[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] Hi.

Welcome again to another episode of "The Woodsmith Shop."

You know, over the years, we've built a few shop carts, and they're mainstays around here for storing tools, hardware, and supplies.

It's time to build another cart, this one a little smaller-scale, but no less useful and practical.

Inside, there's a clever system to create modular trays and drawers, to store and organize all kinds of power tools and supplies.

It stays away from expensive hardware and lets you build something that's practical for the tools that you have.

So it's time to grab a sheet of plywood and start building.

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... ♪♪ ♪♪ And by... Inventables -- tools for designing and building your products.

Inventables.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Now, I've noticed that woodworkers tend to build really elaborate cabinets for their hand tools, but for power tools, I often feel like they just kind of get thrown into a box or on a shelf.

Exactly, and I think that's because a lot of power tools are kind of odd shapes, and they're kind of hard to store.

Yeah.

So on today's episode, we're building a power tool storage cabinet that I think serves both purposes -- organization and looks good, too.

Exactly, and because we're calling it a power tool storage cabinet doesn't mean you can only store power tools in it.

Right.

What I like about the design here is that the interior's really up to you.

You can customize it for whatever you need to hold in your shop.

Yeah.

And I mean, it doesn't even have to be in the shop necessarily.

It doesn't.

It could be in the house with art supplies or craft supplies and things like that, too.

Exactly.

So when we open it up, we have a series of slots in the side that hold hardboard.

And what I like about this construction is you can use the hardboard as either shelves or as an integrated part of the drawer.

So there's no fancy hardware.

The base of the drawer actually ends up being the slide, and it works great.

And you build as many of the drawers as you want, depending on what you need to store.

Exactly.

And you can really customize them to hold different things, like sanders, power tools, even router bits or drill bits.

We even made a tote that pulls out.

There's just a lot of ways to customize it and a good place to put your imagination and creativity to use.

Exactly.

Now, the original plan had using regular birch plywood for this and then edging in hardwood, but that's not what we did here.

No, we used Baltic birch plywood because it has real consistent plies all the way through it, and I think it cuts cleanly and actually looks pretty nice for a shop cabinet.

So you can go without.

It does.

And without all those voids, it's a really clean look.

But if you'd like a set of plans to get yourself started on your own cabinet, they're available at our website, WoodsmithShop.com, and Chris is gonna get started on building the case for our cart.

The construction of our roll-around tool cart begins with six pieces.

We have back, a top, a bottom, two sides, and a divider.

Now, the top and the bottom are both 3/4-inch Baltic birch plywood.

The two sides are also Baltic birch plywood but have a skin of 1/4-inch hardboard applied to the interior surface.

The center divider has the same hardboard, but applied to both sides.

So why hardboard?

Well, we're going to be cutting slots in here for removable tool trays, and we need to bulk out the width of our material.

And the hardboard also provides a nice, low-friction surface that the trays are gonna slide easily in and out of.

So one thing I want to show you is how we go about applying the hardboard to the sides and the divider.

I've got a piece of hardboard here, and it's cut a little bit oversized of my Baltic birch blank.

So the first thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and spread glue over the entire surface.

I'm also going to use this toothed glue spreader to make sure that I've got the glue evenly applied.

We'll add a little bit more here.

So with the glue evenly applied, I'll place my hardboard and get it centered on top of the panel.

So the challenge now is, how do we apply even pressure to make sure we've got a good bond all the way across?

So how do we get pressure in the center, and how do we get it on the edges as well?

Well, the easiest way to do this is using a clamping caul.

Now, a clamping caul is usually just a piece of wood that's got a slight crown put into it.

You can make that crown by sanding, by jointing, by sawing.

But here's a simple way that I like to use.

What I'll do is just use a little bit of masking tape to build up that crown.

It's very fast, and it's very easy.

I'm gonna use three strips, each of a descending length.

It's not fancy, but it gets the job done, and it's fast and it's easy.

So with that crown in place, I'll place that against the hardboard, and as I tighten each of my clamps, the pressure will begin at the center.

And then as I tighten the clamps, the pressure will extend out towards the edges.

Simple, but it really works.

Well, now I just need to let the glue dry, and then I'm gonna take this panel, I'm gonna go to my router table, I'm gonna use a flush trim bit, and get this nice, smooth, exact edge that you see here.

And when we're done with that, well, then it's off the table saw, and we're going to begin by cutting the grooves for our pullout trays.

[ Table saw whirring ] Well, I'm ready to cut the slots for our tool trays.

I have a 1/4-inch dado on our table saw, and it's 1/4 of an inch high.

I've got my fence set at 3 1/2 inches for our first dado.

Now, one thing I want to point out to you is that the sides are actually a little bit longer than the center divider.

The center divider is housed in the dado, so it's a full 1 inch shorter.

Now, trying to have accurately registered slots on parts of different lengths would just be a headache.

So what we've done is we've simply left the center divider the same length as our two sides.

Once I'm done slotting everything, I'll go back and I'll trim 1/2 inch off the top and 1/2 inch off the bottom of that divider, and it'll be the correct length.

But, importantly, the slots will all line up.

[ Table saw whirring ] To complete the joinery for our case, it's all going to take place here at the table saw with a dado stack.

For the sides, I need to cut a rabbet to accept the top and the bottom of our case.

I also need to cut a rabbet along the back of each side to accept the 1/4-inch hardboard back.

The top and the bottom will receive a dado right through the center to accept the center divider, and the center divider needs to be rabbeted, top and bottom both sides, to drop into that dado.

Once that's done, it'll be time to head to the workbench and glue things up.

One of the things I wanted to check was to make sure I had the orientation of the center divider correct.

You can get it backwards.

So, time to glue.

I'm gonna go ahead and put a little bit of glue in the dado of my bottom... ...and also of the top.

So with that done, I'm gonna go ahead and apply a little bit of glue into the rabbet of my side.

Yeah, I think we're ready to add a clamp.

And I'm just gonna lightly clamp things here for a moment, because I'll next need to add the back.

[ Drill whirring ] And with our back glued on, I'm ready to let the glue dry, do a little cleanup, and I think we're ready to move on to the trays and the doors.

Now, I've cut these doors to size.

Whenever I get a piece of plywood at the home center, I like to have them break it down for me.

Most home centers offer that service.

So I have them break it down to a sheet that's a little bit more manageable.

And I've just cut these two doors to the right size, and I've trimmed them a little short so they're not gonna bind on the top.

And their sized so they're gonna meet up in the center with just a little bit of a gap, which is gonna be perfect.

Now, to hold these doors to the case, we're gonna use a piano hinge.

And piano hinge comes in long lengths, and then you can trim it down to whatever size you need.

So I'm gonna go ahead and cut this with just a standard hacksaw.

I'm gonna cut it to the same size as the doors.

Okay, and that fits pretty well.

Now, the plans call for the hinge to be rabbeted into the case and into the door.

I'm not really gonna worry about that.

Because we're not adding any edging, I think it's gonna look just fine.

So we'll go ahead and get this positioned.

And then we'll install it with screws into the case and into the door.

[ Drill whirring ] Okay, there we go.

So now that we have the doors hung, we can go ahead and tackle the interior of our cabinet.

We're gonna do that by adding a set of drawers.

We're gonna start that over at the table saw.

The design of this case is such that you can use the pieces of hardboard in these slats that Chris made, and you'd have a series of shelves, and quite honestly, you could fill up this entire case with hardboard, and you would just have a series of shelves.

But one of the things that I really like is that you can take the hardboard out, and you can turn it into a set of drawers.

We could do that simply by adding a drawer box on top of the hardboard, and then the hardwood board is gonna act as the runner, so we don't really have any slides to contend with.

And it's really fun modular design that allows you to customize the interior of the cabinet.

So we're gonna start by making a handful of drawers.

I think we'll make five or six or so to go into this case.

And to do that, we're gonna start by taking plywood.

We're gonna cut the parts to length, and then we're gonna rip a series of 2-inch strips.

And those 2-inch strips are gonna be the height of our drawer.

Once I have all those cut, we'll come back here and put a dado blade in and talk about the joinery.

[ Table saw whirring ] For the joinery for our drawers, we're gonna keep it simple, just like our drawers are.

And our joinery is gonna be a rabbet joint.

To cut the rabbet joint, I've installed a dado blade here at the table saw.

Now, a dado blade is nothing more than a pair of smaller-diameter blades that have a flat grind on top.

And then in between them, there is a series of three chippers -- three of them in this case, and I've put some spacers in between there.

What that does is it increases the cut width of this blade to much wider than a standard 1/8th-inch blade that you have in your table saw.

In this instance, it's about 7/8ths of an inch.

Now, I've set the height so it is approximately half the thickness of our plywood.

And now we can sit the fence.

And we're gonna sit the fence by using a piece of our plywood that our drawer's made out of and adjusting it so that it is lined up on the edge of the dado blade with the edge of the plywood.

Now, this begs the question, how am I gonna make this cut without the blade hitting my fence on my table saw?

Well, it's because I have an auxiliary fence attached here with a pair of clamps.

And the auxiliary fence is nothing more than a piece of plywood.

It's been notched out since we've used it before.

And it allows the blade to spin with a portion of the blade buried inside the fence.

That way, when we go to make our cut, we can butt the workpiece up against the fence, control it with the miter gauge, and make a cut on both ends.

And we'll do this on these longer pieces that I made for the drawer sides, and I'll guide them, like I said, with the miter gauge, like so.

And I'm gonna make a bunch of cuts, one on each end on all of these work pieces.

So we'll be here for a little bit.

But once I have all those cut, we'll head over to the bench and get these drawers assembled.

[ Table saw whirring ] There we go.

Now we just have to drill -- two locations each joint, I think, should be good -- and then drive a couple screws.

[ Drill whirring ] Okay, so there's one of our drawer boxes, and now it's a simple matter of attaching it to our hardboard.

We can do that just by centering the drawer up on the hardboard and then driving a screw.

I'm gonna put one in each corner and maybe one in each center location.

[ Drill whirring ] Okay, there we go.

Now, that's some quick and easy drawers.

I'm gonna do this a handful more times.

Then it's off to Phil to add a little bit of customization and organize these how he wants them.

The trays that Logan made are a really cool solution to organize the inside of our power tool cart.

However, if you're anything like me, just a basic tray like this can just turn into just a smaller jumble of tools and supplies.

So we came up with four ideas to customize these trays, or the concept from them.

And I think from this, it'll spark some curiosity or some experimentation on your own to come up with solutions that will work for your tools.

So let's take a look at what we have.

The first one starts as just your standard tray, but what I did is I cut an MDF insert to just slip inside the tray, then I traced my 5-inch sanding discs that I use with my random-orbital sander and cut out the four corners over at the band saw.

If you really want to be neat about it, you can use a sander to clean them up.

But when you drop it in place, what you have now is an easy way to store three different grits of sanding disks, as well as register the sander so that it doesn't slide around.

It becomes a nice little tote.

If you want to, just pull it out of the cart and take it with you whenever you need to tackle a sanding job.

The other tote modification is one that holds a circular saw.

Now, the only trouble with putting a circular saw in just a plain tote is that with the saw guard, it ends up kind of leaning at an angle and can kind of rattle around in there.

So what I did is to form a slot along one side of the tote, and that allows the blade guard and the blade to drop down through so that the saw rests flat on its base plate.

The slot itself is pretty easy to make.

Over at the drill press, I used to Forstner bit to drill out each end of the slot, and then I used those holes over at the router table to set up the fence, and a 3/4-inch straight bit and just connected the dots.

So what I'm left with is a slot that's just wide enough to accept the blade guard.

And it makes a convenient way to hold the circular saw in place.

Now, our other two options take the concept of these trays and flips them around a little bit.

Our third idea takes a riff on the concept of these trays as storage devices, but what I've done is made a few alterations.

The first you can see is that I made the tray sides much deeper.

Then over at the table saw with a dado blade, I cut a pair of dados in each of the long side pieces.

Now, those are gonna hold intermediate dividers, and then those dividers have a small notch cut on the top edge to hold this bar, which serves as a handle.

So now what we've created is a tote that you can easily pull out of the cart and take it with you.

This is the perfect place to be able to store some of the extra accessories that go with your power tools, you know, like your adjusting wrenches, maybe an extra tape measure or two, some pencils.

There's three compartments here to be able to divide and organize all of those accessories.

Now, speaking of accessories that go with power tools, our fourth idea goes much further and much more specific on a specific tool.

Now, for the fourth way to organize the inside of the power tool cart, I was inspired by something that Logan said earlier.

He mentioned that the base of these drawers or trays that we're making could be used as shelves.

So I thought, what if we took that a step further and incorporated some storage into it?

So what I did is took one of the bases, and I glued on two layers of 3/4-inch MDF and turned it into a router accessory pull-out.

Now, a lot of times when you're thinking about router accessories, you're just concentrated on the bits.

And this rack, or pull-out, does store a variety of 1/4-inch and 1/2-inch shank router bits, but there's more to it than that because there's more that goes with your router.

Now, one of those things is that the router bits fit into collets, and my router has two of those.

So I have a couple of pins up near the front that I can store a 1/4-inch collet and the 1/2-inch collet, whichever one's not being used at the time.

And to tighten down the collet and the bits, you'll need your router wrenches, whether you have one or two.

So I have a small pin here and a dowel there that register the wrenches and hold them in place right up at the front, where I can get to them easily.

Now, you can drill whatever configuration of holes you want on the tray to make it useful for your collection of bits.

But there's also a few types of bits that kind of come with their own accessories.

So, for example, I have a rabbeting bit, and it comes with a bunch of extra bearings to change the size of the rabbet.

So I put in a couple of nails here, and those are perfect for storing the extra bearings and washers that are needed in between bit changes on that.

So I hope that these four ideas can be something that you can use on your own cart, or even generate some new ideas that you can use to customize the cart to the tools that you have.

I think it's time to get these all loaded up and get this cart finished up.

You know, one of the questions that comes up when you build a shop project like this is what kind of finish to put on it.

You can do anything from paint, which looks great on a plywood project, to a clear finish, or even nothing at all.

Now, for me, I like the clean, bright look of the plywood, so I'm gonna use a water-base finish that keeps it looking light and helps lighten up my shop.

Now, if you'd like to see more about finishing shop projects with water-base finish, there's a video at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

You'll also find plans for this project and others and other great woodworking information to keep you busy in your shop until we meet right back here 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... ♪♪ ♪♪ And by... Inventables -- tools for designing and building your products.

Inventables.com.