[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] Hi, welcome back to another episode of "The Woodsmith Shop."

On today's episode, we're gonna build two weekend projects to help you tame the chaos that can accumulate around the entryway.

First up is a coat tree that's the perfect place for coats, hats, bags, and umbrellas.

The other is an entry bench that serves as a landing spot.

Put down the stuff that you're carrying as you come in or even as a place to sit down and put on or take off your shoes.

I hope you enjoy today's episode.

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.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Chris, some of our favorite projects are organizers, like bookcases, but today we're organizing an entryway.

That's right.

So today we have this hall tree and this bench.

Perfect additions for the entryway of your home.

And you don't really need a lot of space or time to build either of these projects either.

They're both pretty simple.

Now, take this hall tree.

Look at how these hooks echo the shape of the feet.

And it's got a very nice, light-looking structure, great-looking piece, easy to build.

And in another weekend project, there's this entry bench.

Again, it's a small, compact form.

The joinery on it is pretty simple, but we've taken something a little bit unique and gone with a woven seat for it.

And if you've never woven a suit before, it's really pretty simple, but it looks fantastic.

You may even want to do that on another project.

If you want to build one or both of these projects for your own home, the plans are at our website -- WoodsmithShop.com.

And now Logan's going to start with the hall tree.

So the first project that we're gonna be working on today is this coat rack.

It has basic components, and let's take a look at those.

So we have four corner posts.

We have eight hangers.

We also have four feet.

And in between those, we have a couple of cross pieces.

Everything's connected together with dados, and that's gonna be pretty easy to cut over the table saw.

I've already prepped all my parts.

So let's go ahead and head over there.

We'll cut all this joinery.

The orientation of these corner posts is such that each post has two outside faces and those outside faces don't get any joinery cut on them.

So what I've done is I went through and I selected the grain that looks the best to me and I've marked that.

I just marked that with a series of lines down each face.

And that is to tell me that that is the outside face and not to cut any joinery on that.

So now what we need to do is lay out our dado locations and cut those.

And to do that, I've installed a dado blade in the table saw here, and then I'm gonna use the rip fence as a stop.

We'll use the rip fence to position the end of our workpiece.

Then we'll guide the workpiece with the miter gauge to make the cuts.

I'll define one end first, then I'll define the other end and then I'll come back and weigh the waste.

And we have two long dados up top for those top coat racks.

Then we have two lower ones that are gonna be for those cross supports.

Then we have a pair at the bottom.

Those are gonna be for the feet.

So let me go ahead and get this all dialed in.

I'll make the cuts.

Alright, I have all the notches cut in the corner posts, and I also notched this blank.

This is gonna be cut apart in a little bit to make those little cross pieces that go in between the corner posts.

So now we can go ahead and head over to the band saw and work on the blanks for the feet and for the hangers.

The final parts to cut for our coat rack are gonna be the hangers and the feet.

Now, in the plans, it's just taking a blank like this and making a couple of cuts at the table saw.

And you could do that.

But because I already have these templates made, I'm not gonna do that step.

Instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lay out the parts, trace them out, then I'll rough-cut them here at the band saw.

Then I'll be able to head over to the router table and flesh-trim them to final shape.

And I'm just gonna skip that table-saw step altogether.

Now that we have all of our hangers and our feet rough cut, we have to make them all the same size.

We're gonna do that here at the router table.

What we're gonna do is attach our pattern down to each of the leg and the hangers, and then we're gonna trim them using either a pattern bit or a flush-trim bit.

The one I have here has a bearing on top and on bottom, and I like this style, especially when I'm doing something curvy like this.

And I'll show you why.

As you're routing, the grain direction is going to change on you, especially in the curved areas.

So the grain's coming in this direction on this half of the curve, but on this half of the curve, it's coming the opposite direction.

And if we make that all in one pass in one direction, you're gonna get to a point where it's gonna start tearing big chunks out and trying to grab your workpiece.

And then your options are either to stop and run that through the drum sander or to flip it over.

And that's why I like this bit.

So I'll make my first pass with the grain going in the correct direction for a cut with the pattern on the bottom, and then I'll go about halfway.

And this is where the grain starts coming in from the other direction.

So what I'll do then is flip it around, make the same pass on the opposite side, then I'll stop the router, reset it up, and flip it over so the pattern's on the top.

And then I can trim those areas that were going the wrong direction.

But now, because the workpiece is flipped over, it's going the right direction.

So I'm gonna do that for all the hangers and all the legs, and then we have one final thing to take care of here, and that is to make a chamfer along both sides of both of the edges of the hangers and the legs.

Chamfers are so when everything's seated together, they meet up nice and tight on the inside of the coat rack.

Right, now, before we assemble anything, we have a couple of things we have to take care of here at the bench.

The first is we have to chamfer some ends.

Now, we've already chamfered the ends of this one little divider.

And I've chamfered the ends of the posts.

To do that, I usually just grab a pencil and I'll use my fingertip as a gauge and just kind of give myself some guidelines here.

Now, you could do this at the router table, but these are fairly small parts.

And personally, I like using a plane on something like this.

So just mark the ends like that, give myself some guidelines.

Then I'll set it low in the vise, and then I'll just start hitting it with the plane and start cutting a chamfer.

There we go.

I'll do that around all four edges on both parts until we end up with something like this.

After I have that done, we're also gonna apply some finish.

Because of the nature of this rack, it would be extremely hard to finish it once it's all assembled.

There's a lot of little nooks and crannies.

So if we can save ourselves some headache, let's do it.

We're gonna do that by prefinishing.

Alright.

Now that I have the bench covered, we can go ahead and apply the finish.

The finish I'm gonna use is gonna be a tongue-oil mixture.

And really, it's just tongue oil that I've thinned down with a little bit of mineral spirits.

It's gonna help it soak in and dry fast and it's gonna apply really nicely.

And to apply it, I'm just gonna use a foam brush.

So let's go ahead and get some applied.

I'm gonna make sure to stay away from these dados because that is our glue surface.

Alright.

So kind of same story with the legs and the hooks, except here I'm gonna stay away from the cheeks on this end of the leg, because that's gonna be what fits in to those notches.

I will hit the end grain just because the end grain isn't gonna hold a lot of glue anyways.

But we'll stay away from those cheeks.

Now, this coat rack's gonna be a little tricky to assemble just because there's a lot of appendages sticking out, but I think what we'll do is we'll start by applying glue in this bottom one.

Now we'll get a leg in place.

I'm gonna line this up so that chamfer is lined up with the inside of the post.

There we go.

Get a clamp on it.

And to get those cross members in, I'm gonna raise this up onto some blocks just to give me a little bit of clearance.

Then we fit one of these guys in there.

You'll put glue on the inside of two surfaces.

Let's wiggle this guy in place.

There we go.

That feels like it's nice and tight, so I'm not gonna worry about clamping that one in.

We'll put the next one in.

And now we can add the first hook.

Okay, now I'm just gonna work my way around the rest of the rack, adding the lower feet, the posts, and then the upper hooks.

We'll come back once I have it all clamped together.

Now, getting all these clamps on is a little bit of a juggling act, so if you do have an extra set of hands around, it can help get all the parts in place.

But one thing I like about prefinishing is if you have any glue squeeze out, most time it'll peel right off after the glue is dry.

And if there's any areas where you notice that you missed finish, that tongue-oil finish is great because you can just slather a little bit more on and it'll blend right in.

So now we're gonna let this thing dry.

Then it's ready to put it in your office.

For our second project, the entry bench, we're gonna start with the joinery, just like we did with the hall tree.

But for this project, we're gonna need to make a bunch of mortises in the four legs of the entry bench.

Now, what you want to do is start by carefully laying out the position of the four mortises on each of the legs.

To tackle the joinery part, we're gonna start at the drill press where I have a Forstner bit installed.

We can use the Forstner bit to remove as much of the waste as possible.

It saves a lot of time And then we'll head back to the bench to clean things up.

You're not really drilling holes when you're making mortises at the drill press.

What you want is something more like this, something that looks a lot more like a slot.

So I've gone and made overlapping passes with the drill bit in order to create a relatively smooth-sided mortise.

Now, to clean things up here, I'm gonna use a series of three chisels.

The first is a chisel that you want to choose that matches pretty closely or slightly narrower than the final width of your mortise.

What you're gonna do is line it up right on the layout line and then drive it straight down.

Once you reach bottom, then you can pull back on the chisel.

And the sides of the chisel actually scrape away... and clean up the corners of the mortise, so you do that on each end.

Then what you want to do is grab a wider chisel to give you a wider reference area.

You're gonna clean up these long grain sides and level out the peaks that were left over from the drill bit.

Now, because I took such care in drilling out the mortise, you could do this with hand pressure when you're paring away the sides.

Then finally, the last chisel.

Well, it's just a really narrow one that I use to just free up and loosen up... ...all the little chips and debris that's inside of it.

Then you can clean it out and then get started on the next one.

Now, most of the tenons that will fit into the mortises that we cut on the legs are kind of your conventional garden-variety tenons were the tenon is centered on the workpiece.

So when you're cutting them, you're just taking equal amounts off of each face.

Now, there's a mortise up at the top of the leg that's offset.

So the mating tenon is gonna be offset as well.

You can see it drawn in here on this workpiece.

The process for cutting it is a little bit different.

And that's what I want to talk about here.

Instead of taking equal amounts off of each face, I'm gonna establish this inside smaller shoulder first, because that's my reference face.

Then I can remove material from the back side to sneak up on a snug fit of the tenon into the mortise.

You want to take some time before you add the glue to dry-fit all the pieces together to make sure you have a nice fit between the mortises and the tenons.

Now, I like to use a shoulder plane and if necessary... ...just trim up the faces of the mortises to get a snug fit.

And then, like I said, double check, triple check if you need to.

Once that's done, then you can brush some glue on the tenons and bring it all together.

The only thing we had left to do on our end assemblies was to create the radius detail, and all I did there was just draw in the radius using a compass.

Then at the band saw, I cut as close to the line as I could and then just sanded and filed everything so that it's a nice, smooth, even curve.

Now, speaking of curves, the top frame that joins the two end assemblies has a curve to it also.

That helps the webbing that's gonna be used for the seat to wrap around smoothly.

Now, to create such a large radius, you can't really use a router bit.

That would be really big and is really prone to burning, especially in maple like this.

So what I did is went over to the table saw, angled the blade 45 degrees and knocked off most of the waste.

You could see that I drew in the radius on each end of both of those pieces.

I'm gonna use that as a guide for this next step.

Now, what I like to do is turn to some hand tools.

You can use a rasp or a file.

And then using those lines as a guide, just work your way down to them.

Now, another option and the one that I'm using here is to grab a hand plane.

And with the hand plane, what you're doing is creating a series of facets as you go around, so you're changing it from a 90 degree and a 45 to more angles in between.

At that point, you can start working down and down until you get just a lightly faceted surface.

You can leave it there if you want or use a card scraper and some sandpaper to get a really smooth, even curve.

Once that's done, I can assemble the upper frame with its two cross rails, then turn it over to Chris to do the upholstery work.

Every woodworking project carries a unique, new challenge for you.

In this case, it's gonna be learning how to create a seat out of webbing.

The first thing we need to do is to prefinish our seat frame.

It'd be very hard to apply finish with all the webbing in place.

So I've gone ahead and put a couple of coats of varnish on the frame.

With it cured out and ready, the next step is to figure out the layout where each individual piece will go.

Now, in this case, I have a series of marks laid out here which center the webbing on each side of my frame and then leave a half-inch gap in between.

So a couple of terms to cover here.

One is weft and one is warp.

A weft is the strip of webbing that's the longest, the warp is the shortest.

So with those two terms out of the way, let's go ahead and get started with the weft.

So I'm gonna go ahead and start on one side here, and what I'm going to do is simply secure the end of this weft securely to my frame.

And to do that...

I have a upholstery tacks.

Upholstery tacks are very sharp.

They're not a round... ...nail.

They've got a unique shape to them that really holds well and they'll penetrate most woods easily.

So I'm using five nails for each of my connections.

I have three and then two staggered between the other three.

The next step is gonna be to try and pull the weft very tight.

So in order to do that, I've got a backstop here that I can pull my frame against.

I'm going to lightly clamp the frame.

And what I'm gonna do... ...is give things a good tug.

Put my webbing around the frame.

Pull a little harder yet, and then I'm gonna secure this end with a clamp.

So with some tension on the webbing, I can now nail off this end and then I'll trim it to length.

And there we go.

That's our first weft.

So I'm just gonna repeat one, two, three, four more times, and we'll be ready to start the warps.

Well, as you can see, the wefts are all in place.

So now it's time to move on to the warps.

That's done pretty much the same way, except now we start weaving in and out of the wefts.

So I'll begin with things loose and I'm just gonna go ahead and weave my first warp in place.

And as before, I'll start by securing one end.

Well, that finishes our first warp, so now I'm just gonna go on down the line and fill in the remaining spaces here.

But one thing to remember, with this first warp, I dove under the weft and then back out.

But on the second one, I'm going to alternate that.

So my second warp will actually cross over the top of this weft.

So it's gonna alternate back and forth and that'll form our pattern.

And there we go.

A simple, easy seat to do, but it's very attractive, very functional.

So now we're ready to assemble our bench.

So since we've prefinished the seat frame to accommodate the webbing, I went ahead and prefinished all my different parts.

But the mortises and the tenons are all nice and clean.

So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and apply glue to just one end and one end of my seat and I'll glue that in place.

I'll glue my two stretchers in.

Then I'll go back and apply glue to the other frame and my tenon ends and then plywood this end as a cap.

Once that's done, we can set it on the bench and apply the clamps.

Alright, then, so I need to do a little cleanup with a wet rag.

Once I get that glue off, let it dry, and we'll have a beautiful beach to enjoy.

Even small projects can make a big difference in your home.

That's definitely the case from the two projects from today's episode.

Our bench and coat tree bring some welcome organization to your entryway.

If you want to build one or both of these, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

There you'll also find plans, tips, and videos to help you become a better woodworker and enjoy the time you spend in your workshop.

And we'll see you 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.