiple of five, of that number which is 35 and we're right
there we're right on it. i can double-check with a framing square just for fun but, looks pretty good, so i'm going to clamp this down, drive some screws into it. unfortunately my mic died so i lost a few shots between squaring up the frame and getting it together but it's
finished so lower shelf frame, counter top frame, inch-and-a-half square blocks 16 of them fastened together so that the drawer mounts, drawers will mount against these blocks, and that's what we're going to do next is cut all of our drawer components from the half inch sheet of plywood. ok i've got my table-saw set up, i've got a couple of the legs we cut out from the two-by-fours
rigged up as an outfeed table, so if you're following along with any of the plans, we've already had 40 and a five-eighths piece cut at the store. we're just gonna cut this we're just gonna cross cut this at the 20 inch mark. i'm going to cut out the space for the drawer amounts to slide down into the frame, i'm just going to use a scrap
two-by-four as a template. ok drawer frames are all installed, screwed-up, glued up and ready to go. next i'll put on the legs, get everything squared up and we'll build drawer boxes. ok so the plans call for a 4-inch toe kick space beneath the bottom shelf. i just got this stacked on top of a two by four and a half inch piece of plywood ito give me my four inches
and just screw that in. ok so the first step in building the drawers is to cut the dados into the backs and sides for the drawer bottoms. so i've got my little router table set up here. got a quarter inch straight bit, quarter inch depth of cut, half inch to the fence. i'm gonna run my pieces through. usually when i run pieces through a
straight cut like this, i back in about a quarter of an inch and then run the whole piece through so that it doesn't blow out the end. one of the things i also like to do to all my table top equipment whether it's a table saw or a drill press or bandsaw or this router table is to wax it so that your piece slide real nice, and usually i use like
a johnson paste wax but i'm out of it so i'm just going to use this car wax. it doesn't last quite as long as paste wax but it still works pretty well, just put a little bit on... get the fence. i have a little spot here that's catching, so i'm gonna fix that. all right so i've got the router plate off and the screws that fasten the router plate to the table
have a nut on the inside that are adjustable up and down with an allen key. if i can get the right size, picked every one that wasn't the right size. ok now i've raised up the plate, should work good now. now we'll run a piece of scrap through just to make sure our measurements are all good. .242 quarter-inch good enough.
.507 half-inch good enough. now for the drawer fronts i'm gonna plunge cut about a quarter of an inch in so that the channel doesn't go the whole way through and you don't see the channel on the end. ok since this is a utility bench and i don't really care too much about how fancy the drawers are i'm just going to
use pocket holes to assemble the drawer boxes. typically on a project with a little bit larger budget i always use full extension ball bearing drawer slides for my drawers but those are about sixteen dollars a pair and the whole budget for this project is about 60 bucks so i'm not going to spend an extra 64 bucks
just on drawer slides so i'm going to cut my own drawer runners out of poplar boards and rip them down to an inch-and-a-half. got these little rollers that i recycled out of an old art cabinet, i'm going to incorporate these into it. ok i brought everything inside. hurricane
matthew is knocking on florida's door and we're in north carolina and are getting quite a bit of rain. luckily i've got everything finished to where all the big stuff is done now i can finish it inside here. got it sort of set up to where it's going to be at, the drawers done, got all of the drawer runners made so now i'm going to install the drawers and put in the bottom
shelf. ok works pretty good i'll do the countertop, and the lower shelf. sweet. that's going to wrap up this build overall i'm really happy with how it turned out. i'd like to dedicate this video to my dad who recently gave me all of his shop tools and i used most of them to build this project so thanks dad.
it's amazing how having the right tool can really improve your workflow. if you get a chance to build this and use the plans in the link below let me know how it turns out, definitely send me a link in the comments. so yeah we'll see you on the next build... thanks for watching. hi chickies first day outside i put them in a cardboard box with the
bottom cut out. here in the backyard. i'm sitting here watching them so nothing eats them and i scattered some food in the bottom so they can learn to scratch and they already ate a couple bugs. they seem to be happy.