[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] Welcome to "The Woodsmith Shop."

On today's episode, we're building this handsome storage cabinet.

It's been in our own shop for more than 10 years, and it's stored everything from hand tools to glue, hardware, and supplies.

I'm sure you can find a use for it in your shop or even in your home as some practical storage.

It's time to start building.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

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

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

Kreg.

And by... [ Up-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Mid-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ And one of the criteria for choosing a shop project to build on the show is that it's got to prove its usefulness in our own shop.

This rolling tool cabinet has been hard at work in the Woodsmith workshop for the last 10 years.

It's held screws, hardware, and tools.

And I think that's what I like about it is, the real focus on versatile storage.

So, while we're calling it a tool cabinet, it really could just as easily be like a craft supplies cabinet, a pantry cabinet.

Absolutely.

This cabinet has adjustable shelving, plenty of drawers.

Paint it any color.

Put any finish you want on it.

It'll look great in your home.

And there's a lot that you can learn about it from woodworking.

Like, the case itself is made out of plywood so you can go together quickly and easily.

And these frame-and-panel doors and the drawers -- hardwood.

So you'll learn a lot about that.

Now, to start building your own, you'll need plans, and they're at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

Let's start building.

The first step in the construction of our roll-around tool cabinet is to cut the plywood parts to size.

Now, as you know, handling 4x8 sheets of plywood in a small shop or a basement shop can be a real challenge.

So what I did was use a track-saw system to cut those large sheets of plywood down into manageable parts.

Well, with the parts cut, it's time for joinery.

On the table saw here, I've got a 3/8 dado stack set up 1/4 of an inch high, and that's going to cut dados in my sides, which will hold the top and the bottom.

And when I'm done with that, I'm going to move my fence and I'll cut another dado that houses the shelf.

From there, it's time to cut dados in the top and bottom of the shelf and the bottom, which will hold vertical dividers.

And when that's done, I will cut tenons on the top and the bottom.

That'll complete the basic joinery of our cabinet and allow us to go ahead and dry-fit and move on to the glue-up.

Here are the plywood parts for the rolling tool cabinet.

I've got my two sides, the top, the shelf, and the bottom, an upper divider and a lower divider so it'll all dry-fit together before glue-up.

Now, all the joinery is snug, but it's not tight.

If you're joinery is overly tight, when we start applying glue, the wood's going to swell a little bit, and it's going to be a fight to get things together.

So keep your joinery snug but never tight.

I'll begin the process of gluing up by gluing my side to the bottom, the shelf, and the top.

Next, I'll slip in my dividers, and I'm going to finish with the opposing side.

I'll apply a few clamps, and then -- very important -- I'm going to take a measuring tape and I'll measure diagonals across the cabinet and make absolutely sure that it's square.

To give our tool chest a finished appearance and to cover up the plywood edge of the case.

I'm adding a face frame.

The face frame, as you see here, is composed of five parts and I'm assembling them using pocket-hole screws.

Then that whole assembly will be securely glued to the front of our cabinet.

Well, I'm ready to attach my face frame to the cabinet.

Now, I made my face frame the exact size of the box, but there's another little strategy you can apply, and that is you can make your face frame a little larger.

And that way, instead of having to have everything exactly flush and perfectly sized, you can let it overhang and just trim in off later.

I've been prepping the surface here with my block plane and making sure all the joints are true and flat to achieve a good glue joint.

Now, speaking of glue, there's a lot of surface area here, so I think just glue alone will give me ample strength for my face frame.

I'm not going to add any biscuits, nails, screws, or otherwise.

So I'm going to go ahead, add a little glue, and start putting on my face frame.

Here are two more components for our case.

First, this bottom plate to which the casters will be mounted.

The bottom plate is simply a piece of plywood to which we've applied 3/8 x 3/4 inch edging, mitered at the corners, all the way around to hide that plywood edge.

The second component is our finished top.

Now, here we wanted to jazz things up a little bit, and instead of having just plain plywood, we wanted to mimic the look of a breadboard-end solid-wood top.

So, breadboard ends, tongue cut on each one.

Groove cut on the end of our piece of plywood.

The breadboard ends fit in like so.

And we've notched the tongue off of each of these breadboard ends so that a piece of edging can be applied front and back of our finished top, give it a nice, crisp look.

Well, as you can see, I've added the casters and caster plate, I've added the finished top, and this wonderful detail in these corbels.

If you look at the back of the tool cabinet, you'll see it has this beautiful frame-and-panel back.

It's a great detail.

Now, the doors in the cabinet are made exactly the same way as the back.

And Phil's going to tell you all about that.

The starting point for our frame-and-panel construction is getting our pieces roughly sized.

So, you can see here I have my hardwood pieces, the long styles and the center style, top and bottom rails, and my two plywood panels.

Now, it's these plywood panels, actually, that are driving this whole thing.

So, creating the joinery, what I'm going to do is cut a groove on the inside edge of all of my hardwood pieces to fit that plywood panel.

Now, I want that fit to be nice and snug.

That way, when I add glue, it's going to create a really strong glue joint so the plywood panels getting glued in place creates a much more rigid, stronger assembly overall.

Now, to make those grooves, what I'm going to do is use some test pieces, and what I'm looking for is that plywood to slip in with just a little bit of resistance.

The key to doing that is to set up the table saw.

So I have just a regular blade in the saw here.

And as I slide this test piece up, you can see that the blade is just slightly offset from the center line of my work piece.

This way I can make a pass along one edge.

I'll take the piece, flip it around, and make a second pass using the other face as a reference.

And now I've made that groove just slightly wider.

And that's where those test pieces come into play so that you can get that nice snug fit into the groove with the plywood.

So I want to make sure that I cut those grooves on the inside-facing edges of all of my parts.

While the grooves and the sizing of those grooves are most important, they really only tell half the story here.

Those grooves allow the plywood to fit into the hardwood pieces.

But we still need to do is allow the short rails to fit into the long styles, too.

And that's where the stub tenon comes into play.

What we're going to do is create a short tenon on each end of the two rails.

Now, that tenon needs to be the same thickness as our plywood, which is the same width as our grooves.

In order to do that, I've set up a dado blade here in the table saw and made some test cuts so that both the length of the tenon created and its thickness match the width of the groove.

So once I have those stub tenons created, we could head back over to the bench and talk about assembling this construction.

There's a couple of pitfalls when it comes to assembling a door.

On the one hand, you can get a little too eager to start grabbing the glue bottle and the clamps and start putting it together.

On the other hand, it's also easy to overlook the process, and as a result from both is that you can end up with a door that just doesn't work right.

So here's the process that I use when I'm working with a frame-and-panel door.

Step one is to cut your joints as accurately as possible so that they fit right from the table saw.

That way, you can minimize the amount of fussing that you need to do on each of the joints.

The second is to dry-assemble the whole door to make sure everything fits right and it's going to clamp up tight.

So, I've done that already, so I'm ready to get started on the glue-up process, and I'm going to show you a few of the things that I use.

For starters, one of the main advantages of a frame-and-panel assembly like this is being able to add strength to the overall assembly by gluing the plywood panels in place.

So I'm going to start by adding a bead of glue on the inside of this long style.

Now, I'm using a slow-set glue just to give me enough time to be able to get all the joints pulled together and move things around as I need to.

The other thing I like about slow-set glue like this is that I like to have the joints a little tighter-fitting.

So, the slow-set glue that I'm using -- it's a liquid-hide glue -- will lubricate the joints and help those go together a little smoother.

So, I'll put glue in, add a rail on one end.

Then I can add the opposite rail.

Put a little glue, just a bit, on the stub tenons.

And then it's just a matter of kind of adding pieces as you go.

♪♪ ♪♪ Now, when you're clamping up, of course you want to have a clamp that goes across each of the rails where that joint is.

But then it's also a good idea to apply a clamp somewhere along the middle, so just enough pressure to make sure that you have a flat assembly.

And then, to the final step, before letting this sit and letting the glue dry, is to come across with a straight edge and make sure that the rails and styles are flat.

Because if you put too much clamping pressure on, you can end up flexing the assembly and creating either a concave or convex door.

And again, that's not going to sit right, either.

So, once these doors are dry, it's time to install them.

Installing doors in a project is kind of like its own project, and it's easy to overlook being able to get a nice, accurate fit.

Now, this project has four doors and we've already installed the two lower doors just to give you an idea of what we're looking for.

So, you can see the two doors are in place.

They open and close easily without binding on each other.

But what's more important than the function almost is the gaps along the sides, the top and bottom, and where the doors meet.

Now, you want that gap to be consistent all the way around so you don't have any kind of a gap-toothed look to it or something that looks really tight in one place and really large in another.

Now, you can go overboard here and try and dial in specific numbers, but what I'm looking for is more of a visual consistency so that when I stand back and look at the project, all of those gaps appear to be the same, whether or not there's some minor differences in them.

So here's the process that I use to fit doors in a project like this.

I'm going to start -- Or, I'm going to do that with the two upper doors.

One of them is already installed.

And when you're building a door, what I want to do is, I size the door blank, so to speak, so that it either just barely fits into the opening or barely doesn't fit into the opening.

That's going to give me enough room to be able to trim it on all four sides to be able to get the look that I'm that I want.

Now, the first step is to create a nice, smooth, tight fit on the hinge side of the door.

So, you can do this with a table saw or a jointer.

I like using just a regular hand plane to do the job.

And the reason is because I can take really fine cuts and dial in a specific fitting that I'm looking for and be able to sneak up on a nice fit.

So what I'll do is put the door in the vise, take a few passes with the hand plane so that I get a straight edge.

Now, what you can see when I hold it in place here, there's a seamless gap.

The next edge to worry about or to look at is this bottom edge right here.

And again, while this is tight on the hinge side, I want a tight fit on the bottom edge, too.

And if the door is too big, you can do that by just tipping it in place and holding it in there.

Now, I'll do that with a hand plane, as well, and I'll start by taking a pencil and then making a scribble line all across the lower edge of the door, then if I need to make a tapered cut, I can make a few stopped passes with my hand plane where the door still fits tight and then a long, continuous pass in order to clean up and straighten the edge so that when I set it in place like I just did you can see that it fits really well.

From there, we can look at the top of the door, and here's where we can start setting our gaps.

So, I have two spaces here that are just some big -- big old washers that I can set the door on.

And that sets the gap at the bottom, and then I can mark the door and trim it at the top.

Now, again, you can do this at the table saw or with a few passes with a hand plane.

One thing you want to be aware of, though, if your hand-planing across the top of the door with these long styles is that, as you go across, you can end up causing tear-out on this back edge.

So what I'll do is, I'll make a pass across the top of the door about 2/3, 3/4 of the way, and then stop.

And then I'll come in from the other direction and level out that edge.

That way, I'm going to avoid creating any tear-out on either ends of the door.

So, now what I have here is the gap set on the top and the bottom.

I have a nice tight fit here, so I want to be able to use those same spacers on the hinge side to set the hinge.

And then, that'll give me the final setting for where the two doors meet.

And as you can see here, things are a little tight.

So I'm going to have to make a tapered cut on the top of this door and then trim the inside edges, and then these two doors will be fit and I can install the hinges.

Now, speaking of hinges, on this project, we're using what are called surface-mounted HL hinges.

And I really like using surface-mounted hinges for two reasons.

One, they add a really cool visual flair to the project, and, two, they're really easy to install.

I can just wedge the door in place with my spacers and install them right on the surface without having to balance a door open and drill screws into the edges and things like that.

So, I'll get these -- these two doors straightened up, and then it's over to Logan to add the shelves and the drawers on the inside.

So, when it comes to drawer joints, we want the drawer not only to be strong and resist the force of you opening the drawer and not wanting to come apart, but we also occasionally want the drawer to look good, as well.

So in the case of these drawers, for our tool cabinet, we're going to use two joints that are very similar, with one slight difference.

The first joint is going to be for the back connection to the sides, and that is going to be a locking rabbit joint.

Moving up to the front, this is also a locking rabbit joint, but this is a lift-locking rabbit joint.

What this means is that the drawer front is wider than the drawer box, so when the drawer is closed, the lip on the front actually conceals the slides.

Now, these are both really easy to cut here at the table saw.

First thing we need to do is cut everything to size.

And it's important to note, with the lift-locking rabbit up front that the front is going to be wider than the back piece.

A lot of drawer construction, the back and the front will be the same size, but that's not the case here.

And the front, in this case, is going to be a little bit thicker, as well.

So, I'm going to go ahead and get those cut, and then we'll look at cutting these joints.

All right.

So, now that we have all of our draw parts cut to size, we can go ahead and start tackling the joinery.

The first thing that we're going to do is create a dado in the sides.

And this is going to be for one of the tongues on the front and the back.

So we need to cut to dados in each side piece.

Now, I've set up my fence here to be about a 1/4 of an inch away from the blade, and the blade is also cutting 1/4 of an inch deep.

This is where I like to hold on to all my extra offcuts from cutting the drawer parts to size.

This gives you a couple setup pieces, so as you're fine-tuning this joint, you can do it on your sample pieces.

So we're going to cut those dados first, then we'll talk about cutting the slots in the ends.

So, now that we have the dados cut in the sides of our drawers, we can go ahead and concentrate on creating the slot in the end, and then we'll nip that to create the tongue in a little bit.

Now, cutting a slot on end on a workpiece can get a little squirrelly, so we need a way to hold it.

And that's where I'm going to use this tenoning jig.

This has a clamp that locks the workpiece up against the fence, and then it rides in the miter slot and allows me to fine-tune the position on everything.

And I have it all dialed in and locked in place already.

What this does is, it's going to allow us to use the dado blade to create a slot in the workpiece just like this.

Now set the height of the blade to match the thickness of our side pieces.

And the last thing we need to do is mark a reference face.

So we'll mark a reference phase of "In."

That way, when I put this in the jig, I'll lock it in with that "in" facing the jig.

Then, when I go to flip it around to create the slot in the opposite end, we're going to make sure that that reference face is still against the jig, to make sure any variance is consistent and everything's going to fit how we want it.

So, let's go ahead and make the slots in the ends of the backs and the fronts.

The fronts, I'm going to need to increase the blade height slightly, but we'll go ahead and create the slots in those, then we'll talk about knocking the tongues off.

All right.

Final step to create this joint is to knock off the long side of the tongue that locks into the sides.

And you could switch out, do your regular crosscut blade.

However, there's no problem using the dado blade that we already had installed.

Plus, I'm going to use that dado blade again in a minute to create the grooves for the bottoms.

So, there's going to be two different setups here.

One, to create the long, lipped rabbit on the front, and then I'll shorten that up to create the rabbit on the back.

Then, after that's done, I'll cut the grooves, head over to the bench, and talk about some assembly.

So, once all the parts are cut, joinery's all done, we can get ready to assemble.

Now, you might need to do a little bit of fine-tuning.

And usually what I find is the easiest is just to grab a sanding block and hit the end of the sides, because that's that little tongue that fits into the front in the back, and that seems to make everything fit really well.

Now, there's a couple of other things I have done.

The first is create the little finger notch on the front.

This allows you to reach your finger in, pull the drawer open.

And you can do that a couple of different ways.

This is done with a Forstner bit at the drill press, or you can cut it with a bandsaw or with your scroll saw.

Then, I went ahead and cut the bottoms the size, as well.

Don't forget to put those in while you're gluing up.

And speaking of gluing up, I think we're ready to assemble.

So the trick here, in my opinion, is to not get glue all over everything.

So, what I like to do is start with the tongue.

And then see if he can get a little on the inside.

Remember, this is a mechanical joint, so the glue is just there to hold everything tight, and the joint itself will not come apart as you're using the drawer.

Now we can get the back in.

♪♪ Like I said, don't forget the bottom.

♪♪ ♪♪ All right.

So, there we go.

There is one of seven drawers glued up.

So, I'm going to glue the rest of these together, but, first, let's go take a look at the cabinet and see how these guys attach into it.

So, our drawers are mounted inside the case using metal full-extension drawer slides.

Now, these are nice for a couple of reasons.

First, because they're ball bearing, they allow you to easily open the drawers, even if they're loaded down with a heavy load like boxes of screws.

Second, because they are full extension, it allows you to fully open the drawer and you can see everything in it instead of having that dark corner in the back.

Now, the slides screw into the side of the case.

And that's not an issue until we go to the outside edge where we have that face frame because the face frame extends into the case a little bit, we need to create some filler blocks.

The filler blocks are just cut from hardwood.

And they slide into place.

And those will simply get glued in.

You might even drive a long screw from the inside, and you can see, now that those are a little proud, that gives us a location to mount the slides to.

But we'll do that after the case is painted.

So, I'm going go to glue up up the rest of the drawers, then it's on to paint.

One interesting thing about building projects is the life that your project takes once it leaves your shop.

Now, this handsome cabinet started off as a fine tool cabinet.

Since then, it's also served as a general shop-supplies cabinet, and now who knows how it'll end up.

If you'd like to build a version of your own and find out what kind of life it's going to lead, you'll find the plans.

They're at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

There you'll also find other woodworking videos, plans, and techniques.

And then, I'm looking forward to seeing you right back here in the woodsmith shop.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Phil: 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 -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

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

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

Kreg.

And by... [ Up-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪