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

And welcome back to "The Woodsmith Shop."

On today's episode, it's a shop focus where we're building this shop station.

It's designed to help you cut the clutter and stay organized in your shop.

Now, what I like about it is that this project is built mostly from plywood.

So, other than cutting the pieces to size, the joinery is simple, held together with dados and wood screws.

Down below are three primary organizational bays to help you organize and store your tools, so that you know right where they are, and can get to them quickly.

A couple of work surfaces allow for extra storage, and to help you stay organized.

You can set down your plans, your coffee cup, whatever it is you need to help you get your projects done quickly and easily.

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

It's time to build.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Announcer #2: Old Masters, offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

Announcer: And by... Announcer #3: Kreg.

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

Kreg.

Announcer: Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Announcer #4: Titebond wood glues.

The Pro's Advantage.

♪♪ Announcer: And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, today's project is a shop organizer.

And it's a fantastic project because there's not one of us that couldn't use a little organization in our shops.

This thing has drawers, it's got pockets, it's got cubbies, it's got places to put portable power tools.

It'll really help make your shop organized and easier to work in.

And it's a great project because it's just the right size.

It's complex enough to hold your attention, and, if you're a seasoned woodworker, it'll still be a fun project.

But it's easy enough that it's a great entryway into woodworking.

All the joinery of this project is easy to manage.

It's gonna be dados that the ends of our parts slide into, and then we reinforce that with glue and some screws.

So, fast construction, but strong construction.

I've got all my parts pre-cut here.

I've got the ends, I've got the top shelving, I've got the lower shelving and I've got some various dividers, here.

So, with all the parts cut, we're ready to go.

Now, I'm gonna use a table saw to cut all of these dados, but you don't have to.

You know, a router and a straight edge will work fantastic.

The only thing you have to watch is all plywoods are not the stated thickness that you might think.

Now, I'm using Baltic birch plywood, here, which is metric, so it's more like about 0.7022, somewhere in that range.

But even 3/4 inch plywood can vary a little bit, so always make plenty of test cuts, and be sure what you're doing before you commit yourself.

I've gone through a couple of different trials with my dado stack, using shims to come out at just the right fit.

And it's sure easier to get the right fit up front than fighting with a tight fit or put up with a sloppy fit when you're assembling.

Well, we spent some time at the table saw, cutting dados.

Got dados on our sides, we've got dados on the shelving, and we have dados in some of the dividers.

Now, it is time to turn our attention to cutting a profile on the two sides.

This profile is gonna create kind of a hutch-like situation with our lower portion of our shop organizer.

That's gonna give a nice shelf to set things on, make it a little bit easier to use.

This upper portion is the same width as the upper unit of the two-piece combination.

So, it's gonna be slick, and turn out really nice, with the top unit flowing into the bottom.

Now, to make this cut, I've drilled a half-inch hole right where my two lines intersect.

And that's gonna form a nice transition.

And it gives me an ending point for my saw to terminate the cut into.

At the table saw, we've got one more little chore to do.

I need to cut a rabbet on the back inside edge of our two sides.

And that rabbet will later house a piece of quarter-inch plywood to finish off the back of our cabinet.

One of the things that's gonna make the assembly of our shop organizer easy, and make it super strong, is the use of screws along with our joinery.

So, in the drill press, here, I've got a tapered spiral bit, which is a fantastic drill bit to use for holes.

And it has a countersink on it.

So, drill and countersink all in an easy operation.

Now, to mark out all of these different holes, rather than marking it out from the face, I'm actually using the dado as a guide.

It's just safer that way.

It does mean I have to drill the holes in two steps.

So, what I'll do is, first, drill just with the tapered portion of my drill bit, and go all the way through the plywood, so that it leaves a hole on the other side.

When I'm done with that, I'll flip it over.

And I've got my depth stop set so that the countersink will go just the right distance into my plywood.

And that way, we'll have even holes, and best of all, they'll be in the right spot.

The next thing we need to do is to cut two slots on the lower shelf and the upper shelf.

And those slots are gonna house these hardboard pull-outs.

And they're gonna help organize our shop organizer.

So, let's go ahead and get these cut.

One of the great things about the shop organizer is that it has designated spots for cordless power tools.

What I'm working on right now is the drill shelf.

There's gonna be three slots cut into it, and each of these slots will be a home for a cordless drill.

Now, the slots start by drilling an inch and a half hole at the root of each slot.

When I've done that, I'll use my jig saw, and cut out the remaining waste.

Now, on the lower shelf of the main unit that we're working on, there's also two slots, one for cordless circular saw and one for a jig saw.

There are gonna be dimensioned a little bit differently, but they're made essentially the same way.

Well, lots of cutting dados, lots of drilling, lots of jig-sawing, but we are finally here at the point where we're gonna start gluing things up.

Now, the easiest way to tackle this glue-up is to go ahead and assemble the top shelves and the dividers.

Then, I'm gonna assemble the lower shelves with the two vertical dividers and the shelf of drills.

And finally, we'll cap the whole thing off with the two ends.

So, let's go ahead and get started.

I've got a box full of inch and 1/4 number eight screws.

These are sort of a self-drilling style, which will be perfect, and a glue bottle.

We're ready to go.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Okay, before I flip the side up and screw it on, I want to point out I've got the lower shelves and the upper shelves propped up on a piece of quarter-inch plywood, and that's gonna flush off the face of all of our pieces, here.

Well, the last parts to complete the carcass of our project is gonna be to add a quarter-inch plywood back, and then, we're gonna cap that back with two cleats.

Now, these cleats are 3/4-inch plywood, the same as we're using on the balance of the project.

And I've cut rabbets on the bottom and on the ends.

And there's also some screw holes that have been drilled.

Chris did a great job of diving into the nuts and bolts of constructing this lower section of our shop organizer.

However, I want to just take a little step back, and talk about kind of the philosophy behind what's going on here, and show some ways that you might want to deviate from the plans, here, depending on the tools and the things that you're gonna store here.

Now, what you'll notice, structurally, is that this lower piece has three equal-sized components.

Now, we've divided them up into a specific purpose, but, depending on your tools, you could incorporate one or more of these, or leave them out altogether.

So, let's start over here, at this far end.

Now, Chris talked about it when he was making it, but the base of our piece, here, has these long, deep slots.

And that's to hold a couple of cutting tools.

The first is a jigsaw.

Now, a jigsaw usually has the blade protruding out the bottom, and you want to be able to store it easily.

And that's what this short slot is for.

You can just slide it into place, park it there, and the blade isn't gonna get damaged.

Same thing goes for a circular saw, where the blade and the blade guard are sticking down below the base of the tool, as well.

You can just... slide the saw in place.

It's ready to go, really easy to get at.

Now, we'll move on to the middle section, where, you remember, Chris added this divider panel that has more slots in it that are a little wider.

And these are for putting in your cordless drill drivers and some of your other tools that would kind of fit in there, as well.

Now, this third compartment is another flexible option that you can include.

Just has a couple of dados that were cut in both the bottom and then this middle divider piece, here.

What these are for... are hardboard dividers that slide into place.

You could put two of them in there.

You can slide, like, some of your cordless nailers or some of the narrower tools or supplies.

You know, saw blades would fit in there really well, for your table saw -- things like that.

The nice thing is, is these aren't meant to be glued in place, so you can mix and match how many of them you want to have in here.

So, if you had one narrow tool, you could just slide that in place, something a little bulkier, have a little bit more options.

Feel free to add more if you want to increase the amount of space that you have there for even smaller items.

So, what we're gonna do now is add a little cutout detail to the front of these hardboard dividers, just to have a little better access to the contents inside.

So, let me show you how that works.

All right, so, for these dividers, what I want to do is make a cutout along the front edge, like I said.

So, in order to do that, I've laid out a set of stop lines at the top and bottom for a convex transition.

Then, there's another set of lines, here, for a concave transition to the cutout itself.

It sounds a little confusing, but see what we got going on here.

We're gonna have a round profile, here, to eliminate a sharp corner.

You're not gonna bang your knuckles on it.

And then, we're gonna blend that into another radius, concave radius to go into the cutout.

The way I'm doing that is using a set of circle templates.

You can pick these up at art supply stores.

They're really handy for drawing in circles -- a lot easier, sometimes, than using a compass.

So, I'm gonna use the 1-inch circle down over here.

And I'm gonna line up my center lines with that first stop line, and draw in... the radius -- kind of over-draw it, so that I can see where it's gonna go.

For the larger radius I have a bigger one, here.

And I'm using the inch and a half circle.

And what I want to do is find this tangent of the inch and a half circle, and line that up with the tangent here, with my center lines on the stop line.

Now, when I draw that in, that's the transition into the cut-out.

Then, we're just gonna connect the dots with a ruler, here.

Lining up those marks.

All right.

Now, if we do some erasing, just to clear up the lines.

Now you can see how that cut-out is gonna take shape.

Now, to start forming it, we're gonna head over to the drill press.

Drill press might seem like a weird tool to be talking about shaping parts, but it actually comes in really handy for cutting an inside radius.

So, rather than use a saw or whatever to try and shape, and then have to smooth out, that curve, what I'm gonna use is a drill bit instead.

So, I have an inch and a half Forstner bit installed in the drill press, and I've set it up with the fence and a stop block, here, to register the part exactly where I need it to be.

So, when I come down with the bit, it's gonna follow that curve that I laid out.

To get the other side, all I have to do is flip it upside down.

And then we'll connect the dots later, over at the band saw.

All right, the last element here on our cut out is to ease that transition into the cut-out.

So, before leaving the band saw, I just kind of dog eared the one corner.

What I want to do now is turn that into a smooth roundover.

And since we're working with hardboard, I'm just gonna use a file... ...following along, and just rotating it as we make some strokes, to ease that into the corner that I'm looking for.

The layout lines are your guide here, but the ultimate authority is just gonna be when you feel it, if it has a nice smooth transition, and it's free of any lumps and bumps.

Last thing to do is just grab some sandpaper... ...and kind of grind away some of those little fuzzies that are left over.

And there we go.

Now, we can slide it into place.

You can really see here how those cut-outs help give you a little bit more access to each of those compartments.

The last little bit of storage that we're gonna add to this lower section is three drawers up here at the top.

And we're gonna start that process over at the table saw.

For my part of the shop organizer, I'm gonna make three drawers that fit in that top section.

Now, one of the things is that, because those drawers are relatively shallow, we're gonna have them run on full extension drawer slides.

And while that might seem like it's overkill, because they're not very deep, it's really easy to pull those drawers out way too far, spilling the contents on the floor.

So, what I want to do is incorporate the slides, but I don't want them visible.

So, for that, you can see one of the drawers, here, and the type of joinery that we're using.

At the front corner, we have what's called a "locking rabbet joint."

And that's where the front overlaps the sides.

And then, there's another tongue on the inside, here, that fits into a dado on the drawer sides, securing everything.

Now, you'll notice that the front overlaps quite a bit, and that's so that, when the drawer slides are in place, they're concealed here, and I still have a nice even gap all the way around the front of the drawer.

It makes things a little challenging when you get set up here, but once you kind of understand what's going on, it's pretty easy.

And you'll see that as we get going.

So, what I need to do is, we're gonna start with the drawer front, and we're gonna cut a slot across the end that accounts for the overlap for the drawer slide, and then also for the thickness of the drawer side.

That means we need to hold the drawer front vertically while we cut that slot.

To do that, I've set up here a shop-made tenoning jig.

Now, if you have a regular tenoning jig for your table saw, you can just as easily use that.

So, what this does... holds my drawer front perpendicular to the saw table, for making that slot.

For the slot itself, I have a dado blade set up in the table saw.

And the distance between the dado blade and the fence on the tenon -- tenoning jig matches the width of the dado blade.

You'll see why that's important, too, in the second step.

All right, the next step in creating our locking rabbet joint here at the table saw is I have the drawer fronts, here, still.

And after the slot, we need to trim away the inside tab of that slot, in order to make room both for the drawer side, and for the full extension drawer slides that we're gonna be using.

All right, we can turn our attention now to the sides of the drawer.

And you can see just how short these are.

So, that means that draw isn't very deep.

Now, what we need to do is we're gonna cut a dado near the front end, and that's gonna interlock with that slot that we did on the drawer front.

We're gonna do the same thing at the back end.

And even though the draw joint is a little bit different here, just a tongue and dado, our same setup is gonna work just as well.

All right, the last step that we need to take care of on the corner joints for the drawer is for the drawer back.

So, I have it cut to size, here.

And what you're gonna do is form a tongue on each end of the drawer back.

And that's gonna fit into the dado that we cut in the drawer sides.

before we step away from the table saw to do some assembly, we want to cut a groove in all of our draw parts to hold the drawer bottom.

Otherwise, it's not as useful.

All right, we're ready to install the drawers here, in the top of the case.

Now, one thing that's not obvious with full extension slides like this is that, even though they have these three segments here, it actually comes apart.

So, there's a lever on the inside.

And if I depress that lever, and pull it out, it separates the drawer slide into two components.

This bigger piece gets installed on the inside of the case.

So you can just line it up, and put it in there.

The smaller section you can use to install onto the drawer side.

So, you have the two separate components, and then you just click them together, and you're all set.

It eliminates a lot of fumbling and putting the slides in place.

So, what I've done on the drawers is marked out a center line on the width -- or the height -- of the drawer sides, and drawn that in place.

I've also made a mark on the inside of the case that shows me the setback for where I want the front edge of that slide to be when I install it.

All right, that's how the drawer looks when it's installed and the slides are all engaged.

However, I didn't put the draw front or the draw pull on there, so I need to be able to get that draw open.

What I have is a little piece of metal flashing.

So that tab is just kind of bent over on itself.

Now, I can use this kind of like a slim jim, to be able to get into the -- over the top of the drawer front, and pull it open.

And you can see, there we are, We have the drawer installed.

I can get to everything inside, and better yet, see stuff, so that it's not lost in there, and nothing's dumping out on the floor.

Once I get the other two drawers installed, we can hang this on the wall.

Adding the drawers to our shop station really are great for adding another layer of storage and organization.

And I also put on a couple of tool mats on the work surfaces, just to break up that look of the plywood, and provide a cushioned surface for whatever you want to do on these two shelf and work areas.

Now, speaking of layers of storage, this project includes another component, and it's this upper wall cabinet unit.

And you can see that there are a variety of storage options up there, as well -- a couple of adjustable shelves and a center compartment that we added a slot to be able to store a router.

And you can still leave the bit installed, much like we did with the jigsaw and the circular saw unit down below.

If you're ready to upgrade your workshop, this shop station might be just the project you're looking for.

You can find the plans.

They're at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

It's also a great place to find project inspiration for the next furniture project you want to build, techniques to help you become a better woodworker and great ideas to keep you organized and happy in your workshop.

And then, we'll meet right back here to build 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... Announcer #2: Old Masters, offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

Announcer: And by... Announcer #3: Kreg.

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

Kreg.

Announcer: Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Announcer #4: Titebond wood glues.

The Pro's Advantage.

♪♪ Announcer: And by... ♪♪ ♪♪