Bookcase with Edge-Grain Patterned Plywood

last week i experimented with pattern plywood edge banding and i'm super excited to build something substantial out of it an actual piece of furniture my good friend jana has asked me to build her a piece she is a professional gardener she's helped me with the garden here for years and i've been building built-ins inner condo for just as long say hi john hi jonna so this is my wonderful desk and this is the standing desk that i just adore that michael did i live in 400 square feet and that includes my closet i still have lots of room i love the window i love my place this is a fold out couch so i asked michael if he would build me a box and i have a pull out so i can put my linens in there and then there'll be a bookcase and i can sit and see my teeny tiny view see there's all my stuff in there that uh sooner or later it's gonna go back there all right so this is this is the plan i ca i could bump it up to four and a half to kind of match what's going on here and here so we can do what i was we could do four and a half four and a half four and a half so it all looks right but no i like the look of that too okay so we'll go with basically that [Music] once i had the design planned from janna i could start ripping down the sheets of plywood it's pretty much designed to be made out of one sheet of half inch and one sheet of three quarter inch the half inch is being used to make up the bookcase and that's what i'm working on here [Music] since i designed this whole thing in sketchup to get approval from janna it made it really easy for me to lay out all the dados rabbits and joinery that holds this thing together i don't need these lines to be super accurate really all i'm looking for is is reference so that i don't accidentally cut a section wrong it's really easy to do every single one of these panels is different so i just check and double check before i head over to the router table when i made the grill cart a couple weeks back i used a half inch bit to cut it out and and it was just a little bit loose so i've gone to this undersized bit made by white side it's 21 no 31 60 fourths i know everybody goes crazy in the comments when i use 64th or 30 seconds but i'm stuck with the imperial system it's how i grew up and it's kind of how my mind works although when it gets down to the 64th it starts getting real confusing so i started by cutting the rabbets on the back side and the top and the bottom of the outside panels that's so that they can meet up with nice joinery and i can slot the back in and now i'm going to be cutting the tracks for a couple of the shelves [Music] well i might have a little bit of a problem i wasn't really thinking this through a couple of the dado tracks are about 10 inches back and this fence doesn't go anywhere near that far so i think what i have to do is do the rest of them on the table saw so using all the shims and pretty much every part in my dado pack to set it up at 21 no 31 64. and then i could grab my rockler miter gauge and set up a stop fence so i can make repeated cuts [Music] two of the panels require a track for bypass doors i'm gonna make little pattern plywood bypass doors and for this there's there's two tracks on each panel the first one's pretty easy because i can just cut it straight through but for the second one i'm gonna have to make some stop dados i drew a line on the panel at the end of the cut that i want to make and i lined that up with a line on my fence you can see it's just a pencil mark it'll wipe off later but it's a great way to tell you when to stop so you don't cut all the way through into the next portion of the panel this half inch plywood was a little bit wonky so i just made sure to pass it through a couple times pressing down on the panel to make sure that i got a nice even cut i can actually look at the layers of the plywood to tell if it's cut all the way to depth which is pretty handy it's always good when checking these tracks to lay them up against each other make sure they line up properly and also you'll notice that the the upper one is set at a deeper depth and i'll show you why that is in a little bit everything seems to be fitting pretty well and uh i left a couple of these pieces long because i wanted to cut them to fit uh this piece has the tracks in here but i use the same measurements off of the bottom so i have to cut about a quarter inch off in order to do that i'm just going to trace it out and then take it over the table saw so the cool thing about building this way is that it is a little bit more work on the front end but everything squares up super nice and you get rewarded with the glue up because it's just super strong easy to clamp i like this building method a lot [Music] so the one spot that wasn't holding together was this middle area so i flipped it up and popped a clamp on there and then while i was back there i could check it for square plus possible okay okay i tend to like to leave the back until the end of a glue up but i try not to add too many elements to the glue up so it's kind of nice to wait it gives me a chance to clean up the inside then i can cut the back to fit and it's way less stressful this way here i'm checking for any blowouts and fortunately i didn't get any well as i mentioned at the top of the video i've been experimenting with pattern plywood edge banding if you want more details go check out the video i put out last week this is just a quick compilation of what it took to build the blank for it it's the chevron pattern that i'm using here and i'm going to take that edge banding and use it for this bookcase so it's it's from the same blank i'm actually going to use the blank multiple times throughout this build this is a pretty straightforward process all i do is lay out glue and then apply the edge banding the edge banding is slightly wider than the width of the plywood so i have some room to kind of sand it back and i use these band clamps to hold down the pattern plywood while i wait for the glue to dry [Music] cutting the edge banding to fit is is not trivial and honestly i probably in hindsight would have set up a jig for a handsaw i think it might work a little bit better but i did use the table saw after doing it a couple times it turned out once i added a extra piece of plywood behind it it's like a zero clearance insert i got a lot cleaner cuts [Music] before i accidentally snapped these off i wanted to trim them down using a japanese pull saw really delicately but it worked great [Music] [Music] i tried using the bandy clamps over the tracks for the bypass doors but it just didn't quite work so i ended up going to blue tape blue tape is a great method i just don't necessarily love using it because it's so wasteful but there's just certain areas where i had to do it i let the edge bending dry overnight and then came back with my orbital sander sanded it up and then finished it off with some hand sanding i still had a chunk of that pattern plywood left over from making all the edge banding and i decided to use that for the bypass doors i wanted them to be horizontal and i didn't have quite enough to do that but i figured if i glued them together i could do a diamond pattern in the center and then i would have plenty of material to make the doors out of [Music] out of the clamps it wasn't perfectly flat there was one side that was a little rocky the other side was was a bit flatter so i ran the flattest side against the fence cut off the side with the rock on it and then flipped it around shifted the fence over a little bit and nibbled off just a little bit more i didn't have a lot of extra material to work with but this ended up being just enough off camera i made a little template to dial in the thickness of material to make the bypass doors work properly and so i just traced that out onto the big pattern plywood flank brought it over to my bandsaw and re-sawed it [Music] so the resawing got me in the ballpark but i had to go back to the table saw to get it nice and flat and dial in the thickness on both pieces [Music] the panels looked slightly unfinished to me so i added some maple edge banding to the outsides and then i started working on the handle design i wanted to keep the handles pretty nice and simple and so i decided just to use the kerf of the blade to cut in a little notch and then i made another piece out of out of maple to go into that notch i arched it to the arch of the table saw blade so it has this little point on the end of it and that'll make it easy to grip and slide it back and forth so now you can see how these doors insert i made that upper track a little bit taller and so they kind of lift up and in and then their own gravity is what holds them into place there's not much else i can do on the bookcase before i build the base cabinet so that's what i'm moving on to here i'm gonna break down this sheet of plywood so i can start putting it together [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i know how much janna likes the little details on the furniture that i build so i decided for the toe kick to add some dowels into it i could have done this with dominoes totally but i think this is going to look a lot cooler and it's just going to be one more design element that she can enjoy [Music] a lot of times when i add tops to things i'll make them removable because they're the most likely part to get damaged so that's what i did i just screwed this in and i think actually down the road it might look cool as a solid wood top when i went to add the drawers and i realized that i had a scrap piece that was exactly the same height as the toe kick it's the end cut off of the toe kick so i just use that to prop up the drawer hardware while i was installing it and i should say that if you were curious about installing drawers i'm not going to go into in depth on how to do that in this video but i do have a video that talks all about the the main ways that i build drawers in the shop and i think it's really helpful to people who who have never built a drawer or have been really intimidated to start building drawers or even people who have made them before and and could use a couple tips and tricks so check out that video when you get a chance [Music] i chose the blum under mounted drawer slides for a lot of reasons i like this this hardware a lot but i also like these clips because janna talked about wanting to store stuff in the back of this cabinet and rather than having a super deep drawer she can just unclip this drawer whenever she wants and she can store stuff like holiday decorations secret recipes treasure maps whatever you want it's a nice little secret storage in the back of this cabinet so so my next step is to make the drawer fronts for the cabinet and for that i'm going to be using the chevron pattern pattern plywood and i have one piece left from that sheet of plywood and i think it's enough but i'm not really sure i get questions all the time about how much plywood yields how much patterned plywood the short answer is that it's it's complicated but i'm going to be coming out with a guide to to cover all of that soon i'm working on it in the background right now as soon as i'm happy with it i'm going to be posting it on my website so make sure you're on my email list if you're interested and uh let me know in the comments down below if you'd be excited about that or what you'd like to see included in there basically i've just laid out my panel here i've i've actually cut it down it's it's actually 24 inches but i i know that i'm going to lose some from the kerf cut so i just reduced it down a little bit the next step from this is to rip it into strips so i've got all these strips laid out those strips get moved to a 45 degree angle and then those get turned again so you can see it kind of does this twisting motion where the width here actually becomes this width so the 35 and three quarters ends up reducing down to just around 20 25 and then this one actually expands because uh you're going on the diagonal so uh you end up with almost 29 inches there uh this is definitely confusing which is the reason why i do it with 3d software i'm working on a way like a calculator so that this can be managed a little bit easier but uh but hopefully this this gives you some frame of reference for the calculations that i'm doing until i get the pattern plywood worksheet guide whatever it's going to be on my website there there's loads of other resources for uh for making pattern plywood i've made a ton of videos at this point on a bunch of different patterns i think i've developed with like 15 patterns or so and uh you can check all those out i also recommend people going on instagram and just searching the hashtag patternplywood because there's lots of interesting things being done by people other than me and uh it's just so fun to see what's going on with with other other makers as they use this stuff actually the idea for the pattern plywood edge banding wasn't my own it came from the leeds woodcrafters on instagram they they reached out they said they made this really cool thing and uh they were wondering if i'd be interested in experimenting with it and i ended up doing it and and i just love the community that's growing up around around pattern plywood so it's super cool keep up the great work everybody out there and uh keep keep adding me on instagram i'd love to see what you're working on halfway through this i realized that this might actually be the biggest panel i've ever glued up of pattern plywood and it turned out pretty well i actually got really good squeeze out on it i had quite quite a bit of sanding to do to get it flat just because it's too wide for my drum sander and then i just trimmed it up trimmed it down to size so that it would fit the drawers i really like seeing it in this big format it kind of has a different character it looks more like a basket and it's kind of more of a texture than a designed pattern but it's a really cool look and and so it's it's good to kind of experiment and see what it looks like at this size so jonah wanted exposed edge grain somewhere and i decided to add that into the handle these handles are relatively straightforward the most complicated part is this little routed out groove for a finger hold i like doing this i just use the the plate on my router table as a guide to kind of set it in and pull it pull it back out and that worked great i was able to to get a nice uniform pull underneath i just had to clean it up with the chisel after a little bit of thought i was worried that these drawer pulls weren't going to be strong enough with just a glue joint so i ended up adding in these three dowels and i ultimately really liked them it reflected the design from the toe kick which i thought was kind of cool [Music] once again to make my life easier i broke this up into two separate glue ups so i glued the handle on first waited for it to set up and dry and that way i knew i had the alignment then i could use the holes that i drilled before to drill in for the dowels and then hammer those into place [Music] when it came to installing the drawer fronts this was pretty straightforward i just clamped the top one in to the bottom of that drawer and slid it out and screw it in from the back [Music] [Music] the second drawer was a little bit more complicated i used some double stick carpet tape on the back and i taped some handy shims at an eighth inch to the top of the handle so that i had my spacing and i pressed it into place to get the tape to adhere once that did i slid it out and then clamped it in from the bottom screwed it in from the back again now it's time to add some finish to all the parts and for this i'm just using a water-based polyurethane made by general finishes i'll put a link down below i like this a lot because it doesn't yellow quite as much as other finishes and it's it goes on real easy dries in an hour or two and is ready for a re-coat [Music] so one of the things that i honestly just forgot about until the day that i was supposed to install this was that i needed a hole for an outlet in there and usually i would do this on a drill press while i was making the furniture but i just totally forgot so instead i took these armor clamps and clamped down a piece of plywood to make sure that the grain doesn't explode on the inside and then used a inch and a quarter forstner bit to drill out the hold for the plug now the plug had to go through both the bookcase and the base cabinet so i traced out the bookcase on top of the base cabinet removed it and then drilled another hole through i also didn't want the grain to explode on the inside of this cabinet so i drilled almost all the way through from the top and then finish it off by drilling from the bottom [Music] [Music] the pac-man seat the pac-man seat and we love the pac-man seat make sure you don't get trapped in there yeah okay are you good yeah i think so okay thanks john you're welcome so [Music] so [Music] he's made so many things he probably can't count a lot of things and he just finished this okay you can now have that melon you go ahead and have that okay [Music] this is so great look at that goes all the way out nothing will get lost back here oh so nice oh look at that okay i'm ready for you sunset thank you so much wow and we gotta fill it with books [Music] you

Channel: Michael Alm

Views: 93,549

Rating: 4.9508538 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Oltu9m-WDro

Length: 31min 55sec (1915 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021