Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Machinist Tool Drawers!

adam savage from tested here in my cave with another one day build uh i know i've been doing a lot of shop infrastructure lately and today is no different so that's just the flavor of what's going on right now it's time to organize uh so i have been uh studiously turning my whole lathe persuasion into uh a really refined organism a tool ecosystem i i got a brand new dro that's a digital readout from the dro pros uh turns out best business you could ever buy digital readouts from happens to be right here only a few miles from me here in northern california and i ordered this beautiful dl400 kit from them um i this isn't an endorsement i paid full price for it i love it uh i am super psyched about it but as i've been looking around i have been slowly tackling this shelf you remember the one day build of those uh bins up there um and now it's time to find a home for another part of the lathe ecosystem and that is the tooling okay so i've got uh i've got a bin here of boring bars and inserts and cut off tools i also have about 15 years ago on craigslist i scored this unbelievable tooling treasure trove um and it's like 40 pounds of uh tooling and inserts and insert holders and an embarrassment of riches to be sure but this uh sortimo just doesn't really cut it in terms of being able to uh retrieve things in a timely manner see one of the things that i love about machinists toolboxes is that they're they have full of shallow shelves like this edge finders center finders that is what's in this drawer and it's one layer deep and that's it that's how you get your stuff slightly deeper for the radius and chamfered end mills uh compasses still a bit of a shit fight but right so this is what i need i don't need deep drawers i need a bunch of really shallow drawers and i don't think i've built floating bottom felt line drawers on tested before so that is what we're going to do i have a very specific location for it too uh which is over here now this is normally where i store my planer it's on wheels um so i'm actually going to make a set of drawers but i'm gonna put them on a dolly that raises them up so they live right here but stuff can still live underneath yeah this is a really specific savage lathe drawer set one day build i think i'm going to start with some sketching hey i'm realizing that um i have a lot of options in terms of size but i'm looking at a box it's gonna be fairly large so i'm actually going to try and wrap my head around just how many many square inches of drawers i need okay uh i have my plan i think i'm gonna need approximately eight drawers that are eight by sixteen inches uh eight by sixteen inches eight deep sixteen wide um it's actually going to be more like 14 wide i'm also going to include some slots in the drawers so i can put in dividers if i need to i am also going to actually try a drawer construction i have not tried before um which is i'm going to uh dado cut an inset a slot in the sides of the drawers yeah and i am going to include a runner for that slot in this structure and i'm actually going to make the drawer uh the structure that holds the drawers deeper than the drawers themselves so you can pull the drawers all the way out and see inside them this is a big problem i have with drawers that they back up against the thing you pull them all the way out and they fall i'm actually going to include like an extra three inches on the drawers so while this is only going to be like nine inches eight inches deep on the drawer the actual box is going to be more like 11 inches deep and you'll get to pull the drawers all the way out and see what's in them i'm kind of excited about this i have not tried building drawers this way i've also run into trouble in the past where uh i try and build a structure and drawers at the same time i'm building your drawers first and then i'm gonna make the structure that holds them that should make it a little more intuitive so the drawers are going to be an inch and a half tall and a half i'm going to have one drawer be two inches all the rest of the drawers will be inch and a half with a uh a floating bottom yeah this is going to be cool all right time to rip some wood okay a lot of a lot of separate pieces here uh i've got the drawer dividers the drawer bottoms the drawer fronts the drawer sides both narrow and thick the uh drawer runners that will mount into the box and the drawer sides these are drawers front and backs and these are sides um all together well it's uh one two three four i don't know it's a lot of pieces um but i am now about to get started on the drawer handles and i'm gonna make the drawer handles out of plywood but instead of using the table saw for this i'm actually gonna use my milling machine i'm going to set it up on a time lapse so you can see my methodology i'm going to use some round over bits and some radius bits and uh i hope to get some nice um some good-looking drawer handles so 99 parts that's how many parts comprises all nine drawers 11 parts per drawer i have 99 parts and i want to soften them a little bit but instead of running them with sandpaper i'm actually going to use my speed trick which is my linisher uh big belt sander basically that's got a uh 3m scotch-brite belt on it and that should soften this up fairly quickly it should take about 20-25 minutes then we're on to assembly 99 parts cut engineered sanded now ready for assembly so this table is about to become an assembly machine that's the front those are two sides oh and they go on the sides like that right yes and then this is a back but i don't put that on i glue those two first then slide in that i am uh just now completing my sixth of nine drawers past the halfway point the halfway point in the construction project like this is usually where i time myself and i see how i'm doing and that's like you know i'm not on a schedule but it really it helps me when i'm doing this specific kind of work to always be checking in with how it's going that's like part of the process and i have to say uh after doing four my fifth one i did it in about two and a half minutes that's not bad at all i'm very pleased with that again i'm not on a schedule it's i'm not getting paid by the hour but um doing that kind of math is how i answer the tedium of this kind of work um and it also like it keeps my head in the game i mean this doing this kind of work where you can zone out where it's um you know it's a little boring um that's also where you can get dangerous because it's like i'm picking up a stapler holding back at safety and uh letting those uh letting those little 22 gauge nails go in and if i if my attention wanes yeah i could drive one of those nails right through my finger i have friends that have done it and i don't want to do it so um for me the doing that math always uh the math always helps me stay focused um also i'm doing these drawers with true floating bottoms so that's how a drawer should work is that the bottom isn't glued it's actually a floating panel sitting in four recesses inside the drawer um oh nope this one goes here and uh it is it is just a there's a reason they make drawers that way you know it was funny when i was working at berkeley repertory theater we were doing theater carpentry but like every now and then you had an extra couple of days to do something like you know for some reason the schedule opened up and whenever you had more time we would all experiment with uh doing better woodworking it was like oh yeah okay i'll do a full floating panel on these kitchen cabinets uh and see what that's like uh and you pull out the router bits and you make that work it's um it's actually funny that theater carpenters practice their carpentry on shows while working wait a second am i missing oh no i'm not okay cool uh i thought i was missing one of my little handles and i didn't want to also note that i've made a measuring jig for the handles i'm centering the handles by eye this way and i'm using this little corner bracket i made to get them close to center and as long as like i actually got it pretty dead to nuts but even if i wasn't as long as they were all the same you wouldn't notice so that is the that's all of the one and a half inch drawers and now we're on to the two inch drawers very exciting uh yep bottom um this is also where you know zoning out means you're going to start to assemble stuff wrong like you'll assemble a whole drawer backwards now i haven't done that yet touch wood but uh it certainly has happened in the past and on all sorts of tested videos that we've shot this year uh however this build is going fairly smoothly um like i said i haven't even started to build the external structure yet but that should go fairly quickly this is by far the uh the most time-consuming part of this build this is i'm really getting excited about this oh you know what i've also got to do i've got to go upstairs and get some felt and uh see if i have enough felt to make a liners for these shells because i want my parts sitting on felt not just on wood you know i don't want them rolling around and i do believe i have some felt i might actually have some gold felt left over from uh from the poker table build which would be stunning i've also done something kind of cool in that for these drawer fronts so i made these drawer fronts this is the front of the drawer that's the rail that the drawer will ride in i made these to cover that and it just makes it look a little better and it's like you know the less detail you see the more easily you can read what the hell is in that cabinet that you made so carefully uh oh right so i did something cool with the drawer fronts and that i cut them all from the same piece in order so when this goes back up it should be one piece of plywood if i got my numbers all right uh it should be one piece of plywood on the face you should be able to see the grain match um yeah that's just me trying out something i've never drunk i've never done before in my carpet just like let's cut loose and do a little bit more advanced of a move here now the question is do these drawers let's see here that's almost exactly half below i am going to go with the handle height the same distance from the top that it is on the other source yeah that looks better there is a million little decisions to make when you're making a piece of furniture like this even something as like quick and dirty as this and every decision matters aesthetically engineering-wise i mean the funniest thing about trying a technique out and like making something for yourself using a classic woodworking technique is that when you do it you often get to see oh that's exactly why they build that thing that way because there's a good reason there's a reason we've been doing it the same way all these damn years right it's very funny okay i know i don't have to put these dividers in but it's making me happy to diminish the piles over here okay this is the last drawer um this will be really nice my machine tools deserve my lathe tooling deserves a library that's the thing i i had had them sitting in drawers but they weren't being cared for and i was leaving you know if you can't see it you don't have it right if it's not at the top of your mind it's not in the roster of tools and materials that you have access to and organization is about making sure that you are properly utilizing the very things you have bought to make your shop work right yeah uh so to me like when i'm noticing i have a collection of things and it tends to get neglected organization is how you like bring those errant members of the flock home to use a fairly religious metaphor or a sheep metaphor ah the religions have been using sheep metaphors forever wake up sheeple okay uh cool now we do the very last of the grains i don't want to get that one upside down that would be a boring mistake it would be a very knee mistake um so once i have these then it's time to cut out the sides of the external structure i'm going to cut out the sides of the structure and then i'm going to uh lay in and staple the runners that's these guys and once i've done that then we're going to be really really close oh i have to make the stand that it sits on and that's a whole nother thing i'm actually making a um a rolling stand it'll sit on oops had a little blowout i have had like one long i've been i'm getting better i'm screwing up less yeah that's what getting better is getting better is screwing up left okay uh slightly less not even a lot less getting better is screwing up just slightly less i mean think of your dumbest shot mistake and then think of the best craftsman you you know and share with them that dumb mistake and they'll be like yep i've done it uh nobody escapes the mistakes okay that's the last handle ladies and germs that is nine drawers okay so let's see here uh here is the critical distance between these two things right now is 1.15 and then this these ones down here one point six five one point six five and that's the same as this one i am going to glue in the rails and then i'm going to trim to the top and bottom after i've glued in the rails this is based on hard-won experience of trying to engineer all things at once everything is relative no matter how precisely you've made something you're going to have introduced errors you've got to build the thing to itself try as you might to build it exactly to the drawings there's always going to be some fudginess so what i know is how do i lose tape measure so freaking fast ah so what i know is is that um top and bottom it's 15 and a half basically so i'm going to make it 16. i'm gonna make it 16 16 inches but that's really lovely item it should be 16 inches i'll say 15 and a half and cut it down ah i'm doing a bad new zealand accent because i miss my new zealand sisters and brothers uh 16 inches by oh right right right by i'm gonna go a little deeper by nine and a quarter 16 by nine and a quarter okay gotta let this thing run all the way down the only time i've ever been bit by a table saw was while i was spinning down long time come on damn i nailed it make sure this is super square on the bottom because and this is yeah i want to make sure when these rails go down that they will hold this thing yeah see that i got to be a little higher than that i gotta be a little bit more the squarissity of your first piece is so important it's worth really taking some extra time to dial it in because everything else will build across that i'm going to make i'm going to put these drawer slides down in relation to each other we are in the home stretch i am uh attacking and attaching the last um staples i am not worrying about like super high quality on this one because it's a shop shelf but i am strong so yep authority i think i think this is the bottom it doesn't matter really because well i mean it does matter but i don't have to know which is which obviously it matters which is the bottom i don't have to know which is which i turn my compressor off at night so it doesn't make come in hello sir just dropped it right there what's that you can just drop it right there thank you that was my neighbor bobby bobby is the master furniture maker actually master carpenter all sorts of okay so technically yeah let's see here see one two better much better even still my tolerances are a little too tight this is my thing as a maker man cut things too close i made the drawer fronts just a little bit high to actually give myself the ability to do exactly what i'm doing right now which is to kind of finesse these things to a tight tolerance without having to sand the whole top of the drawer down number four goes in beautifully number five a little bit close i love it it's like i know what i'm doing okay yeah eight goes in beautifully there we go here's nine which i didn't even need runners for really but dude dude right okay so now it's time to cut the back this is uh just a shade under 16 by 16 and 3 8. that is almost exactly square without intending to 16 but i'm going to use just some clap backing material i don't need to use the good stuff i can just use this bit of theme bruan 16 the shade under 16. here's the thing is that putting the back on is always kind of great it just makes everything run better it's like fixing the thermostat in the car it's just you can instantly tell oh that is so pretty here there's another aspect of this which i want to bring up actually let me um i'm going to change my vantage point here because i can see that my head is in the dark and that's weird um there's another aspect to this build that i want to bring up which is these relationships between the drawer runners and drawers and the tolerance and how they fit all of that is um there's so much subjectivity to getting to building the thing to itself and the only way to get really good at it is just to build a lot of shit it's just to build a ton i mean i i have always thought i was pretty okay at carpentry but to be honest in the last six months i've done so much more advanced work in the mental carpentry department and it's just about the institutional knowledge right like making my drawer fronts just a tiny bit higher than the structure of the drawer itself came about from like tons of making drawers slightly wrong sizes that didn't fit and then i like i had to you know do all sorts of really weird things to get those things to get fixed but again some of the most dangerous work you can do with a pin nailer because i've got my hand on the safety and i'm just driving the nail after now i could easily miss one you didn't even hear that but it like shot all the way over there it's time to make the sand i'm gonna use one inch plywood because it's gonna be very very strong and uh yeah all right ladies and gentlemen the rolls it's on wheels this is the stand for my new oh yeah look at that this oh this is really really why are you still sticking what is your deal sorry i don't need to keep on refining this i could do that off camera mostly the build is finished uh i have a few things to do uh so the next thing will happen is i'm going to line these drawers and then i'm going to fill it i'm going to put the stuff that belongs in it so it's the next morning and i came in a little early all planning to jump into my lathe tool cabinet i have a really cool finish i want to do on it i'm super excited about it and as i was moving something around my lathe i bumped a switch broke the switch shorted something in my lathe and then i had to tear apart a whole bunch of crap just to get to the fuses in my lathe i had positioned it years ago so that i had access to those fuses but i had forgotten and it's not like i'd blocked my access but in some ways i had locked my access so i had to uh tear apart my shop this is so this is a sm this is what happens in a small shop when you run into an unexpected problem right everything comes out and this is like one of those things that happens in the shop it's unavoidable but i didn't expect to lose 90 minutes this morning two hours two yeah no 90 minutes night i look i just lost 90 minutes replacing a 3 amp fuse so i am now going to put the shop back together we get a time lapse of that and then i'll get back to work back to zero uh yeah we'll have lost two hours but that's that's what it is and we're back uh whoo last two full hours okay i want to finish this i'm actually i was thinking about staining it and my wife misses don't try this she had an idea she said what about making it red and the thing is i have just made the handle of my collet carrier red and i had used a red spray lacquer marking fluid machinist marking fluid i've got a full can of it so that is what i'm going to finish these drawers in and then i'm going to line them in leather because why the hell not uh i made this template here out of plywood and i cut out nine sheets of leather so it's time for some spraying some finishing some drying and some gluing and then it's time for the sorting the whole sorting i'm installing the leather in the bottom of these drawers and it's instructed to talk a little bit about the process number one getting the material out perfectly to the edges is super vital to you you want to come cut it slightly oversized and then cut it back i am less concerned with that in this one i'm using a carpet and headliner spray this one is made by permatex and i really like this stuff i used this on the headliner in my land cruiser and like three hot summers and it didn't deteriorate and i didn't have that happen with the other headliner spray i used so this stuff is super super strong i'm not sure how archival it is i don't really need to wear a respirator for it because the glue comes out fairly localized it doesn't make the whole room stink um however i'm just going to show you my thought process as i attach something like this um first of all i like to work with the glue a little bit wet uh and then i'm holding it here with yeah a four finger clamp to keep it from sticking to itself and then oh huh and then uh i've never done this while talking and then my real goal here is to get one corner in really nice and flush there we go okay so i get one corner in nice and flush and then i get one edge nice and flush and i do the long edge by the short edge and that allows me to kind of ride the long edge and if stuff is like not quite sitting i can just massage it a little bit yeah like this and look every material has a little bit of a different movement to it right the real trick is don't be afraid to pull this up and start from scratch like buy more material than you need because you're going to mess this up now you could see this little edge curl in here i can take that out i don't care about it um your results may vary if you were going to cut it back then i would actually cut it even bigger so you had some meat to actually hold on to while you were cutting it back this drawer set is rapidly becoming something i'm super ecstatic about um and the leather line drawers i'm kind of curious how i'll feel about those in a year i mean you know felt is such a felt this has so much cachet to it as a toolbox liner green felt like that's what you want to see tools against the green bays right um bayes by the way b-a-i-z-e is an alternative term for the pool table felt if i remember correctly from my time as a pool playing obsessive um you had time as a pool playing obsessive why yes i did kids someday i'll tell you about it uh all right this wow this one's going really well you get into a rhythm i mean you know the more i gather skills the more things i learn how to do both physically and materially engineering-wise and problem-solving-wise the more i realize that less is more and by this i specifically mean a lighter touch is almost always required not the heavy touch think about shooting practice yeah you you push it against the gun lift you you're you're not going to shoot correctly uh archery archery again you don't want to be rigid you want to be soft you want to be the reed that bends uh for all sorts of material and making stuff it's the same thing so with something like this you might feel like you've got to keep an iron grip on the whole business but the fact is you actually need to hold it like it's a baby and when you do when you're relaxed about the movement of it you don't over correct you don't make over correction movement yeah it is uh it's very specific any physical skill that you know well i think you would agree with me that the key to it is not to overdo the amount of force you put into the equation i'm having trouble removing it from the back all right so again i get one corner get one corner in again each time i'm not quite getting it i'm sort of just re-rocking and starting from scratch when the glue gets a little tacky it's also a little less techy it's also a little easier there we go that's the one you know when you got it um i have to say also i threw a pair of tweezers into my uh into my apron and i've been using tweezers almost i've been using tweezers multiple times a day i'm finding having long thin graspers is a really important bit of everyday caring all right ladies and gentlemen this thing is getting so pretty time to put some tools in it do okay campers i have to say julia my wife is brilliant suggesting that i paint the thing red i am happier with this build than i have been with many like this is this is not only lovely it holds all the things that i need and it does it in a beautiful and okay there's a little stickiness here and there but that just was paints drying and stuff this is just all stuff that was gathering dust and like in three different locations and now 40 some odd pounds of it are in one single location and life is good yeah i am uh i am super super psyched um let's go put it in place i managed to fit all my cutters all my manufactured cutters pointy cutters radius cutters cut off tools inserts insert holders boring bars this thing holds a king's ransom of lathe tooling and now that it's all in one location it is actually useful to me that's the thing about organization now i know where it is it can become part of the team thanks for watching 100 of whatever you just watched that's awesome we get to add that to our completion rate you deserve something you deserve a t-shirt for all your hard work follow the link below and buy yourself a tested official t-shirt

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 721,655

Rating: 4.9389138 out of 5

Keywords: tested, one day builds, adam savage, one day build, adam savage one day build, adam savage one day builds, adam savage tested, adam savages one day builds, one day build adam savage, adam savage builds, adam one day build, one day builds tested, one day builds adam savage, tested adam savage one day build, adam savage lathe infrastructure, tested adam savage lathe, drawers, toolchest, tool drawers, adam savage shop, adam savage shop organization, adam savage shop infrastructure

Id: BTGN5QNyA-8

Length: 42min 41sec (2561 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020