[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] Our special guest on today's episode is Mike Pekovich.

He's the editor and creative director at Fine Woodworking magazine and one of my colleagues.

And on today's show, we're going to be building his tea chest.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Phil.

Yeah, glad to be here.

Now, let's talk a little bit about the design of this particular tea chest, because it's not just a small box.

No, there's a lot going on.

It's a really cool little project with a lot of interesting things.

The way this works is there's a lid which folds in half, and that allows you to reach in and pull out your nice little trays packed with your tea packets.

And it's just a really fun presentation and a fun way to entertain company.

If you want to build along, you'll find the plans at our website WoodsmithShop.com.

So let's get 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...

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.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I've got all my case parts cut.

I don't know the exact dimensions of all these parts.

That's not really critical.

What is really critical is that all the parts start at exactly the same width, and the short ends start exactly the same length, and the long pieces start exactly the same length.

This way we can do without a lot of unnecessary measuring, and still end up with a box that's coming together square.

The marks that I'm putting on these pieces are going to happen on the top edges.

I'm going to start by holding two pieces together, marking a triangle across both pieces.

The point of the triangle is facing towards me.

This is the front of the box.

The sides all do the same thing and mark a triangle across.

In this case, the triangle is going in the opposite orientation in regard to the parts, but this, once again, is facing to the front of the case.

So now when I organize these parts, all my triangles should line up and come together to create one big triangle.

It's a really traditional method.

Cabinetmaker's triangles been used for hundreds of years.

It's really smart way to keep all of your parts in order.

So on my long sides...

I'm going to have my groove for my drawer bottom at the bottom.

I'm also going to have my shallow rabbet along that top edge... ...for the lid to sit in.

I'm going to sandwich those back together temporarily to keep my orientation lined up.

And mark that groove in the rabbet on that piece, too.

And I'm always, once I'm done, I'm going to go ahead and gang those back up with my triangles matching.

I should be able to butterfly those open and see all my marks where they're supposed to go.

So everything is happening on the inside face as opposed to the outside.

In addition, I'm going to make some marks for where we're going to be drilling... ...some pins for our center divider.

Whenever I'm doing any joinery like this, I always want to start by establishing the shoulder line.

I'll use a marking gauge for this.

As we talked about earlier, I do like the proud joinery.

So that's really easily affected just by setting my marking gauge a little bit longer than the thickness of the stock.

So however much longer it is, that's how much those pins are going to stick out.

I'm also going to be scribing shoulders on the short ends that are going to receive the pins as well.

I have a specially ground table saw blade to cut the tails, so two things I need to get right.

I need to tilt it to the correct angle, and then I need to set the height.

To set it to the angle, I'd just like to use a digital angle gauge.

Turn it on, set it on the table.

It has a magnetic base.

I zero it out, mount it to the side, and then I'm just going to tilt it over 8 1/2 degrees, which is the angle that my saw is ground to.

If we look at the dovetail layout on the case from the outside, it looks a little bit odd.

We have our three tails in the center with really wide, basically half-pin sockets on either side.

The reason for that is that allows us to run this rabbet in the groove on the top and bottom edges without running into those dovetails.

What that means is we can cut those all the way through and not have to worry about that.

With this setup here, this is setting up the angle for me and the height.

I really just need to know where the center line is going to be.

I'm just going to make a mark just centered where I want those pin sockets to be.

Or if I have a lot of parts and pieces to do, what I can do is go ahead and set my workpiece up on the sled with one of my tick marks aligned with the center of my curve, and I can just make a mark on the sled top itself.

So with those marks in place, I can just align the rest of the pieces to those marks without having to do a lot of layout.

On the first pass of cuts, what we're doing is we're defining just one side of our pin socket here.

So we'll come back, flip the board to create the rest of those pins, as well as that half-pin socket on the opposite side.

So I'd like to chop halfway through from each face.

And to do so, I like to hold the chisel really low by the blade.

I have a lot of control rather than holding it by the handle.

It's a little bit more difficult for me to place, and also with my hand in contact with the wood, I have a nice break that keeps the chisel from inadvertently going too far.

So the first thing I want to do is go ahead and take a look at my triangles, get my parts realigned the way they should be, and then I'm just going to kind of keep them in their rough position as I clamp it in place.

Okay, so there's a lot of things we need to get right, right now.

So we need to, um, first of all, keep this in a position where it's not going to be moving as we're scribing.

Secondly, we need to lock this in the proper position both side-to-side, front-to-back and rotationally.

So it's a lot to get right.

And finally, once we're done scribing, we need a guide to what side of the line we need to be sawing on.

Because even if we have our scribe lines where we want and we're sawing on the wrong side, we're introducing gaps before we even get going.

So I'm tackling this in a few different ways.

All of them dead cent-- dead simple.

But all of them, I think, really essential to this process.

So the first thing I'm going to do is throw some tape along the end grain.

This is going to give me a guide.

Once I scribe through the tape and peel away the waste areas, I can see my line really, really well.

It's also going to tell me what side of the line I need to be sawing on.

So as long as the tape is in the right place and we don't cut into the tape, we're cutting really good dovetails.

So what I like to do is just add a temporary rabbet by taking a piece of MDF.

This has a little slotted block glued along the edge to create a fence.

I'm just aligning that plate right with my scribe line.

So basically I'm creating a temporary rabbet at that scribe line.

I can hold those two pieces together, bring that against my pins board, slide it over until my fence hits the edge of my board.

Now I'm lying front-to-back, side-to-side, and rotationally I should be really, really square.

So I've scribed all the way across.

Now I'm just peeling away the tape from the waste areas.

And as long as my knife trimmed right adjacent to my tail, I should be in good shape.

And one way to test that out, what we've done actually, we've just cut a really, really shallow dovetail joint, basically the thickness of the piece of tape.

So I should be able to bring this work piece back up, slide it back and forth, and it should literally lock in place.

That tells me that the tape is where it needs to be.

And I can also take a look down.

And if I have any gaps where I see some wood between the tape and the pen, it just meant that I scribed a little too far away.

In that case, just put some new tape on there and try it again until everything is right.

This is the stage we need to get right.

Because if our marks are in the right place, we're good.

If they're in the wrong place, and even if we can hit them perfectly with our saw and chisel, it's still not going to be a joint that fits as well as we would like to.

So from this point on, I'm just going to bring a pencil line down from the tape area to my scribe line, just as a general guide for sawing vertically.

And from this point on, again, the closer we saw to the tape, the less fitting we're going to have to do.

Um, what I would like ideally is right off the saw, I would like the joint to seat at least partially one side or the other, because then I have some reference for figuring out where I need to trim to get it to fit all the way.

If it doesn't fit at all, if I'm a little too conservative sawing away from all of my lines, it can be a little tough to know where to get going.

When I'm sawing, my saw foot is really back in a wide stance to give me a really stable base.

I'm trying to keep this saw aligned with my forearm nice and straight, which is aligned with my upper arm, which is then aligned with the point of my shoulder.

Okay, that's the hard part.

The next step is really just getting rid of everything between our tape down to our base line.

I want to show you a technique that I use quite a bit, which is coping out most of the waste within about a quarter inch of the bottom.

This sounds like it could be a little bit overkill, but it's a really, really cool technique.

I'm using a short, straight-bearing guided bit.

And what that allows me to do is it allows the bearing to run against the sidewall of the pin.

So I'm not inadvertently cutting into anything I don't want to be cutting into, but allows me to route right down to the baseline.

One crucial step I want to take care of is to make sure that the walls of my pins are perfectly vertical.

Because if those are angling at all, it means that as we're driving the joint home, that joint can get tighter and tighter and we'll finally split those parts.

So all I'd like to use a chisel a little bit wider than the stock, and as long as my grain on my workpiece is going straight up and down.

Now I can go ahead and assess the fit at this point.

Okay, so really, that was just enough to get the whole thing fully started.

And I can probably get it fully seated.

But if you're getting halfway down and it's still a little bit too tight and your walls are nice and straight... ...you can run a little pencil line along the bottom edges of your tails in the pin sockets.

What this will do is once we tap it back in place, it'll transfer any pencil to areas which are just a little bit too tight.

I'm really using the chisel to erase the pencil line.

So that looks pretty good.

And that was just enough to get a really nice fit.

With the dovetailing done, I went ahead and knocked out the rabbet and groove at the table saw and drilled a couple holes with the drill press for our center divider and our handles on the ends of the case.

So everything's ready, and it can be tempting to go ahead and glue everything up right now, but it's really going to pay off if we take a few minutes and do some prep beforehand.

Somewhere in between a hand plane and sanding is a card scraper, so a card scraper can do away with a ton of sanding for me, but it doesn't run the risk of tearing out on something like white oak.

For the short edges, I can go ahead and hit those with the hand plane.

In order to keep this nice and square.

I'll keep this flat on the bench and I'll just run my hand plane on its side on the bench.

The pins and tails are going to be proud of the surface.

I want to do a little something to make them a little bit friendlier to the touch, so I can hit the long edges with a block plane, or I can use the sanding stick to perform that same task.

I'm still trying to keep it at roughly a 45 degree angle.

I'm looking for just a light chamfer rather than a true roundover.

So once I'm done scraping a surface, um, the reason why the scraper doesn't tear out is because we're scraping beyond 90.

We're really compressing those fibers, so that keeps them from lifting and tearing.

But at the same time, it creates a surface a little bit rougher than a normal hand plane would.

So at this point, I can just take some 400 grit sandpaper and go across that scraped surface.

And it leaves just a really, really smooth finish without a ton of sanding.

One thing I like to do is pre-finish the end grain.

This is just blonde shellac which has been thinned down with denatured alcohol.

And I can just use a -- just a cotton rag to put finish on that end grain.

So what we're doing is we're really pre-sealing this.

So if we do get any glue on there, Number one, it's not going to mess up our finish.

And it's also going to allow any glue to pop off really easily.

So the only structural glue surface is really where the sides of the pins meet the sides of the tails.

So there's no reason to put a lot of glue on the end grain between the pins, because that's just going to cause a lot of squeeze out and isn't really strengthening that joint force too much.

♪♪ ♪♪ Case getting glued up.

I want to turn my attention to the lid frames.

The big challenge here is that we're working with pretty small parts.

And a really cool way to tackle the joinery on something like that is by using loose tenons.

Getting the slots cut where we want them so that the parts come together... nice and flat and align where we want, that's the trick.

So I have this situated so the blade height cuts roughly centered on our stock.

I know it's not perfect.

So in order to keep all of my parts in alignment, once everything comes together, I need to make sure that I'm always keeping the consistent faces of the parts facing up.

Ready to start in on the joinery for our little lift out trays.

It's pretty simple and pretty quick.

All of this is handled at the table saw.

So these are just thin pieces of stock which are mitered at the corners.

The really cool thing about a mitered box like this is that all of the joinery is hidden by those miters, which means we can go ahead and cut those grooves for the bottom before we even cut the parts apart.

To cut the miters for our trays, I'm starting out pretty much with the same situation as the dovetails.

I have a sled specifically designed for miters.

Again, it's just a U-shaped box attached to miter gauges.

What makes this a little bit different than what we use for the dovetails is that, um, first off, there's a pair of stops that run along a T-track.

This allows me to cut both the long and the short sides of the trays without having to readjust the stops.

The most important thing is that there's an added bed to the right of the blade.

That makes it a little bit elevated, so that when we make the cut, the offcut is actually going to drop down and away from the blade, so this is much safer.

Gluing up the trays is much more straightforward process than the chest was.

In fact, we don't need any clamps at all.

Blue tape is going to provide all of the clamping pressure we need.

Just like the case, I would like to do some pre-finishing.

It's much easier to get the inside faces of our tray parts now rather than later.

The other cool thing is that getting a thin coat of shellac on the inside faces will make getting rid of any potential glue squeeze out really easy to pop off later on.

The next step, once the shellac is dry, is to go ahead and get some tape going across the outside faces.

To keep the parts aligned, I like to use some sort of straight edge.

It can be as simple as a piece of scrap clamped into your vise.

So I'm just going to arrange these making sure that the groove is facing down on all the parts.

And I am alternating between long parts and short parts.

I'd like to minimize the squeeze out as much as possible.

So what I'm doing is I'm putting most of the glue down at the bottom of the V where the parts meet.

Get the bottom in place.

And just wrap the sides up... ...around the bottom.

Bring that last side up and just make sure that last edge is aligned.

So I'll glue this divider in place.

That takes care of our trays.

The handles for the case are really, really simple.

It's a really fun technique and I use it on a lot of stuff.

So basically the finished product is two lengths of 4-millimeter hemp cord, which is then wrapped in the center with the 20-pound twine, and it just gives it kind of a nice look.

I start with a pair of cord lengths and about 6 feet of the twine, and I will kind of pinch the end in toward the center with my thumb, and then just wrap around that tail...as I go.

I'm trying to keep the winds really tight next to each other without overlapping them.

So I've got a scrap piece of twine here, which I am going to loop in half, and then I'm going to take that loop and lay it over the wrap, and then continue to wrap... over the loop the rest of the way through.

To finish off...

...I'm going to go ahead and just... slide the tail through the loop.

Hold that fairly snug, and then I'm just going to pull the ends of the loop through.

And that pulls that tail all the way under the wraps.

The trick is to take this cord and thread it from the outside in through those holes I've already drilled, and it can get kind of frayed.

So the easiest way to make that happen is to just get some tape.

So I've got all four ends in place, and I can do some fine adjustments by how tightly I'm pulling the cord in.

What I like to do is I like to pull the upper cords a little bit tighter, leaving a little bit longer length at the bottom.

That just kind of gives us a sense that it's a real handle.

So now the trick is kind of figuring out how I'm going to keep this cord in place and not leave a big mess on the inside.

What I like to do is to start with some dowel stock, which is the same diameter as the hole, and with a chisel, I'm going to pare a little kind of a sharp bevel on there, and we're going to drive that into the hole from the inside and then trim everything flush.

[ Saw rasping ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ All right, Mike, you spent time on talking about the joinery for the lids themselves, but what's on the inside of the lid is a little something special to you, right?

Yes, so this lid on this particular box is filled out with a Kumiko panel.

That's a Japanese lattice work technique, which is really, really fun.

It starts with just a half-flap grid, creating some squares, and then filling out each of those squares with smaller beveled parts.

It's a great technique.

I think it's a nice place to show something like this off in a box like this, but the box works really well with any sort of panel.

I think if you've got some nice veneers hanging around or even some special figured scraps you don't know what to do with, I think that'd be a wonderful accent to this piece.

Yeah, and that's what I like about it, is having a box where you can have the confidence in knowing that the whole thing is going to turn out, but then you can make it your own with something really simple.

That's the whole idea is, I hope this is just a starting point, to take it wherever you want to.

All right, well, thanks for joining us on today's episode.

And, uh, if you'd like to build along with Mike on this box, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

You'll also find a lot of other great woodworking plans, project inspiration, techniques to help you become a better woodworker.

And then after spending some time in your own shop, we'll gather right back here for another great project on "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.