♪♪ Welcome back.

It's time for another episode of the the "Woodsmith Shop."

On today's episode, we're tackling an arts and crafts classic, the sideboard.

Now, what I like about it is it's small-scale, perfect for a small house, but you could use it in a variety of rooms, too.

But there's a lot of woodworking here that's just as enjoyable.

We'll work on gluing up solid wood panels, constructing legs that look great no matter what angle you're looking at.

We'll make strong and sturdy drawers and a casework assembly that goes together really easily.

There's a lot to learn here, and it's all coming up on the "Woodsmith Shop."

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... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ You know, Chris, I don't know if there's something that screams woodworking in a woodsmith design like a craftsman piece like this.

You know, this is classic craftsman here.

We got this beautiful quarter sawn oak heavy hardware.

The portioning, the lines, it is craftsman.

You know, looking at some of the details here.

We have three beautiful drawers, solid locking rabbet joinery.

I think I might do something a little bit different on the drawers later.

But there's some really nice woodworking that's packed into this project.

Absolutely.

First off, think of all the solid wood.

Every woodworker loves to work solid wood.

And we've got classic woodsmith joinery all the way throughout with mortise and tenon joints, and there's even twin tenons on the front rails.

And those are a lot of fun to do.

You know, one of the things I like is we have this really big solid top, and that gives you a good chance to pick out some really nice grain on your project and really showcase it off.

Absolutely.

And another great thing about this piece, it's just the right size for about anywhere in your house.

This is a project that could fit well in your dining room, your kitchen, your family room.

So overall, this is a really fun build.

And if you like a set of plans to get yourself started on building this craftsman sideboard.

They're available at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

A great place to start in building the craftsman sideboard is to begin with the legs.

Now one of the problems with solid wood legs is very often there's one face that's nice, maybe another that's okay, and a couple of faces that aren't so great.

And we always end up having trouble orienting them in a way which really shows off the good face.

Well, we're gonna work around that with this project.

What we're gonna do is take a core of the wood that we're using for our legs and then face two sides of it with some 1/8-inch shopmade veneer.

And that way, what we're going to get is a leg that's fairly consistent on all four faces, and that's gonna make for a better-looking project.

To start with, as I said, I've got a core.

I'm going to lay it on top of a spare piece of veneer to lift it up off of my work surface.

And I want to do that because the veneer is cut extra wide.

When I glue the veneer on this face, I want it to be centered, because once the glue dries, we're gonna go to the router table and use a flush trim bit to bring everything down to the same plane.

And so making sure that that veneer is centered is important.

I've cut some pieces of Baltic birch plywood, but you could use any scrap you have as a clamping caul.

The use of the caul ensures nice, even clamping pressure and a good bond.

So once the veneer dries, I'll go ahead and place another piece of veneer on the other side.

And when that's done, we'll head to the router table and start cleaning up the legs.

What with our like blanks all made up, the next step is to layout the joinery.

In this case, a lot of mortises.

Now, I'll tell you, the first thing you want to do, the very first thing, is you need to label the legs exactly in the location that you're going to go.

So that's what I've done here -- front-left, front-right, rear-left, and rear-right -- because it is so easy to get things confused, and it is so disappointing if you lay out all your joinery, you cut all your joints, and you find out you made two lefts for your legs or something like that.

So label everything very carefully.

I've gone ahead and laid out mortises.

So this is the inside of a leg.

And you can see them, there's quite a few.

On the front legs, we actually have some small twin mortises for the rails, so that's kind of an interesting joint that I think would be fun for everyone to make.

So careful layout, double-check everything.

I think I'm ready to head to the drill press and start drilling out mortises now.

Drilling the mortises is pretty straight-forward.

All the mortises are 3/8 inch back from a face so I can set my fence and forget it.

I have my depth stop set for 5/8 inch deep, and I'm using a Brad point drill bit.

A Brad point because it cuts a clean hole, and it lifts the chips out very easily.

Well, what the mortises all cut out, it's time now to go to the router table and cut two slots.

These slots are going to house the ends of solid wood panels, which will form the sides of our sideboard and the back.

So what we're going to do in two cuts that will end up being 3/8 inch deep, I'm going to connect this mortise to this one and this mortise to this one.

Now, the way I'm gonna do this, my first cut, I could simply register against the fence.

I'll push it through until I see the mortise on the other face center with my router table, and I'll also feel the bit break through into that mortise, so it'll be pretty easy to feel it.

At that point, I'll stop.

This other mortise, I'm gonna have to flip my part over and drop the leg onto the bit, centering with this mortise the center point of my router table and push it through.

All right.

I've got the slots all done for the panels on the side of the piece in the back.

And so now, as long as we're at router table, what I want to do is to put an 1/8 inch roundover on all the edges.

Not only will that soften the leg in appearance, but remember that we have laminated veneer faces on and so the 1/8 inch roundover will really go a long way to hide any joint line that we have.

Well, we're almost done with our legs.

We've got them veneered mortised, notched, rounded over.

Last thing -- the rear legs each receive a notch.

And that notch is going to accept a piece of 3/4-inch plywood which forms the dividers for the drawers in our cabinet.

So I'm just gonna use a simple handsaw and make two cuts and chisel out the waste.

♪♪ ♪♪ When it comes to keeping hand tools sharp, you have a lot of different options.

And any one of those options can lead to a sharpening set that is really fairly large.

But Hermie Calorba had a great way to kind of condense his set down.

Let me show you what Hermie did.

So Herman uses diamond stones, and as he had them all spread out on his bench, he realized, "Hey, I could take those three or four stones that I have and condense them down, especially utilizing two-sided stones."

So the solution that Hermie came up with is this stone holder.

This holder is made out of maple and it has two pieces of aluminum C-channel embedded on one end, and the stones simply slide into place underneath the channel and the other side is held in place with a rare earth magnet.

Now, this does a couple of things.

First, it condenses basically four stones, with these being double-sided, down into the footprint of one stone.

The other thing it does, which I really appreciate, is it gives you a little bit more clearance as you're sharpening stuff.

So if you're flattening the back of a plain iron, you can actually get a good grip on it rather than the stone being directly on the bench.

Overall, it's a great solution to really condense down your sharpening set and give your handles a little bit more clearance while sharpening.

♪♪ Now that Chris has the legs all taken care of, my job is to connect the legs.

And I'm gonna do that in three separate assemblies, and in each one of them, we're gonna build on what we learned in the first one and apply some new techniques along the way.

So what we want to do now is to take those two side legs and to join them with a series of three rails.

The top two rails are gonna be joined with a panel, as well.

Now, the main thing here is cutting tenons on each end of all of these rails to fit the mortises that Chris made.

I'm gonna do that here at the table saw using a shopmade tenoning jig.

There's lots of ways to go about it.

But I like a tenoning jig because of the cutting action gives me really smooth tenon cheeks.

So what I've set up here is the tenoning jig with a dado blade installed.

Now, when I clamp one of the rails in place vertically.

As I make a pass across the dado blade, I'm gonna cut that tenon cheek, and I just unclamp it, flip the piece around, and make a second cut.

You want to do that with some test pieces and fit them into your mortises so you get a nice, snug fit here.

These first cuts take care of the thickness of the tenon so that they're gonna fit into the mortise.

What we need to do now is take care of the width of the tenon to match the length of the mortise.

So that involves just trimming a little bit off of each side on the lower and middle rails, but just one side on the upper rails.

To do that, I've reset the tenoning jig so that I'm gonna hold the work piece in the tenoning jig so it's square to the rip fence and make that trim cut.

Once the table saw work's complete, there's a quick stop over at the router table to rout a groove on the lower edge of the upper rail and the top edge of the mid-rail.

And that's gonna hold a plywood panel.

What we can do now then is to assemble our side assemblies.

Now there's a lot of parts that go together here, and I like to give myself the best chance possible.

So I'm gonna use a liquid hide glue, brush it on to the tenons, and then fit those into the mortises.

Since we're working with plywood here, you can glue the panel in place if you want to, but it's not necessary.

Now glue on the opposite tenons.

There we go.

Clamps bring it home the rest of the way.

And now we can set this aside, work on the other one, and then tackle our other two assemblies.

The second of our casework assemblies is the back assembly, and it's pretty similar in construction.

We've got stub tenon and grooves here, panels.

What's different is that there's more pieces, so there's the upper and lower rails.

This time there are three intermediate styles and four small plywood panels.

I'm gonna glue those together now, but I want to point out a couple of key differences.

First, is over at the table saw, I ran a narrow groove down the face of the lower rail, and that's gonna hold one of the drawer dividers later on.

It's made out of plywood.

Then similarly, I put in a wider dado blade and cut a wide dado across the face of the styles.

Again, this will hold another plywood divider that will separate the draw compartments.

So I'm gonna get things put together here with some slow set glue.

All right, I have things roughed in place here, clamps just kind of pulled a little snug.

I want to make sure that this whole thing is gonna stay square in the parts in the proper orientation.

So to do that, I'm gonna bring in some longer clamps here.

And I'm gonna add the side assemblies... ...just to the ends here.

I'm not gonna put any glue on the tenons, because I don't want to glue this in place.

I just need to hold this in its correct position.

All right, we'll let the glue dry on here, and then I can take off the sides, and we can work on the front assembly.

Part of the process when Chris was making the legs, was drilling out the two side-by-side mortises.

Well, we've come to the part of the project where we're gonna cut the matching part of that, the twin tenons.

Now it can seem a little tricky to do, and there's a variety of ways to tackle it.

But the approach that I go with is to put together a test piece.

So what I have here is a piece that matches the width of those rails.

And I've laid it out to show where those twin tenons need to be with a few pencil marks.

I can use this now as a setup gauge for aligning my tenoning jig to make those cuts.

That's really all I'm gonna do here is use the layout lines on my gauge piece to set up the tenoning jig and just work to the lines.

It's gonna take a few cuts, but overall, you're gonna be able to get pretty consistent results.

Now, just make sure when you're doing it that you cut the tenons on both of those rails at the same time to avoid a bunch of multiple setups.

Getting the case of the sideboard assembled requires putting together quite a few pieces at once, so you want to have a good plan.

And in the plans that you'll find with this episode -- they're at our website, WoodsmithShop.com -- you'll find the assembly sequence.

It starts by setting one of the sides on a pair of sawhorses and then fitting the back assembly into place.

Then you're gonna work from the bottom up, starting with the bottom panel.

That lower rail gets glued into its mortises.

And then I attach this middle divider and the lower rail with some screws beforehand, and then I could attach and install the upper panel and that gets installed into those dados and the notches in the back legs that Chris made earlier.

Once that's in place, then I can bring clamps together, check for square.

I made a pair of spacer pieces so that that lower drawer opening was a consistent size.

It's gonna make Logan's job a lot easier.

Then once clamps are all in place, I can drop the top rail in, at last, from above, because the more gases are open at the top of the legs.

Some screws to attach that center divider and I think we're all set.

Once the glue has had a chance to set up a little bit, we can work on the drawers and the top shelf.

It should come as no surprise to you that quite a few of the people around here at "Woodsmith" are suckers for old tools in practically any shape and condition.

Now, among the things that we're looking for are those little gems that often get hidden at the bottom of a box.

For example, I found this sharpening stone in the -- I don't know, like, a bunch of old auger bits or something that were way beyond use, but I liked it because of its small size.

Now, it's not gonna be the one that I turn to for sharpening chisels and plain blades, but it's perfect for keeping in a drawer for pocket knives and even some carving tools would be perfect to sharpen on here.

The problem is, is that it's got a healthy coat of grime from sitting in a garage or who knows wherever so that you really can't sharpen anything with it.

And it's all loaded up from probably poor care prior to that.

There's several ways to bring a sharpening stone like this back to life.

And I'm gonna show you one of my favorites.

I'm gonna start off with some dish soap here, and I'm gonna apply a pretty healthy coat as if you were, you know, pre-soaking or lathering up just an old dirty pan or something.

So once it's well-coated, I now have a plastic tub that I've filled with pretty hot water, about as hot as you can take it.

And I'm just gonna plunk that in there for a little bit and let that soak for a good 10 or 15 minutes.

If the water starts to cool down, put some more hot water in there because it's the temperature of the water working with the dish soap here that's gonna loosen all the crud that's on there and then we can scrub it up.

So all we're gonna do now is wait.

After a long, hot soak, it's time to exfoliate a little bit.

So I'm gonna get the stone out here.

You can see already that some of the gunk has already floated off, and we got a much better color on here.

So I'm gonna re-apply some detergent.

And now I'm gonna scrub the surface using a nylon bristle brush.

If things are a little heavily dunked, then you can go with a brass or even a steel bristle brush.

You're not really gonna affect the stone here so we'll just start scrubbing away.

Always build up a good lather.

All right, after rinsing off any of the soap, what we want to do is let the stone dry here.

And at this point, you can really see what we got because we have a really fun-looking natural stone that has some different colors and gradations in it.

That just adds to the visual appeal of this.

And just blot it on a paper towel here.

And then once it's dry, we'll come back and talk a little bit about the care and feeding of the stone now that you have it all cleaned up.

The nice thing about an oil stone, at least a natural stone like this, is that they're not very porous, and it dries off pretty quickly.

So here you can see what it looks like.

I think it looks really cool.

Now, the next thing we need to consider is the condition of the surface.

Now, even an oil stone over time can dish out.

So you want to just check it with a straight edge here.

I'm just using a metal ruler.

And, you know, the faces are remarkably flat.

If you find any dishing, what you can do is just use a diamond stone, a pretty coarse one here, and just rub it back and forth in a figure eight pattern or just back and forth until you renew both of those faces.

I don't really need to on this one.

So what we want to do now is think about taking care of our stone when we're using it.

The big thing here is keeping it clean, and for that, we'll need some kind of lubrication as we sharpen tools.

Really easy solution is to use three-in-one oil, it's a lightweight machine oil that helps remove the sharpening debris -- it's called swarf -- that's created as you sharpen a knife or a carving tool or whatever.

Another option are, you know, dedicated honing oils.

This is a vintage can that we have laying around here.

Still works just fine.

The key thing is having a good film of oil on it while you're sharpening your tools.

Then when you're done, keep it clean.

You don't want to have any of the oil and the debris harden or get embedded in here.

So apply another layer of oil and then wipe it down with a cloth or paper towel just to keep it working.

So let's see or take here some... ...the three-in-one oil.

And just work it into the whole surface of the stone, both sides.

I don't really want to gunk this up, so after applying it kind of wipe down the excess, and you'll be left with something that looks just a little bit kind of rain-wet, so to speak.

And the stone is ready for use.

The big thing here, though, is finding out now what kind of grit this is.

And most stones like this weren't labeled, so you're gonna have to do it by trial and error.

If you have some other sharpening stones, take one of your tools, say, like a pocket knife is a good example, and just pass it around on the edge of the stone and compare it to some of the your other ones.

Very quickly, you'll find out if it falls into what I would call three broad categories -- a course, a medium, and a fine polish on your tools.

Stone like this, like I said, is great for carving tools or pocket knives or even some of your marking knives.

Small enough to keep in a tool box ready to go whenever you need it.

So if you have an old oil stone that you found at a flea market or a garage sale, don't pass it by.

It could become a valuable addition to your sharpening kit.

♪♪ That was a lot to get through.

And now that the clamps are off, you can see our sideboard is really starting to take shape, and it's taking on that really nice craftsman look.

From what Chris taught us about creating great-looking craftsman-style legs to the case construction that we used here, you can see how you could apply it to a lot of other projects.

If you want to build one of these for yourself, the plans are at our website.

Then stick around for the next episode where we're gonna talk about creating a solid wood top, a shelf, then Logan's gonna go through the process for creating handcut dovetail drawers.

And then I want to walk through the process of getting a great-looking craftsman-style finish.

It's all right 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, rooter 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.

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... ♪♪ ♪♪