♪♪ Welcome back to "The Woodsmith Shop."

On today's episode, we're starting a whole new adventure.

We're building a steamer trunk.

Whether you're headed off to school, on a voyage around the world, or just need a place to stash a few extra blankets for the cold winter nights, this is the project for you.

It's built out of some solid white oak that one of our cast members, Logan, actually milled here in Iowa.

If you'd like to build a version of this steamer trunk for yourself, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

It's time to get started on building our steamer trunk.

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

Announcer: And by... 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.... Man: Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

Announcer: And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ So, our steamer trunk build starts by making the case.

And in true craftsman style, this is made with stub tenon and groove joinery.

So, what I've done here is I've laid out the parts that I want to be the front of our trunk.

I'm going to pick out the grain patterns that are the best and have the biggest ray flecks on there.

So, let's look at the parts here.

We have three rails, we have a couple of stiles, and then we have these short stiles.

These are all going to come together with a bunch of grooves and stub tenons.

We're going to have a frame assembly for the front, the back, the sides, and even the bottom.

So, now that I have everything laid out where I want it, and I've identified what I want to be the front of our trunk, let's head over to the table saw, and we're going to cut some grooves, and then we'll tackle the tenons.

So, to form our grooves, I'm going to use a dado blade, and I've already loaded that up here.

Now, this dado blade is actually slightly undersized.

The plans call for a 1/4 inch groove, and this is just a hair under.

But that's okay.

What I'm going to do is, as I form these grooves, I'm going to make a pass with the workpiece with one face riding along the fence.

Then, I'm going to rotate that around and put the opposite face against the fence and recut that groove.

What that's going to do is it's going to center that groove precisely on this part.

The groove may end up being a little oversized, but that's okay.

When we cut our tenons, we'll make them fit the groove.

Now, there's a couple of things I'm going to do here.

First, I'm going to spread all my parts out and make sure I'm cutting the grooves on the right edge of the right parts.

Second, I'm going to use a featherboard.

I'll lock this in place, and this is going to help me keep pressure against the fence with the workpiece as I'm making these cuts.

The final thing I'm going to do, especially for these smaller parts, is I'm going to use a push block.

So, keeping my hands nice and clear from the blade, and I'll make sure I use dust collection because there's a lot of grooves to cut.

So, now that we have all the grooves cut, we have to cut tenons to fit into those grooves.

So, what I've done here is I've increased the width of my dado blade.

I added a couple chippers in there, and then I added this auxiliary fence, and I buried the blade in it.

What this is going to do is it's going to give me a stop for my parts, and then I'll guide my parts across the dado blade with the miter gauge.

What that's going to do is create a stub tenon that's going to then fit inside that groove.

So, I'm going to do a test cut on a part real quick.

And as long as everything fits like I want it to, all we have left to do is cut the tenons on the ends of the short parts and the rails.

Then we'll head over to the bench and talk about the panels.

So, after cutting all the joinery at the table saw, especially with white oak, I find that we get some little chips and kind of junk in the ends of these grooves.

So, before we glue everything up, I want to make sure I take a chisel and clean that up.

We don't want anything holding these joints apart when we do have glue all over everything.

There we go.

So, everything fits together really nicely.

Now the only thing we have left to take care of are the panels.

Now in the plans, these are going to be plywood panels 1/4 inch thick.

However, here, we decided to make this case really heavy and make them out of solid wood.

So, we've cut 1/2-inch-thick solid wood panels.

Now, to get the 1/2-inch-thick panels to fit in that 1/4-inch groove, I went ahead and cut a rabbet all the way around the panels.

I did this at the table saw with that same dado blade setup that I used for the tenons.

After cutting it, they slip right in place.

And I think they're gonna look really nice.

So, now the only thing left to do is start spreading some glue on these tenons and get everything glued up.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ There we go.

So, now, before this glue sets, I'm going to make sure all of these rails and stiles are in a line where I want them.

And then it's just a matter of gluing up the sides and the back.

So, now that the glue is dry, we're ready to cut our joinery to attach the front and the back to the sides of this chest.

To do that, we're back here at the table saw, and I've widened out our dado blade even more.

What we're going to do is we're going to take these side panels and we're going to cut a rabbet along both the front and the back edge.

Now, this is going to be a wide and deep rabbet, so I'm going to make this in two passes.

I've set the blade at approximately 3/8 of an inch.

I'll make one pass along each edge on both sides, and then I'll raise it to the final depth and make one more pass.

Then we head back to the bench and get it glued up.

Well, with the main portion of our trunk done, it's time to move on to the lid.

And the lid is curved, and that means angles, and angles are fun.

So, to start with, I've got four rails here, two outer and two inner, and they're a little bit different.

The outer rails are a full 3/4 of an inch thick.

The inner rails are a little thinner, 11/16, and that's going to help us later on when we do some final shaping.

What each of these needs is a plow to accept the tenons of our stiles and the small oak panels that go in between, and the edges are going to need to be beveled.

So, we're going to go to the table saw.

I've got a dado stack set up, and we're going to start by putting a plow on the inside edge of our outer rails, on both edges of our inner rails, and then those same areas, we're going to put a slight bevel on.

So, let's head to the table saw and get started.

Well, with our rails all done, it's time to begin work on the stiles.

Now, there are two kinds of stiles.

One that is sized for the outside of our lid and the balance for the interior.

The stiles for the outside are a little bit narrower.

They're going to have a groove on one edge to accept an oak panel.

And in a departure from what Logan did yesterday to build the main portion of our trunk, these are going to use a floating tenon.

So, I'm going to be cutting a dado across the end of these.

The inside stiles only differ in the fact that they're going to have a plow on both edges, and on both ends, they'll have a dado.

To make things a little bit safer, I've made a couple of jigs.

This jig is to help me cut those plow cuts, and it just helps to hold the piece down firmly against the table saw top, firmly against the fence with my fingers well away from that blade.

In order to cut those dados on the ends, I'm going to reset my fence.

And this simple little jig, once again, it just captures the block, presses it firmly against the table, keeps it in position, and my fingers are not even close to the blade.

Once we've done all that groove and dado work, the next step is I'm going to replace the dado stack with a crosscut blade, and we're going to cut a slight angle on the end of each of these stiles.

And with that, I think we'll be ready to start assembling.

So, let's take a look at all the parts here.

I have my outside rail, my inside rail, outside stile, inside stiles.

Here are the loose tenons, which will join everything together, and up here, you'll see the panels.

So, let's go ahead and start loading things up.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, with our two assemblies pretty much dry, it's time to go ahead and put them together and form the arch of our trunk.

So, I have things just loosely laid in place here.

You can see our two panels, and here are the stiles.

And just as before, we're going to be using the floating tenons.

I'll be inserting panels in place, but in order to get things to fit tightly and to glue up well, I have added another piece of wood over here to be able to trap my frames in place.

And that way, I know that the two edges are going to be parallel, and everything we can do to keep things parallel, to keep things true, is going to help us out tremendously.

So, I've done that.

I also have two blocks of wood that are a little over 2 inches tall that are going to give me a sense of placement so that each arch is bowed up the same amount.

So, let's go ahead and start spreading some glue.

♪♪ ♪♪ Well, here's the lid with all the rails, stiles, and panels in place.

One thing I wanted to show you was how I went about clamping these two side assemblies together in this arched form.

Well, what I did was made some blocks, and they're cut at a 99 degree angle on one side and have a little bit of a lip right here.

Each one of these blocks fits very nicely against the inside of the inner rails.

And then I could just take an F clamp and tighten it up like that.

And that drew my two panels together tightly against these inside stiles.

So, a clamp here, here, and here made it easy.

So, what's next?

What I need to do now is to go to the table saw, and I'm going to trim a little bit off each side of our top here and get it to a consistent size.

Then, I'm going to go about making some sides which are angled or have an angled rabbet to fit tightly against this edge here.

And we're going to glue that up.

The end caps that finish off our lid both have to fit tightly against the bottom of the lid, but also need to fit against the end to really seal up and cover that end and make it smooth and give us a good transition from the sides to the top.

The way we're going to do that is we're going to take a solid piece of oak and we're going to cut a fairly heavy rabbet around it.

And that rabbet is what's going to fit in underneath the lid.

Now, how do we do that?

Well, I've got a piece of MDF here, and previously I had leaned the lid up on a piece of MDF and scribed the interior surface.

I then took that to the band saw, cut it out, cleaned things up with the belt sander.

That MDF pattern is now double-sided taped to a slightly oversized piece of oak which will form the end cap.

My job now is to rout out that rabbet that we need to fit it in there.

On my router, I have a top bearing pattern bit.

That bearing is going to ride against my MDF template, and that's going to give me an exact fit.

You just can't beat this system.

It takes a tricky situation like this and makes it pretty easy.

This is the other end of our lid, and I'm going to go ahead and just rout them in tandem, just because it gives me a little more area for the router base to ride on.

So, I'm going to clamp these down, basically do one half, flip them around, and finish the other half of my ends.

Once I've done that, I can glue them on.

And once we're done with that, it's going to be a lot of shaping and sanding to get that wonderful round shape that will really set our steamer trunk apart.

Well, here's our completed top.

It really wasn't that hard to do.

I just had to pay attention and keep my eyes open and my mind sharp when building it to make sure that all the dimensions were correct and the faceting that was on this top, you know, it wasn't that hard to take out.

I used a block plane and carefully used skew cuts, being aware of the grain.

For some of these end areas, I found a rasp worked really well to smooth out this end cap and once again keep that grain from tearing out.

So, paying attention, being a little bit careful.

And finally, I used a random orbit sander over the whole top.

I can't wait to see this on the final chest, and I think it's going to look just great with some finish on it.

So, on to Phil and the final assembly of our chest.

There are several stages to the surface prep for our steamer trunk before we're ready to apply the finish and then the fun hardware that gets added onto it.

Now, because we've had several assemblies that get glued together, we're going to use different levels of tools to accomplish what we want to do.

So, for example, gluing the case together, we've got some glue squeeze out going along on different joint lines.

So, I'm using a carbide scraper... ...to get away all of those overly large chunks from there.

Then, you'll notice that when we glued the bottom assembly onto the case that it overlaps the sides and ends a little bit.

And rather than sanding that, I like to use a block plane, and then I can just plane away the excess... ...until we have a flush surface there.

Then it's on to the sanding.

And one of the issues with this steamer trunk is the frame and panel look here.

While it's really distinctive, it gives you more nooks and crannies than the English muffin that you had for breakfast.

So, what we want to do is tackle some of those things in stages, as well.

So, I'm going to start with one of those soft white erasers for art projects to remove all of the pencil marks because it won't scratch up the wood.

And I can eliminate all of those marks really easily.

Then we want to do some sanding.

Now, usually I'll use a hand cork sanding block for getting into some of these smaller panels.

But as you can see, the panels are so small...

...I'm not able to get much of a stroke on here.

So, instead, I've taken some adhesive-backed sandpaper and just folded it over.

And now... Now I can get in there and get a nice smooth surface on here.

Of course, the real trick is taking the time to sand the panels initially, before you glue everything up, when it's a lot easier to access.

And then you can do what we did here is at the end, just give it its final sanding.

Now, for the framework all around the top here, the grain is going in different directions, and I don't want to end up with cross-grain scratches if I'm doing this by hand.

So, I'm going to use a random orbit sander, working my way up through the grits, ending at 180.

So, what I can do with the sander is as I pass it across all the surfaces, I know that I'm going to get smooth surfaces.

I'll be able to level the joints here and end up with an even, consistent scratch pattern that's going to look great once we get the finish on.

So, now, while I still have some work left to do on the rest of this side here, I want to highlight one last thing that you'll need to do, and that's to take a little scrap of sandpaper, fold it on itself, and just ease the sharp edges around each of the panels.

That's going to make the surface a little bit friendlier to the touch... ...and eliminate just one more sharp edge.

Once this is done, I'm ready to apply the finish.

Now we come to the fun part, putting finish on our steamer trunk.

For the finish, I'm going to use a gel polyurethane.

And what I like about it is I have a lot of control.

But the other thing is, is that it's oil based, so it's going to bring out the warm colors of white oak.

It's something that appeals to me.

Now, if Chris or Logan were here, they might go with a stain first.

But I really like the natural look of white oak enhanced with the oils here.

Now, one thing that I'm not going to do, though, is put any finish on the inside.

An oil based finish can leave some lingering odors that'll hang on for years and years, and it's just not real appealing to me.

So, I'm going to stick to the outside and top edge here.

A couple of coats is all that's needed.

Here's how to apply it.

Since it's really thick, I'm going to demonstrate on one of these panels here.

I'm going to apply it in the panel with a foam brush, and I want to work it around to get into all of the little areas and crevices and things like that.

Once I have the panel all taken care of, then I can work on the surrounding frame material.

And you can see here how that color is really getting brought out.

So, for the example that I have, I've taken care of the panel, the surrounding frame with it.

And what I want to do is wipe up any of the excess, because otherwise it's just going to solidify into kind of unappealing globs.

So, I'll start on the inside, just rubbing it out.

And that's what I'm looking for.

I want the surfaces to appear like they're wet, but there's no obvious pooling or dripping going on with the finish on here.

So, you could actually do, like, whole sections at a time.

But I just wanted to show you what it looks like and what the process is.

When you're all done, whatever rags you use to remove the excess with, you want to lay them out flat and allow them to dry completely to avoid any issues with spontaneous combustion and for good safety.

The lid sports much of the same jewelry as the rest of the case.

But there's a few things that I want to point out.

Now, you can see there's the strap protectors on the top, as well as the corners here.

But what's different is that with the curved lid, you have to adjust the fit of these corner protectors.

So, thankfully they're relatively easy to flex and bend, and you can get them to wrap around and follow the curve pretty well.

From there, we can attach hinges on the back.

And then at the front, we have a couple of clasps on each end, and those are relatively easy to install.

I marked a center line and then used the hardware itself to mark for drilling the pilot holes and then driving the screws in place.

Same thing goes for the hasp and the lock in the middle.

Again, it's just a matter of finding the center line, marking it out.

And then I started with this upper screw and then used that as a way to install it and then mark and drill for the other holes that need to be installed there.

That kind of wraps up our steamer trunk project.

But there's a little bit more that you could add.

If you want to build your own, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

There, you'll also find plans for adding a sliding tray to the inside and a video of that build project, as well.

And then when you're done, you can join us for an all new woodworking project 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... Man: Old Masters, offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

Announcer: And by... 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... Man: Titebond wood glues, the pro's advantage.

Announcer: And by... ♪♪ ♪♪