A Modern Craftsman Liquor Cabinet, Fine Furniture Making, Woodworking, Carpentry

a Mike Farrington welcome back to my shop aka the boardroom in this video I'm gonna build what I would describe as a liquor cabinet and I started this project about 15 months ago if you look at some of my earlier videos you may see it lurking in the background and if you're wondering why it took me so long piece like this is very costly to make it's not costly in terms of materials so much actually all materials used in this video were just leftovers from other jobs so materials were essentially free but a project like this is very costly in terms of time I spent about three working weeks building this project and that three weeks also includes filming which adds considerably to the timeline of a project but splitting it up week here a week there and a few weekend days I was able to push through and get this project completed and I'm happy I did I am extremely pleased with the end results you the wood used to build this cabinet is black cherry I'm told it was sourced from Pennsylvania a state rich in both history and hardwoods the case itself is held together with the mighty dovetail all in all there are 56 dovetails in this project there are 32 holding the case together an additional 24 holding the drawers together and yes that is a useless statistic that you are welcome to use at your next cocktail party so as you can see I'm using a couple of cheats to hand cut these dovetails namely magnetic dovetail jig and a router which you'll see later if you're interested in more information on my process for hand cutting dovetails I have a video on my channel it's titled how to hand cut dovetails with a power tool cheat that's a descriptive title anyway take a look at that and I go into great detail about exactly what I'm doing here [Laughter] as I mentioned earlier building fine furniture takes a lot of time so anything I can do to speed that process up I welcome using a router and a special MOX advise to route down to my scribed line saves a ton of time on chiseling which is the slowest part of cutting dovetails nextly I move on to a couple of fixed shelves and dividers that will house three drawer boxes and I take the time to mark precisely where I want the shelves to go I use those marked lines to help me cut out spacers to reference the bottom of my biscuit joiner and if you're wondering yes the biscuit joint is plenty strong for this application those who say biscuit joint has no strength or biscuits or for alignment only they are wrong perhaps if I was stacking my incredibly large collection of gold bars on these shelves I would look for some more strength I'm not going to be doing that these are fixed shelves inside of a liquor cabinet this is a perfect application for the biscuit joint and no matter what tool you're using for joinery of biscuit joiner a Festool Domino or even a router cutting spacers as I'm doing here is a great way to ensure that your joinery is consistent it will ensure that the left and right sides are mirror images of each other I have found over the years this is a much more accurate way to cut joinery when compared to just measuring and marking and trying to work to pencil lines it is a little slower because you have to cut the shims out but I think the end result is worth it this is known as a line boring machine and I've since sold this tool it was really a leftover from when I was building more kitchen cabinets and it is very precise and fast but it lacks flexibility so I ended up just using a router in jig instead and the final detail before glue up is to chamfer the ends of the dovetails for larger complex glue ups such as this one wood glue just sets up too fast so in this case I went with a two-hour set time epoxy and that really reduces the stress during glue up as I mentioned earlier I worked on this piece in three different sessions spread out over a pretty large amount of time each time I would come back to work on it I would change the design again and here I thought it would be a good idea to add some cumin panels to the door you with a door design in mind I get started by bifurcating a piece of four quarter cherry that I will book match glue together and turn into the door panels after the panels work glued up sanded and cut to size I rummage through some of my off cuts to come up with some door parts and here's a trick that I used to get a two-to-one ratio with two height in this door opening here of course I ended up changing the design again but a neat trick nonetheless at some point during this build I was watching some TV after work one day I was flipping through the channels and I stumbled upon the excellent movie Terminator 2 and the song you could be mine is played in that movie and that's an awesome song so if you feel like going back to 1991 I suggest listening to the song you could be mine by Guns & Roses and you know what while you're at it go ahead and watch Terminator 2 again it's still an awesome movie after gluing up the doors I held him up to the case and I started to have doubts on whether I wanted to add Kumiko into those top panel areas and I couldn't come up with any good solutions right then and there so I decided to turn my attention to building the three drawer boxes for the inside of the cabinet and the drawer boxes themselves are made from bass wood the Front's of the drawers are made from a piece of Doug Fir that was actually part of a demolition job I pulled it out of a customer's home when I was tearing out an old wall piece of wood look beautiful so it's been sitting in my shop for a handful of years just waiting for a little project like this one these are known as half blind dovetails and that means you can see the dovetail on the side of the drawer box but not on the front they're a little more work but it's not too bad and I think having that nice clean drawer front is worth the extra effort and as you can see here a router with a little tiny straight bit removes most of the material and I come back with a chisel to clean out the last little bits this is known as a fishtail chisel and it works great for cleaning out the waist in a half-blind dovetail joint [Music] and I thought it would be a good idea to pre finish the insides of the drawer boxes so I added a few coats of shellac after glue up by hand plane each drawer to a nice piston fit I work real hard so that there's very little slop left and right or up and down just enough to allow the drawer box to slide in and out nicely in the final detail for the drawer boxes is to drill a 20 millimeter hole as a finger pole now that the drawer boxes are completed and sliding perfectly I next turn my attention to the stand and I decided to do the stand versus the Kumiko panels in the door because at this point I still couldn't decide on what I wanted to do I thought if the case was sitting on the stand that might help with the design choice festival Domino makes quick work of joinery like this once completed I cleaned up all the parts with a smoothing plane and glued the stand together job complete but hinges are always tricky to install there's very little room for error so to ensure that I get a good result I always cut a template the template is the same height as the door I can put a little stop on the bottom if I want and then I cut the mortise out with a router and I used that same template on the cabinet and if I have to cut a notch to fit around some fixed shelves that's not a problem I take care of that and I use a sliding square to set the location of the template on the cabinet and of course I have to square up the corners with a razor sharp chisel but the result is a mortise that houses my butt hinge perfectly and I start each of the three screw holes with a VIX bit I don't drill to full depth because I'm concerned that the VIX bit spinning around in the screw hole may wear off some of that dark finish and here's a protip anytime I'm fitting a door with a hand plane I'd like to chamfer the edge of the door that I'm gonna be planing off of and this will reduce or eliminate the chance of blowout and now with the hinges and doors installed it was time to make a final decision on what to do with the door panels and here's what I came up with it's not really Kumiko but it does use little tiny strips of woods very similar to Kumiko but it isn't quite such a defined style it's a little more generic and look and I thickness each of the parts down to 1/8 of an inch to match my saw kerf and then I added rebates to the end of each of the pieces to bring it all together and by the way who was that old dude in the last shot wearing glasses and bald that can't be me got to check the settings on my camera and I use a good old fashioned wood glue as a binder and the last task before finishing is to add some door polls and I was having trouble making a decision on what to do with the door polls as well so I went to my instant Graham account and asked everybody there and this was the design that we all came up with and it's a real simple design just a rectangle cut out of Ebony glued into a mortise the finish I'm using is called Osmo and it's described as a hard oil wax I don't know what the chemistry of that is but it's designed for floors and it looks and feels real nice when applied all surfaces get two coats I pre finish the door panels then I come back and add a coat of finish on to the whole door and then I apply a very light coat to just the frame of the door and I buff this coat out real good to make it nice and shiny here's another pro tip I didn't use the highest quality hinges for this project there were hinges that I already had so when I installed them the barrels were actually rubbing on the wood when opening and closing so I added a piece of blue tape to each side of the leaf hinge and that just shimmed it out enough to where the door could then swing freely and I always use steel screws for construction and mock up but for the final assembly I come back and add the appropriate colored brass screws last but not least I epoxy the door pulls in place and let's round this one out with some Beauty shots overall I'm pleased with the end result I really worked on execution on this piece the gaps around the drawers the dovetails the gaps around the doors I wanted to do all of that to the very best of my ability and I think I did a pretty good job one thing that I find interesting is if you look at the case that was built quite a while ago versus the doors that were built more recently the doors are lighter in color and it just goes to show you how a cherry ages with time enjoyed building this piece I had fun pushing my skills a little further I hoped that showed through and I really hope that you enjoyed following along with this video and here's what happens anytime I break the camera out when the shop apprentice is around until next time thanks for watching

Channel: Mike Farrington

Views: 194,868

Rating: 4.9427495 out of 5

Keywords: carpentry, woodworking, furniture making, mike farrington, the boardroom, craftsmanship, fine woodworking, dove tails, festool domino, lamello top 21

Id: uiYlLZgVxjo

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2019