[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] I'm Phil, and it's time for another episode of "The Woodsmith Shop."

You know, I've always found woodworking to be a great way to gather and bring people together.

I've met a lot of woodworkers in my travels and in my time at "Woodsmith," and it's always a joy to talk about shop and tools and the projects that we're working on.

And that's the story behind today's project.

We're building what we'll call a bar, but it's the great opportunity to bring people together around your woodworking.

This project features some plywood case joinery as we make a simple, although unique plywood case for this bar.

We'll add a solid wood top here for the serving surface.

And then we're also going to dress things up with a lattice panel in the front.

Chris is going to tackle that in two ways.

All in all, there's a lot of woodworking here and a lot of great ways to help you improve your own woodworking skills.

If you're ready to build along with us, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

But for now, I'm going to serve up some education on building this case.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... ...Titebond Wood Glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by...

Here at Grizzly, woodworking isn't just our business, it's our passion.

We love what we do.

Thank you for the opportunity to support "Woodsmith Shop" TV.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The inside of our project is a case.

It consists of two sides and a front, along with a pair of shelves.

All of those pieces are made from plywood, which has its ups and its downs.

One of the downsides is that the full sheets of plywood are a little awkward to get into your shop, and then to cut apart.

One of my favorite ways of doing that is to use a track saw to make those cuts.

Bring the tool to the work piece, especially when it gets pretty large like this.

So what I've done here is set up for my first cut, drawing a line across the plywood panel -- that's going to cut this end to the final length that I need for the two side pieces.

Then what I'll do is measure off my cut end another 36 inches to cut the front panel.

The three main case pieces are joined with a tongue-and-groove joint that provides good registration for assembly and a solid amount of glue surface.

I'm going to start by cutting the grooves in the two case side pieces here, so I have a 3/8 inch dado blade set up, raised to the correct height.

I can just run the piece against the rip fence.

I'm going to use a push pad to make sure that I have consistent downward pressure and a consistent depth of cut all the way through.

Once I'm done with the two grooves, I need to install an auxiliary fence on the rip fence and reset that so I can cut a rabbet right along the edge of that front piece.

You need to do that on both edges and then look for a nice smooth fit there.

Even though we've knocked out the joinery for our case pieces, we can't grab the glue bottle just yet.

What we need to do are two other things.

The first of those is to drill some pocket holes on the inside faces of the front, and then the two sides.

These holes will be used to attach our solid wood top.

Now, working with big plywood sheets like that, I can't exactly clamp it vertically in the jig, but this jig allows me to just line it up and clamp it right here.

Then I can drill a hole, slide it down, and keep working without having to muscle the sheets around.

That second step that we need to take care of before assembly is to cover up the exposed edges of the plywood on the front and back edges of our case side pieces.

Now, you could use just solid wood strips and glue those in place and trim them flush.

But for this project, we're using big, long coils of veneer tape, which is a thin layer of veneer in the matching species of our plywood, and it has a heat-activated glue on the back side.

So what you'll do is, with one hand, center the veneer on your panel, and then, with the iron set to the cotton setting, just slowly start working your way, pressing it down as if you're getting ready with your Sunday go-to-meeting clothes.

And then the heat from the iron is going to activate the glue, melt it, and then, as it passes over and cools, the bond will be solidified.

There we go.

If you find any places where there are bubbles or where it lifts up, you can just go back over it with an iron and press it back down.

And that's not going to affect the glue.

It's a good idea to allow the glue to cool down and set up before you trim it to size.

Now, the veneer tape is actually a little bit wider than the plywood, which is what you want, because then it makes it easier to put on without having to feel like you got to nail it right from the get-go.

Trimming it -- you could use a chisel or a file, but they also make double-bladed veneer trimmers specially designed for this task, and they're not that expensive, and, frankly, the way to go.

So, what you do is take it on one end of the plywood, squeeze it so that it's tight up against the faces of the plywood sheet, and then slide it along, and, in one motion, trims the edging flush on both sides of the piece.

To take care of the ends, now, what I'll do is just pop it out of the vise, put it down on a sacrificial surface, and then come in with a chisel on the end here and slice that flush.

We're ready for the glue up here of our case.

It's only three pieces, but there are still some things going on here because we have relatively wide panels that we're working with.

So I'm doing this kind of one at a time.

I have one side already glued up here in place, and I'm about to do the same thing with the other one.

I'm using clamping squares, big chunks of aluminum that help hold assembly square.

They don't provide a lot of, like, clamping force against, but it holds the pieces together.

Once they're set up, then I can apply some long clamps to bring all the parts together.

What I'm going to do is run a bead of glue down the groove on this side piece here, brush it out so that I don't get big globs squeezing out, and then I'll fit it onto the tongue on the end of the case front here.

I'll bring the clamping squares into play and hold that in place.

With the outer part of the case complete, we're turning our attention to the two shelves that go on the inside.

I have the upper shelf here, which is the larger of the two, and you can see that it's got kind of a tapered and a curved shape to it to match the narrow side of the case, and then that much longer other portion of it.

We're going to do this in two steps.

I've laid out the profile here in pencil.

And I'm going to use a jigsaw to cut away most of the waste.

Stick as close to that layout line as you can.

When we're working along with the grain here on the face, that's going to be pretty easy because we're not going to get a lot of tear-out.

The jigsawing is really the rough work.

Now what we want to do is clean things up.

You can see I have a pretty wavy edge here.

I'm going to do that with a couple of templates -- actually, three different versions of ones.

Now, you could make a full-size template for each of the shelves, but since they're both different, I didn't really want to go through that much hassle.

So what I did is broke it up into segments.

There are long, straight segments that I can easily tackle with a straightedge.

And then, for the inside curves, I created an inside-corner template to match the radius.

It's a 2-inch radius on there.

So I can use double-sided tape or clamps and align my template with the layout lines, and then use a flush trim bit and clean up that inside corner.

Same thing for the outside corners -- I have a corner radius here that, again, you just line up one edge of the template with the layout line on my workpiece and rout away.

For the routing, I have a compact router here, and I have an extended base plate on it to give me a little bit more stability while I'm routing away the waste.

And then I have a flush trim bit in here that has a bearing, both on the tip of it and another one on the shank end, just to match whatever I need to do here.

You'll notice the crazy spiral flutes on there that help create a smooth shape on both the -- both faces of the plywood without creating tear-out.

Cutting the shelves to their final size is really only a part of the action here.

The other part is to cover up these exposed plies with that same veneer edge-banding tape as we did before.

I'm going to use an iron, but they're going to throw a curve into it -- two actually -- there's this inside curve that we need to apply the banding to and the outside curve.

The trickier one is this inside curve.

As I go along, working from the straight end into that inside curve, I'm going to use the very tip of the iron to warm up and soften the glue on the veneer tape.

Then I'm going to quick grab my secret weapon here -- rolling pin from the kitchen, and I can roll the veneer tape into that corner and press it in until the glue begins to grab on it so that I can keep that nice tight seal on the glue on that inside corner.

Then I'll continue on with the iron going uphill here, rounding over that top edge, finishing out at the end.

Trimming it flush -- I'm going to use tin snips, this time for the ends.

And then, to trim it so that it's flush on the edges, I put a fresh edge on my chisel plane here, and I can hold the chisel plane flush against the surfaces of the shelf as I slowly work my way along, slicing away the excess.

The assembly part here for installing the shelves is pretty simple, because it's just a matter of driving a few pocket screws.

What you want to do, though, because we don't have any other joinery, is to make sure that that shelf remains level.

The solution here is to clamp a few spacers on each side.

That way, I can just rest the shelf against it.

Then it's just a matter of driving those screws in place.

Once the upper shelf is taken care of, reposition it for several narrow strips for that bottom shelf, and then just rinse and repeat.

My last portion on this project is to make the top.

Now, we did the case out of plywood.

The top is solid hardwood.

And I glued this up from four pieces, but since we have this "L" shape to match the profile of the case, I could have two shorter pieces for the glue-up and then two longer pieces.

And then I started with a track saw here, supported the workpiece on some foam insulation to handle all the straight cuts.

From there, I was able to grab a jigsaw to handle all the curved work on the outside corners, as well as this inside corner here.

Then, as you can imagine, we've grabbed the two templates that we used earlier on the shelves to smooth out the waste and the radius on the inside curves, and then the outside curves, as well.

So what we have now is a really nice, smooth-looking top and just about ready for finish.

But first, I'm going to pass this along to Chris.

Well, it's time for us to make the decorative lattice panel for our cocktail bar.

Now, this is a really fun piece to do.

Now, there are two approaches that we can use.

One, we can template rout.

The other -- we can use the CNC machine.

So let's talk about the template routing first.

Many of you may have a set of these template bushings for your plunge router.

And this is where they really come in handy.

Now, I've got a 1/4-inch straight bit in my router, which is the right bit for cutting all the way through plywood, and then I have a 3/8 bushing.

My template that I have here is for the basic repetitive shape that's going to be throughout the lattice.

Now, I drew this template 1/8 of an inch larger than what I actually want.

So this line here represents a line 1/16 of an inch outside of what we want to cut.

So, you do have to make your templates to match the size of your bushing and the router bit.

There are a couple of ways that you can make the template.

You can just take, in this case, a 3/8-inch drill bit and drill out the corners.

Then use a jigsaw or your scroll saw, cut everything out, smooth it up, make it perfect because you're going to be repeating this over and over and over again.

So we want it just right.

Or, if you have a small CNC machine, you can easily use that for creating a jig.

And that's what those small machines are really handy for -- shop jigs.

I've made my template rather generous in size, and that just gives me some options for clamping it.

Now, let's take a look at my piece of wood here -- my piece of plywood that's going to be the latticework.

As you can see, I've drawn out all of the horizontal and vertical lines that are going to contain our circle motif.

And that gives me some lines on which to align my template to.

Now, when we're on the outside here, I'm going to just use these F-clamps and clamp on the edge.

So we're going to go ahead and rout this location.

And I'm just lining up my template relative to my pencil lines.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ All right.

So, as you can see, it's pretty simple.

Now... the clamps work great for these outside areas, but when you get to these interior areas, we need another strategy.

So I'm going to line up my jig on my layout lines.

And the simplest way to deal with this is to drill a number of very small holes in different locations around the perimeter, and just use some small finish nails.

You don't need to drive them all the way in.

And now we're ready to go ahead and complete one of our interior locations.

♪♪ ♪♪ So there we go.

That's the easy way to deal with the lattice using a plunge router and the guide bushings.

Another great way to create the latticework for our cocktail bar is with a CNC machine.

Now, I've created a drawing file of the lattice, I've created a cutting file, and I've got the same bit that we used with our template, and that is a 1/4-inch straight bit, which is going to give great results with the plywood.

My CNC machine doesn't have the format size to do the whole panel.

That's okay.

I'm going to do it in two halves, and then I'll join the halves when I'm done.

So let's go ahead and get started and get the first panel finished.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, after pulling the two panels off the CNC machine, I did a little prep work with them.

One is, I knocked out all the waste material that was still connected by tabs.

Then I used this router bit.

Now, if you'll notice, it's a solid pilot, and that's because I needed a router bit with a small pilot diameter in order to get into all these little areas.

Most router bits have a bearing that would be too large, so either a micro bearing or one of these small solid pilot bits is ideal.

And that saves you from having to do a lot of sanding and gives us a nice radiused edge.

Once I did that, I took each of these pieces over to the table saw, and I cut them to final width.

With that done, I used this small router bit here, the slotting bit -- it's an 1/8 by 1/8 -- to cut a slot on the edge of my two panels, where they're going to join.

The spline that I've cut is a piece of 1/8-inch plywood by a little over 1/4 inch wide, and it's going to give a good, strong connection.

So, next step -- I'm going to use a thick glue and go ahead and glue these two panels together.

♪♪ You know, the finishing part of any project can be pretty stressful.

It's the last thing you see when you finish the project and it moves into its final spot.

But by taking a few steps, it can be a simple process that's low stress.

This top is going to get a stain and then a clear coat applied.

The base simply gets clear-coated.

And then that latticework gets painted.

So we have a bunch of different finishing techniques here.

But we're going to start with the top because the stain needs to dry the longest before it gets its final coat.

Now, to color this top, we're going to start with an oil-based gel stain.

And the gel stain is different than a standard stain that is kind of watery.

That watery stain soaks in really quickly, and you have to work pretty quick to wipe it off so you don't get splotching.

But the nice thing about the gel stain is, because it's thicker -- it's almost puddinglike consistency -- you can spread it on, and it gives you a really nice, even coverage.

Now we'll start here by applying finish to the bottom.

We want to make sure that we're finishing both sides of our project the same way.

If you finish one less -- let's say we didn't put a clear coat on the bottom side of this -- the difference in surfaces are going to cause it to absorb moisture differently.

So it's going to want to move.

So we want to make sure we're taking the same finishing steps on all sides of the project.

So here I have the bottom sanded and I didn't sand it super highly, but it's sanded enough that it's going to accept the stain really nicely.

And then once we have this bottom side finished, we're going to flip it over, put it on some painter's points to hold it up off of the surface of the workbench, and then we can apply a finish to the top.

When I do the top side staining, that's when I'm also going to tackle these edges.

That way if there's any drips that come along it, it's going to be on the bottom side where you're less likely to see it.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Okay.

That's good coverage and it goes on looking like paint.

But once I've let this soak in for 10 minutes or so, I'm going to come back with a couple of towels and we're going to wipe it off.

And we want to get all of this loose color off the surface, and then we'll be able to see the grain and the final color of the stain.

♪♪ ♪♪ Now, while the stain is drying on the top, we can go ahead and tackle this panel, and this gets painted.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint it with a foam roller.

Now, because there's all these nooks and crannies in the cutouts, it'd be a great time to use a spray system if you have one, but not everybody has one.

So I'm going to roll the surfaces here, and then I'll come back with a brush to kind of get those inside edges.

The final piece of finish to add to this bar is going to be to add a clear coat to the base and a clear coat to the top that we stained earlier.

And to do that I'm going to use a tung oil varnish blend.

This has a little bit of varnish in it, so it's going to add some protection, and the tung oil is going to soak into the wood and protect it from the inside out.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to decant this into a glass jar, and then I'm going to brush it on, and I'm going to flood it so that it gets a good liberal amount on the surface.

And then after letting it soak in for a little bit, I'll come back with a clean rag and wipe it all off.

When Mark, our shop manager, built the first version of this serving bar over a few lunch hours, it was in preparation for a party he was having at his place.

But I knew that that project had to be in the pages of Woodsmith.

And then after Dillon added his touches, we ended up with something that looks like this.

For our version on today's episode, we added a slightly thicker top, changed up the color of the lattice pattern in the front, and went with slightly different stain colors.

All small little steps that you can make in order to take a project plan and customize it to suit your own needs.

And that's what happens when woodworkers get together.

And that's what we're doing right here on "The Woodsmith Shop."

If you're ready to turn your place into party central, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

There you'll find all kinds of information, project ideas and plans, tips and tricks and techniques to help you become a better woodworker.

And then we can gather right here for another great project in the Woodsmith Shop.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week, you'll receive an e-mail with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

Sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition with shop projects, plans, tips and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD, or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

And by Kreg -- From the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

And by...

Here at Grizzly, woodworking isn't just our business.

It's our passion.

We love what we do.

Thank you for the opportunity to support "Woodsmith Shop" TV.