the wood whisperer is sponsored by powermatic the gold standard since 1921. (jazzy music) hi, i'm marc spagnuolo host of the wood whisperer at the woodwhisperer.com. now today we've got a realspecial treat for you. we're going to build apiece of furniture and we're
going to use an absoluteminimum in tooling to do it. okay, this piece back here isa small entertainment center. some of the great features we've got these sliding doors. you can see the hole in the back plenty of ventilation forheat exchange or air exchange to dissipate some of thatheat from the electronics. we've got some niceshelves here in each unit and three compartments.
you can sort of cover two sections at once whichever two you want. and the whole piece is elevated on this it's about a three-inch base. now the other touch to this,although it's very simple has a certain elegance to it. and almost a throwback feelwith the vertical grain just kind of reminds me of something that would be in someone'soffice back in the 70s.
but at this point i thinkit's been long enough that we can bringsomething like this back. now an interesting designelement that i included was the tapered top and bottom whichis mimicked in the shelves. the shelves themselveshave tapers mimicking the top and bottom trim whichi think is pretty cool. the other thing thatwe have is in the back. let me show you that. now in the back here we can seetwo very important features.
and this is the great thing about building custom furniture for yourself. if you think somethingshould be there put it there. just because mass-producedfurniture doesn't have these things doesn't meanwe can't put them there and that's the joy ofmaking your own stuff. so the first thing is a lotof times these units usually house a flat panel tv andthe idea is for it to be low profile and save space.
so to me it's really annoyingwhen you actually have a piece of electronics on there andyou can't push the entire unit up against the wall because of cords and a jumbled mess of wiresor something in the back. so what i've decided to dowas to inset the back panel to the middle compartment like this and this way you can put a surge protector or other various electronics or wires or anything that you might need back here
and put it in this little cubby and you can still push the entire unit right up against the wall. the other feature here is this gap. basically split the back panels in half so instead of puttinga grommet or, you know some type of a grill to let air exchange what i've done is justremoved part of the back panel so there is a free flowing amount of air
that's going to go inand out and dissipate all that heat from the electronics. also the wires can just come right around and drop into this back area here. so again, a nice littlefeature but one of those things that reminds us why it's greatto build our own furniture. now when i said a minimal amountof tooling i wasn't kidding. this is pretty much it. we're going to use a circularsaw to do most of our
long rips and things, tocut the sheet goods down. we're going to use therouter to make our dados. that's the primary joinery that we're going to use for the project. and, of course, the drill isjust going to come in handy for various things that weneed throughout the project. so really this is a can-doproject with a very basic set of tools and some supplies you can make a prettynice piece of furniture.
so i think it's time to get started. let's get building this thing and hopefully you'll be inspired to build this unit yourselfor something like it. so let's get in there and cut some wood. so the first order ofbusiness is cutting down our big sheets of plywood. and that can be pretty tricky depending on the setupthat you have in your shop.
now to keep things simple i actually like to cutmy plywood on the floor. now it's not actually on the concrete. i have three pieces of wood under here just three two-by-threes thatspan the length of the plywood and support it and bringit up off the ground. now what that allows me todo is to use my circular saw and make my cross cuts or myrips, whatever i need to do to bring it down to a manageable size.
and then, you know, wheni make the final cuts i may do something a little bit different. and we'll get there. but for now, basicallyall i need to do is take my cutting diagram, transferthose marks to the board and i've got in this particular piece my top, my bottom, side one and side two. so it's a pretty easy set of cuts. really not too much difficulty here.
so the first thing i'm going to do is grab my straight edge,get the circular saw and start by cross-cuttingit right along here to separate the side piecesfrom the top and bottom pieces. now before we make our first cut we should probably talk a little bit about the tools that we'regoing to use to do it. first of all, let'slook at the circular saw it's pretty straightforward.
what you want to look for is well first of all if you'reusing the stock blade that came with it you want to get rid of that thing. we're cutting plywoodhere and plywood tends to tear out when you cut it. especially when you cross-cut it. all those little fibersbreak off and it just becomes just not really a great looking cut.
so you want to get a blade that has a really high tooth count. the more teeth, the smoother the cut. okay, so as long as you have a decent amount of teeth in thereyou shouldn't really have too much of a problem with tear out. okay the second thing we canlook at are the straight edges. you have a lot of options. you can use something as simple as
just a two-by-four thathappens to be really straight. you can get a level, use that. just clamp it down on bothsides before you make your cut. or you can use something like this. this is a clamp and toolguide that spans across the sheet of plywood and has abuilt-in clamping mechanism you pull the lever downand it tightens it up and it's a nice secure straight edge. it's really great, you know,really not too expensive either.
now the thing that i'm going to use is the clamp and tool guide but all these other optionswould work just as well. now when you go to make your cut the first thing you'reprobably going to notice is that you have to figure outwhere the straight edge should go we know the line that we want to cut at you know, seems simple enough. but where do you put the straight edge?
you can't put it right on the line. because the blade is offset from the base by a few inches on this sideand about five on this side. okay, so you need to knowwhat that distance is so you know where toset this straight edge. now on my saw, my bladeis exactly five inches on this side of the blade. it's five inches to the end of the base. so if i want to make thiscut i've got to make sure
that my straight edgeis located five inches away from this line and if i use a ruler to set it in the right place i know i'm going to have a good cut. so keep that in mind throughoutall of these procedures that's something you'regoing to need to figure out for your saw so that you getit right each and every time. (sawing) now for the longer cuts like this one
the clamp and tool guide and even a level just isn't long enough togo this entire distance so what i did was, iwent to the home store and i found a nicepiece of pre-primed mdf. it's probably used for some sort of trim. but happens to be a nicerelatively true straight edge and i've held my straight edge against it just to make sure it's good and i think it's going to work really well.
so i just clamp it on both ends and run the saw straight across. now the other thing to notice when we're going with the grain and making the cut in this direction it's not like cross-cutting where everything was completely supported. so what i recommend doing is either turning your supports, thetwo-by-threes on the ground
turning them in the otherorientation 90 degrees so that you have fullsupport through the cut or like i did here, just add another one so that both pieces aresupported by two two-by-threes and this way when you finish the cut you don't want those plywood pieces turning into each other or falling because it could damagethe plywood or worse yet it'll bind the blade and it'll kick back.
so never want to have that happen. so let's go ahead and make this cut. now we're going to cut ourpieces to final dimension. now the thing that works in our favor here is the fact that a lot ofthe pieces have duplicates. for instance, there's a top and a bottom that are exactly the same. there's two sides that are the same. and also the middle dividers are the same.
so if we cut them at the same time it's going to make our lives a lot easier because we'll know that those two pieces are exactly identical. makes everything that much easier. so what i'd like to do is i stack for instance, i've gotmy two side pieces here. obviously they're quite a bit oversized and we need to cut them down.
but i stacked them on top of each other and what i'm looking for at this point you see we've got a cut edge. we've got a factory edge. these are now cut corners. so we're not sure if those are 90 degrees. the factory corners theymight be 90 degrees. so what we want to lookfor is the best corner. and i take a nice big square to check it.
and when i find the best corner which i've already doneand it's this one here okay, once i find the best corner i try to even up both pieces so that the bottom is flush here and the side is flush here. and sometimes, you know,sometimes plywood of off but in a lot of cases it'sactually nice and straight and you might have anice corner to work with.
but if not, you're cut edges might provide that 90 degree corner for you. so what i'm considering mygood corner is right here. okay, this is my good corner, 90 degrees two straight edges. so what i need to do now when i cut this sandwichpanel to width and length is make my cuts through both pieces but make sure those linesare parallel to these.
okay, so there's acouple ways you can do it but the way i'm going to do it is by well first, let's take a measurement. okay, your final dimensionand you make a mark. then i get a nice trusty reliable square and i'll extend thatline all the way across. now we know that line is parallel because we know thatthis edge is 90 degrees. it's square with the other edge.
so using a nice trusty square like this will give you a good result. okay? now of course, we know that this line although that's our cut line that's not where weplace our straight edge again, we would then measure at least in the case of my saw i'm going to measure five inchesback and put a little line
and i'll do it at the top too. five inches back, put a line. and now i can grab my straight edge place it right on the workpiece on those two dots clamp it down and we can make our cut. and this time we go all the way through both pieces at the same time. and of course, you don'twant anything to move so you want to clamp both pieces down
and clamp them to the worksurface at the same time. now i have both the top and bottom pieces here on my assembly tableso i can sort of get a bird's eye view of what's going on. and what i'm going todo is transfer the lines from the plan to the work piece itself so i know exactly wherei need to put my joinery. so let's talk about thejoinery for a second. what we're going to use here is dados.
okay dados are going toallow the vertical partitions to nest inside of a groove cut into the top and bottom pieces. okay and with a lot of, you know, a decent amount of glue in there it's a pretty secure joint. so plywood, whenever youcreate dados for plywood you have a little bit ofan issue because plywood is never exactly three-quartersof an inch thick.
and if you use athree-quarter inch router bit to cut your dados a lot of times it's going to be over sized and that panel is goingto wobble in the dados. so fortunately router bit companies make plywood sized router bits. they're usually about23/32 of an inch in width and that's exactly whatyou need for most plywood. now be sure when you get yourbit to test it out on scrap
and make sure that your plywood fits because unfortunatelyeven though most plywood is around 23/32 i can't tell you how manytimes i've been bit in the butt by a piece of plywood that was either a little bit thicker ora little bit thinner. so just be aware of that. now the other thingthat we need to discuss is how these layout lines work.
every time i draw up aplan or i get a, you know ready to do another projectthat involves creating, you know something just like this vertical partitionsfor a cabinet let's say you always run into an issue where you calculate the start of the dado and the stopping point of the dado. because that dado is not exactlythree-quarters of an inch it really, really messesup the calculations
if you have to add 23/32 here, 23/32 here and god forbid it mightbe some crazy odd number that's even worse than 23/32. so what i like to do is a littlebit of a different approach. instead of trying to figure out where the beginning and the end of that dado is why don't we just worry aboutthe center line of that dado. and that's exactly whatwe've included in the plan are a diagram that shows you where the
center line locations are. i don't care where it starts and stops. i just want to know where the middle is. so that's exactly what i have here on this happens to be theunderside of the top that i'm drawing on now and the great thing is most routers have center line marks. and that tells you exactlywhere that router bit
center point is so all i have to do is line up my router with the center line that i've drawn on my workpiece and boom, i'm done. so the outside dados, i'm going to use an edge guide to do those because they are only an inchor so away from the edge. this will be nice and easy. for the inside ones we'regoing to have to use
probably the clamp and tool straight edge or any type of straight edge to make those cuts. we'll start with the outside and then we'll talk about the inside. (router running) alright, so we have one dado cut now i'm going to show you a couple very important things here.
first of all you are almost definitely going to see some tear out. especially when we're goingacross the grain like this. right up on the corners,it just turns into this fuzzy, little mess here. now the thing is that can be a problem if you don't remove it the right way. if you just basically come along and just try and sand it out of the corner
and you're real aggressive with it or even if you use achisel to get rid of it that might actually reallycause some serious issues. the best way that i findto get rid of this stuff without actually damaginganything or creating an eyesore is to take a little bit ofsandpaper and i just have a random orbit sander pad, it's 220. and you want to sand with the grain okay, you're going to needto do that on both sides.
but if you go with the grain eventually those little piecesare just going to pop off. and what you're left withis a nice crisp corner. okay and the other thingthat i wanted to show you you know, i'm never shyabout showing my mistakes bottom line is, whenyou're trying to build a piece of furniture and you're the person running the camera andsetting up all the shots obviously my brain is in 10different places at once.
so it's very likely thati will make mistakes as i go through. and it's really importantbecause those are mistakes that you could very well make too. and showing you how tofix them is really the key for all of this learning. now what i did was, as i waspushing the router through i forgot that i'm supposed to stop. that's pretty much the most important part
of this whole process, isstopping before you reach the end. now here's the good thing. we haven't applied our trim yetso the front of it's covered you're never going tosee it from the front and fortunately the piecethat i'm routing right now is the underside of the top which means really no matter what you're never going to see it. so technically even ifyou didn't repair this
it probably wouldn'tbe the end of the world but you should repair it just so that you, you get some practice with that method and you can see, youknow, what viable ways there are to repair something like this. so let me show you exactlywhat i'm going to do. okay, you can see righthere,this little black mark that represents the pointthat i was supposed to stop. and instead went all the way through.
you know this is a commonthing that may happen on any project so it's goodto know how you should fix it. i basically took a scrap piece of plywood from the previous cuts andi cut a little chunk out that would be the exactwidth of this dado and then i just very carefully sandedlike so until i got it to be a nice snug fit. and really, as long as the grain in going in the same direction
it's a pretty good match. i put a little bit of glue in here make sure it's spread onthe sides really nicely and the bottom as well put a little bit on the workpiece and push it into place. now i'll give that a couple hours to dry and when i come back a light sanding even now you can see a light sanding will
smooth it out and just kind of show you that it won't be all that bad. the good thing, again, isit's the underside of the top you'll never see it we'll just come backand trim this excess off with a flush cut sawand our front trim piece will go in front of this you'll never even know that this was here. now to cut this center partition dados
very simple we just line up our straight edge use the router itself as a guide and i'm going to eyeball the center line basically check it at one end hold the straight edge and check out the other end make your adjustment now you may need to go backand forth a couple times
until it's perfect but as soon as you get it just right clamp it down and you're ready to roll. (router cutting) now i'm still holdingout hope that one day a router bit company is goingto make a square router bit. but until then, we've gotto fix issues like this. now where the verticalpartition comes to the front of the bottom and the top pieces
it's rounded over because the bit is round so we need to square that off and the only way that i knowto do that is with chisels. so the first thing that i'm going to do is basically two different motions here we've got the side thatwe need to clean out first and then we're goingto establish the front. okay, so the reason we'redoing it this way is because if we start trying toestablish the front line here
there's a good possibilitybecause the grain is running this way thatthe grain could split and continue on. so i don't really want toestablish the front line until i've severed thefibers on the sides. now the widest chisel you haveis really the way to go here because you're going to reference off of the existing side that's there. okay, just using the fingerpressure here you can sort of
push in and establish aperfectly vertical position. so that's exactly what ido, but i tilt the chisel a little bit to the right like this and i actually will hold itin and start chopping. so you just want to at thispoint go with the grain and chop that material out. just keep working yourway back until you're basically right up to your pencil line. okay now we're going to do thesame thing on the other side.
just reference, give it thetilt and just kind of pry it in. and that establishes a nice straight line. go back with the smallerchisel, chop that away (pounding) once you've gone as far as you can go and you're right up to your line get a chisel that fitsas closely as possible to the three-quarter inch width here put it right on your lineor in front of your line
whatever your personal choice is mine is actually going to split the line and i clean up usually you don't knowhow far exactly to go down so i like to drive a chisel in this way just to loosen it up at the bottom. make sure i have a nice flat bottom. (upbeat music) there you go, nice and square.