Building A Kitchen Island From 100 Year Old Pine

okay welcome into the shop it's great to have you out here i've got a really cool build lineup for this and this is going to be a full build 30 minutes long but there's a lot of cool um woodworking techniques we're going to cover in this this is a kitchen island that's basically designed to be a piece of furniture so it's not something you would leave in your house it's a piece that you would take with you freestanding here's the sketchup file of this basically it's got three dovetail drawers on the front an open shelf in the bottom and then the back area has kind of a sitting area for bar stools to slide under it's going to be painted on the base and clear finish on the top so i'm starting by working on the front drawer frame this is the bottom rail you can see in the sketchup design where i pulled it out we're fitting it with a double morse antenna now i've already cut the mortises on the mortiser the tenons on the bandsaw so we're just jumping right into the fit on this and basically this doesn't have a joint or another joint it doesn't have a shoulder on the top and bottom of the joint so i can take a hand plane make a few passes and adjust the fit pretty easily uh and that's what i'm doing here is just kind of dialing in the fit you want it to be snug able to snug it down mostly by hand and then a few taps with a hammer to get it uh to get the seat at home so with that bottom rail fitted with i'm turning my attention to the top rail of that drawer frame which you'll see again here in the sketchup file it drops into the top of the legs with a real cool joint that's actually a dovetail this is a common joint used on traditional furniture for that top drawer runner top drawer rail in the frame so basically i've laid out the dovetail i'm about to cut that with a dovetail saw now this does have a rabbet uh on the bottom to create a shoulder you're gonna see this better here in a few shots um i cut that rabbet out on the table saw using a dado stack and then i cut the drug tail and i try not to cut my finger slice my finger dude so the unique thing about this pine is it has a really hard late wood so that darker wood you're seeing is the late wood the earlier early wood is the lighter color wood the late wood is super super hard it dulls machinery really quick and hand tools so if you run a hand plane over that that late wood is going to dull them the plane super fast interesting wooden that way so when it wears there's really no wear on the late wood but the early wood will dent super easily and it's just i find that so interesting how hard that late wood gets it was a real challenge as a craftsman building it's not exactly an ideal uh material to work in it would be my first pick it is beautiful but it's a pain to work with so with that dovetail cut out i've got to cut the other shoulder so you can see that first shoulder i was speaking of on the bottom and this is just the uh waist part of that dovetail we're cutting out and i'll take a chisel and kind of clean that up and make sure everything is flat and flush so with the dovetail cut i'm just going to transfer it into the top of my leg uh just basically using a pencil and then we'll take that waste out with a plunge router i think i've got a 3 8 up cut spiral bit on here just to take the waist out and then i'll come back with a chisel and chisel basically to my line uh to get the exact fit i need you want to be real careful when you chisel uh in this manner because you're chiseling down into the wood you're you're you're you're more splitting the fibers than you are cutting and you have to be careful because if the wood wants to split it can it can undercut that dovetail edge and actually make a for a really bad fit so if as you tap that chisel down you notice that the wood's not splitting how you want then you're gonna have to come across the grain now i was fortunate in this piece that it was um splitting quite nicely and it was actually cutting the fibers and making a nice clean uh shoulder there for that dovetail to fit into but if it splits and it undercuts then uh your joint's not going to fit well you're not going to get the glue joint so you have to come across the grain you can see there's a pretty pretty good fit happy with that uh so there's actually four of these joints to cut there's a there's a rail on the front and then there's actually one in the back which you'll see here in a bit when i assemble it next step is to work on the vertical dividers uh that divide out the three drawers there's two of them they're going to be connected with a sliding dovetail so the first thing i need to do is in that top and bottom rail that we've been working on i need to cut a dado in there so that i can come back and cut out the sliding dovetail you can't cut the sliding dovetail in one pass without removing some material it's just too much for that bit to cut it's uh it just wouldn't work so you always come in with a dado and run a dado and then when you come back with your dovetail bit all it's cutting is the outside of that router bit the middle waist is obviously gone so it makes it way easier to cut and i'm not using a fence or anything here i've just laid all these out with a knife and you can see how well they all line up it's really crucial that everything lines up the two slots the two dados and the shoulders at the end uh that way your drawer frame is perfect square and true otherwise you're going to run into a lot of problems so i've got the sliding bit in the router in one pass i'm going to cut that sliding dovetail right out you see it right here it makes sense now that would be really hard to cut all by itself without the dado it would be a big cut a lot of material to remove now we're going to glue the up the front frame i've already got the sides glued up just basic morrison tin and joining now before we jump into that i want to tell you real quick about today's sponsor simply safe okay so i want to take a few minutes to tell you guys about today's sponsor simply safe now if you've been with my channel for a while you know that simply safe has been a great supporter of the channel for the last couple years they make a very effective and reliable home security system which i have set up in my home and in my shop you just order online it's super easy takes about an hour to set it up there's no contract so you're not locked into any long-term deals it monitors your house 24 7 from this home base you uh connect all the components with a keypad you can set your alarm please exit now or you can set it from the phone it has an app you have sensors at your windows and doors so if you open in any of those it'll trigger the alarm there's also a lot of cool extras like hd camera a doorbell camera it also has a lock both of those i have set up on my house you have smoke detection which is great for the shop also water detection which is also great for my shop because my shop has flooded before you 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sponsoring the content for being such long term supporters and for making such a great security system that gives me and my wife great peace of mind now let's get back to this build and finish up this kitchen island okay we're back at it gluing in that bottom rail uh those tenons we fitted at the very beginning of the video and that top dovetail as well this piece you see me putting glue on is the bottom uh basically runner or apron you can see it had a miter on it so it meets up with the other apron on the on the on the side uh they bury into that leg and actually meet up together inside the leg that's why they have to miter otherwise they wouldn't seat up so when you clamp this up you want to be very careful that you're not over tightening the clamp it's really easy to bow your parts pretty severely especially um on your drawer drawer frame you just want to get basically the shoulder seated up right there and then back off the clamp a little bit if you bow that drawer frame it's going to cause a lot of problems fitting your drawers into the frame in fact you're probably not gonna have very good action on your drawers they're probably gonna bind and stick so we drop in this dovetail piece right from the top like i mentioned there's two of these so there's one in the back as well just to keep the whole frame the base frame kind of squared and true you can see it in this shot kind of towards the back of that frame okay so while that's drying up we're going to run the sliding dovetails these are the vertical dividers i just set up the router table and make a few passes and uh basically those fit into that drawer frame uh this is the back apron you can see it here in the sketchup file it is also dovetailed in um there's two of those there's one on the bottom that holds the shelf and then the one up high it basically just slides in with a dovetail as well it's a little bit awkward here as you can tell that it's such a tall piece on the router table so you have to be careful how you manage it um and just go real slow it helps to wax the table top in this situation because it creates a real slick surface so it's easier to control the work piece is not sticking or binding and here again you see the drawer the vertical drawer dividers that are going to divide out our drawers so with those cut i'm going to glue those in uh even while the the glue is wet on the other parts that we glued up previously still got the clamps on those so we'll go ahead and slide in this back apron that that side fit a little loose so when i hammered on the other side it kind of dropped in which is a little bit convenient but that's a once that glue sets up that's a really solid strong joint and the great thing is there's a mechanical advantage you can't pull it apart obviously like if it was a regular dado uh eventually it could break out because there's no mechanical aspect to it holding it in place that's the exact same thing that applies to these drawer dividers and even more important in this case because you put three drawers in here and put weight into those drawers it's pulling that bottom rail down trying to separate that frame and if it was just a regular dado eventually it would separate that frame i've seen it in antiques where they've fallen apart the sliding dovetail it has the mechanical advantage that it's held in there it would take a lot of force to break that apart way more force than the weight you could put in the drawers okay so i turned my attention now to milling up the tabletop these beautiful beautiful boards all came out of the same beam basically re-sawn book matched and i get to use my new oliver 16 inch wide joiner this is actually one of the first times i used it and it's perfect timing because these boards were about 15 and a half inches wide so it fit my joiner perfectly no issues here um really beautiful machine that works really well what i love about this long leaf is that vertical grain you can tell it's all growth because it's such tight growth rings it's very very unique it's not something that you find in new growth pine trees if you find behind at let's say home depot you're going to have these big growth rings i honestly couldn't tell you why so here i'm face joining which means i'm joining the wide part of the board i'll face joint all three boards get a nice flat true face and then reference that on the bottom of my planer and plane them all to the same thickness [Music] so once i process them all to the same thickness i get to go over here and edge join them and this is where this new machine really shines because it's a hundred inch long tabletop this is a 76 inch long board that i'm joining and basically right off this joiner i'm able to glue up these boards and i've never been able to do that before in the past because i have a small i've had a smaller jointer that's 54 inches long almost half almost half the length of this new one so almost always i have to go and dial this fit in with a hand plane but these were coming off the jointer true and straight and i was able to go straight to the clamps off the jointer which makes me really happy because it saves me a ton of work with the hand plane another thing i love about these boards is if you look the flat song section is only about three inches wide that's the middle of the board basically some people call it cathedral grain the rest of it is all mostly quarter sawn i mean it's just this really small center section of the board and everything else is this nice straight vertical grain which is a very unique look um in my opinion and i love you can see these black dots in it those were actually the bolt holes that held hardwood for this bridge where the cables attached to the beam so it's interesting how uh you get that reclaimed look and the story to this wood is really unique and i think that's really what the client was looking for okay so while that's drying uh we're gonna work i've already glued up these frames so this is what i would call the kickers for the drawers it goes on the top and it's the top of the drawers right on this it's basically just a frame that is laid up to match the opening of my drawers and i'm just going to basically glue it in to the table base and unscrew it as well that's what i'm doing right now is drilling out some countersink countersunk holes to put screws through it you get a nice fit here it adds up quite a bit of structure to the piece as well um gives a little bit more stiffness it helps stiffen up that front drawer frame to keep it from sagging because there is a tendency for that to want to sag at about a 74 inch span there basically i will line that up to the top edge of that table base after i glue up any table base i always hand plane everything level and flush so that tabletop has a nice flat surface to rest on and it gives me a starting point here starting point here for reference so if i reference this frame to the top of my table that's i know that's nice and true and flat and then from there i can work off of that as i add more of the components for the drawers so here i'm adding the runners i want you to notice the mdf spacer basically i have a spacer for each drawer opening it's very uncommon almost never happens that all your drawers are the exact same width exact same opening there's the discrepancy there maybe a 16th of an inch so i make a spacer for each opening and use that to place my runner so if that spacer is cut to the exact opening i can move it to the back and put my runner in and i know everything is true and parallel if i just work from right to left and this is just a filler piece to fill in that gap that the leg creates from the apron to the drawer so with all the runners in i'm gonna drop the bottom frame which is the exact match to the top frame um and it basically is what the drawer will rest on and be supported by and uh the same thing i did with the spacers i'm doing here there's four in there you can find the four mdf spacers that basically those are cut to the exact height of the openings and i can just rest it on that make sure it's down tight it was a little bit of a tight fit so i just bring it over to the other bench and shave off some with the hand plane and then i can glue it and drop it in to the actual table base frame and that is a nice snug fit it didn't quite drop all the way down it set up about an eighth of an inch which i hadn't planned on uh but it's just kind of how it worked out and i was okay with that because under the table you may feel it if you reach under there but you're not going to see it so i move on to the dovetails i'm not covering a whole bunch of the dovetails here i have multiple videos on cutting dovetails and the whole process and i'll link those so you can check that out so i'm just catching kind of the high points here basically what i'm doing now is batch cutting out the dovetail so the front of the drawer will have half blinds the back will have full dovetails and i cut basically put one drawer in so there's two sides into my moxon vise cut the verticals and come back with my coping saw and cut out all of the inside waist and then we'll chisel it all out to the shoulder uh once we take it out of the vise here i'm on the pin board so this is the mating board to what we were just working on i've laid out the dovetails i've made the cut and i'm chiseling out the waste i have a knife line that i can just work my chisel back to and have a perfectly straight shoulder across that pin board the drawers are made out of quarter-sawn white oak uh which i've always thought was just a great wood to work with fun wood to cut dovetails with and it has a great look to it as a drawer when you open it up it's pretty stunning to see quarter sawn oak there and plus it's stable so quarter sun oak is super stable you're not going to get a lot of swelling and movement out of it quick test fit to see how it looks how it works i've gotten better over the years at fitting it right off the saw when i first started cutting dovetails i spent a lot of time with chisels fine-tuning the fit because they were always too tight because i was scared that i would have gaps and i've slowly kind of gained my confidence and skills to where um really a few trim a little bit of trimming here and there and i've got a good solid fish so i glue all these drawer boxes up the next step is to hand plane them to fit their openings the way i do this is i i fit the front of the drawer to fit the opening perfect so when i glue it up i leave the sides slightly proud of those pins uh as i hand plane down once i start hitting the pins on the front of the board on the front board i know that at that point i'm taking material off that front board and i'm making the drawer smaller so i have a frame of reference and it helps me not to plane too much off it helps me to know kind of when to stop once i do the sides i set it on the other bench and basically do the top and bottoms basically what i'm doing is just leveling the joints they're pretty level to begin with uh but there's a little bit of work to do to level the sides with the front and make everything clean at that point it should fit fairly well if everything uh was fitted correctly to begin with uh sometimes it takes more work than others uh in this particular build i was pretty fortunate to have all the drawers fit real quite nicely and off the first few passes with the hand plane so there it is um slides in perfectly this is the point where you just want to stand back and look at it and kind of amaze me as a furniture maker i can't help but open and close it multiple times i even find myself coming up in the shop sometimes you just can't help i mean it's a satisfying moment as a furniture maker to have a drawer fit properly um i don't know words don't really explain it it's just super satisfying next step is to put in the half mortise locks i'm cutting out the keyhole here so i've already drilled a 3 16 hole that was a 1 8 chisel that i'm using to lay out off of i'll place my key over the hole and mark the bottom of my slot there and this is a pretty crucial part of the build there's certain areas where you just can't make a mistake and this is one of them i'm going to use a coping saw and i need to i need to be able to salt straight down that line without making any errors if i go off at an angle it's going to be super noticeable and there's no fixing it really so i take my time here and go really slow and just concentrate on getting a nice straight cut with my coping saw so once i get there to the end cut the other one obviously and then i just come back with that chisel that i used to lay it out and just lock the waist the reason i use the eighth inch chisel is the smallest chisel i have and um i want to make sure that i have enough room to get a chisel in to do what i'm doing right now if it was any smaller and i couldn't chisel that out it would be very difficult to get that waste out all right so i'll take a few passes with my hand playing kind of clean up any uh little bits of tear out or anything around that keyhole get a nice crisp line between the surface of that drawer and the keyhole so the next step is to cut the mortises that the actual deadbolt will go into to lock the drawer i just use a quarter inch bit on my plunge router just put the drawer in mark it out and i like this to be a really pretty snug fit i don't want when the drawer is locked i don't want there to be a lot of play i feel like that feels kind of almost cheap and not well done so i like i like basically to have a pretty tight fit so when you lock that drawer and you pull on it it doesn't really move at all so you can see here in this shot kind of how the tolerance is and how close it is you got to be real careful here because there is a chance that if you're too small you can't even lock it and then obviously that's a big problem so so it's a tricky fit but uh like i said i like to get it as close as i can get it okay so we're just going to jump right into the finish here i know a lot of y'all are probably like why are you painting a long leaf and i get it the we wanted this to have a very traditional feel the paint was decided from the beginning because it matched their their setup their kitchen so what i'm doing is brushing on primer so i'll get those brush marks those brush strokes in the finish that gives it that traditional feel plus when you paint pine any any wood like this you're going to see the texture of the wood through the paint which i love that look it looks great it's way better in my opinion than painting maple or poplar where you get a really slick smooth surface so that's one of the reasons we stuck with longleaf pine for the base on the drawer boxes i taped off the sides i wanted to not paint over the dovetails obviously and just paint that front drawer that front board so it was a little tricky here making sure that that was masked off properly i didn't get anything of me spraying the finish but i just basically sprayed two coats of tinted color lacquer which is the exact color you're seeing right now uh and that's man that's like the most satisfying part right there is pulling off that tape and seeing those dovetails the drawer box gets a couple coats of shellac that's a really easy quick drying finish to put on drawers and then you can wax over that and get a nice slick drawer that even improves how it rides in the drawer opening and here i am putting some wax on it and you can see how nice that looks and how that that quarter-sawn oak really pops even without a stain or color on it and the next step is to put the drawer bottoms in these drawer bottoms kind of potato chipped on me really bad they bowed big time uh with a shift in humidity so they were a bit of a struggle to get in but i got them in there and the the bottoms are secured with just a simple brass screw that's in a slotted hole so it allows that bottom to uh shrink and swell with season uh you can see the slotted hole right there so i hope you enjoyed the build i'm gonna go over it a little bit here on camera for you guys i appreciate you tuning in and here's a little bit more detail about this piece okay so let me tell you a little bit about the construction of this piece it's all mortise and tenon joinery um everything is put together with mortise and tenons you've got a dovetail dropped into this top leg for this top rail right here sliding dovetails for these vertical pieces and sliding dovetail for the rear apron pieces all the drawers are boxes are made out of quarter sawn oak some of it is ripped but mostly shot for quarter sauna the tur the pools are turned uh in the shop it's got half mortise locks from horton brasses i can find a key so these are actual functioning locks the keyhole is i was really thought this was a cool keyhole i made it really small it fits the key perfectly and i think it has a really cool little look sometimes i'll put i think it's called in a sketchy one i always pronounce it wrong but on this particular one the key was so small i didn't like the way the ones i had looked but everything functions and works perfectly the the drawer boxes are all dovetailed by hand hand cut dovetails oh we're still locked it's still locked there we go so the dovetails are all done by hand they're half blind dovetails we taped off and painted uh where the front meets the sides i did not want to paint over these dovetails they're just too pretty so i did this masking and taping i think it looks pretty cool over time i'm sure as you open and close these that's going to wear off and change a little bit but i think it looks cool right now the drawers operate and function real nicely gotta love that awesome the bottom is tongue and groove shelving and then you've got these angled braces that come in and kind of give it a nice look because what we've got is actually a back area so the back of this actually is designed for bar stools so it sets in about um oh i don't know 12 30 actually about 14 inches so you can slide bar stools under here and you can sit and use this top and that's why we have that separation those cross braces going i wanted to kind of create a separation there i mean we were originally going to do a really cool paneling uh but we opted to do something a little bit more open that's why we use the cross braces also we did you know you can see all these holes these are book match boards so all these holes kind of match up the glue line is about right here so obviously these fold over onto that one and then there's another glue line right about here this one would go straight over to that one these were the old bolt holes that held the hardware filled them with a total boat epoxy tinted it black filled all the cracks with epoxy try to get it nice and clean and smooth although it will get beat up it looks pretty nice right now i had so much fun making this these are the kind of pieces i love to make just nice traditional clean looking furniture with hand cut dovetails it'll be a heirloom piece of furniture they'll give it to their grandkids and that makes me happy because that's what i like to build okay so real quick i just want to thank you all for tuning in on this video i hope you enjoyed it it was a two and a half week build that i went through pretty quick i had a deadline that i had to hit i was working pretty hard to get that and focus a little bit less on filming it so i know it was maybe a little bit spotty and skipped through some spots but hopefully you got a good feel for how this piece was made it's a beautiful piece that ended up in a beautiful home you can go over to my instagram and see photos of it in its finished spot and see how it looked and also if you want to help support the channel i have merchandise that is in the description as well and also a big thanks to simply save for sponsoring the content but the biggest thanks of all goes to you guys for watching and enjoying the videos i hope you enjoyed this one leave me a comment let me know what you think now i know a lot of y'all are wondering where we're at with the arkansas and there's a lot happening right now with that so expect some content coming real soon i've got enough content right now to make multiple videos i've been working on that thing now for straight about a week and a half and i have gotten a lot accomplished we've already started doing some woodworking on it and making some cabinets so you guys hold tight there's a lot of argus content coming a lot of cool stuff is happening so just be patient hopefully this week i'll get a video up for you guys and appreciate you guys tuning in leave me a comment let me know what you think and we'll see you next time

Channel: Andy Rawls

Views: 137,467

Keywords: andy rawls, andy rawls bandsaw, andy rawls boots, andy rawls cutting board, andy rawls demolition ranch, andy rawls instagram, andy rawls merchandise, andy rawls shop tour, andy rawls spoon, andy rawls table, andy rawls workbench, woodworking asmr, golf ball, wood golf ball, making a golf ball, wood driver, lathe, woodturning, carving, wood carving, breadboard ends, making breadboard ends, mortise and tenon, dovetails, halfblind dovetails, kitchen island, long leaf pine

Id: Vn8ApVyRUHk

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020