Building A Simple Book Case! Woodworking How To

hey I'm presenting everything and today we are building this bookcase now I know it looks complicated but the assembly is very simple you can really make this with a couple of basic tools check it out okay so we're building this bookcase out of one inch by 12 inch finger joint pre-primed the pine now one inch by 12 inches a dimensional standard so the material actually measures eleven and a quarter by three-quarters of an inch thick now because of that my bookcase is actually dimensioned to use this material without ripping it so a lot of the work that I'm doing on this project is on the miter saw now I set up a positive stop block and I drew this entire cabinet in Google Sketchup and after I done drawing the cabinet I make a very concise and very specific cut list now the cut list allows me to pretty much you know effortlessly cut all my material up using stop blocks I know exactly how many pieces I need the lengths I need and I can label them in categories that I do in Sketchup on the computer so that when I'm in the shop I can really maximize the shop time and just bang through cutting all these pieces up you can see how quickly I'm able to just set stop blocks cut them up the parts start to add up really quickly and as long as I keep things organized there's very very little room for error now I need to make some of the shelf facing so we're gonna have some three and a half inch thick facing some 4-inch facing and some inch and a half so again I set my fence I know exactly how many I need of each and I just run them through the table saw real quick and easy back over on the miter saw I can cut some of the shelf blocking that I'm gonna use now I'm not using a sophisticated shelf mounting system on this I'm basically just using blocks that are going to be pinned and screwed the side panels of each cabinet and those are what's gonna be holding my shelf up the glues and the 18 gauge brad nails that I'm going to be using are more than enough to support shelves of this width and it's going to be a quick and simple way to build this cabinet now you saw that I just marked out that thin piece of wood and that's what's called a story Paul I'm gonna talk a little bit out about that in a minute but what it does is it just allows me to quickly mark all my cabinet sides at the same dimensions I also nailed these little pieces of wood into the table so that I could push these cabinet sides up against them so they wouldn't go anywhere now I'm using inch and a quarter 18 gauge brad nails and I'm using this little cordless nail gun I'm very confident in those Brad nails with the glue to hold these shelves in place I use this system quite often when I'm building a simple shelving unit like this now the other option you could use a router and you could router in a groove for all your shelves to sit in if you watched my cedar closet video which I'll put a link above that was how I did the cedar closet because all the shelves had a 3/4 inch thick dimension now these shelves are supposed to look as though they are inch and a half in some instances and three and a half in other instances so that's why I'm able to use these big pieces of blocking and I'll put a shelf on the top and the bottom to gain that dimension okay so what you just saw me doing was using what's called a story pole so what I did was I laid out the bottom of all of my shelves on this piece of scrap material and then I made this little jig that just allows me to slide my cabinet side in just so that it doesn't slide around it's not doesn't have to be precise but basically what I'm doing here is using this story pole against the bottom reference of the shelf and that's giving me the bottom of all of my shelving now I marked the story pole with what size blocking goes in each location and then I use a square to shoot a line straight across the material and I put in this block and I'm very careful to make sure that I'm right on that line so that it's consistent across both sides of the shelves and the other thing that I'm taking into account here is I'm making sure to mark the front and the top of my material that being said if my square is a little bit out I want all my shelves to be out in the same direction so basically if my square was out a square by a little bit up all my shelves would be a little up or down that bit that being so that when I put this thing together I can shim it on the same side I'm not trying to compensate for it twist so this is a really quick and easy way to avoid using a tape measure the tape measure is where that human error comes into play now as I finish these up I could put them over here and now I only need to make matching shelving sides the two sides that flank the cabinet are gonna be matching if I was making a lot of these I would actually test assemble the first one just to make sure that everything was correct since I just have one more to make I'm just gonna go ahead and use a story cold to lay it out knock my blocking on then I can assemble them both at the same time so now that I have all my shelf sides completed I can start to put my shelves in now I just make sure that I have the right ones I did orient them a little bit with front faces you know I wouldn't I wouldn't want to accidentally use one of the chowder DUP you know faces this stuff does come straight from the lumberyard so some of them have some pretty bad gouges and nicks in them so I'm careful to make sure I use what's nice and clean now I'm checking my dimensions as I go cuz this is the first one I'm adding glue to both the bottom and the side of the shelf panel and again I'm using inch and a quarter Brad nails to pin these into place I also have a wet rag around so that I can clean up any of the glue squeeze out at the end this cabinet is going to be painted on-site by a painter so I want to give them the best job that I can so there isn't a lot of excessive glue squeeze-out that they have to try and chip off or scrape out with a knife once I get one side in place I can raise up the other side get my glue in there and nail it in and I'm using just a little rubber mallet making sure everything stays nice and even I want my face to be very very flush and parallel so I pin everything and I go back and I add a couple more nails check for square and I move on to the next one now I'm gonna be able to shim these with some cross bracing if they're not square now so I don't have to worry about it and I'm gonna add in the bottoms of the thicker shelves now as well before I do the next shelving unit and then these just get nailed in like I said from the bottom and these just give those shelves a little bit of a lesion that they are four inches of solid material as opposed to just you know 3/4 inch material of blocking I can start on the pair to this side flanking unit so it's to about 28 inch wide units on the sides and then a about a 60 inch unit in the middle again I'm making sure to get rid of all my squeeze out nice tidy job with both of those nailed I can get them out of the way and put them off to the side on my sawhorses while I work on the larger unit before I get to the larger unit though I'm going to take a square and I'm gonna use just some scrap wood I'm gonna put a diagonal brace across this in an orientation that leaves my shelves nice and square to the sides those will dry overnight and they'll be really really stiff and set up by the morning now this now this larger shelf is a little harder to deal with just because it is so much bigger and I have to do so much more reaching but at the end it is the exact same process so I'm gonna nail in on one side nailing on the other try and keep everything nice and square and flush I can flip it up on its side add some more nails to those shelves so all the nail holes that I put in through these 18 gauge Brad's I'm gonna patch with some ready patch prior to giving this to the client I just like to do a little bit of due diligence and just make sure everything looks nice and smooth before it gets into the clients apartment I'm also adding some screws here just to give a little bit more stability to those horizontal shelves now here's my first chance to do sort of a test mock-up and see how wide the unit's going to be check my dimensions and make sure that everything is looking good everything checks out and I need to make some spacers now to space the side units off from the centre unit now for these I decided to screw these in with pocket screws instead of using the Brad nails again I just thought pocket screws would help me eliminate some of the holes that I was making plus I wanted an opportunity to test out this new toy that I got from an auction this is a Craig DB 55 it is a pneumatic pocket home machines so this uses an air power drill to drill the pocket holes with an air-powered clamp to hold down the material this thing worked really well and now I can flip my side units down and I can screw into them using the Craig screws and again this is just gonna give me some stable material on the side to space out my other cabinets and also not have any visible fasteners now with both of those side spacers screwed on there I can assemble the cabinet in a more permanent fashion just to know my dimensions now I'm using some clamps here temporarily but this is going to accurately show me how wide the style is gonna be and this is gonna allow me to put in some of the blocking that goes on these thicker shelves now I wanted to add blocking here with just glue and clamps let this dry overnight and that's gonna make my shelves extra stable and also just sort of keep things and keep things nice and clean without adding a bunch of extra nail holes right on the top of the shelves where there'd be most likely to be visible the last bit of blocking I need to add to add actual shelves to the unit is the top section now there is a four inch top shelf on the unit itself and in order to accomplish that I added the blocking similar to how I did on the others and put a shelf on the bottom side of it that wouldn't act as the top you can see how I did it here just by nailing on some of that blocking and then nailing the Shelf up to the bottom of it now I decided it would be best to screw the side units on to the center unit for my test assembly and that'll just keep everything nice and tight so that when I do all my trimming I don't have to worry about things being different when I get to the site itself now in order to do the trim the important sections here are the base and the vertical Stiles because those are gonna dictate the size of my shelf fronts and those are what I really want to be nice and tight so I start with the base and I just tacked this in place with a couple of nails because this isn't permanent i tacked the other small section in place - you know the big key to this whole unit is that it's able to be taken apart into three or four pieces and able to move into this house without having any issue so I try to keep this built and designed in a way that it would be easy to take apart but also I want to maximize the amount of work that I can do in the shop because that's where the environment is the most controlled I can stay as long as I want I can make noise and we can make it right so I start nailing in the vertical sides and I'm careful here not to nail the entire cabinet together because I obviously need to take the whole thing apart so I only have nails on one side and now the other key here is that the actual shelf fronts are not going to be three quarters of an inch thick like the rest of the material I want them to have a 1/8 inch reveal so I run it all through the planer at five eighths of an inch and that's just gonna give me that little extra detail it's gonna make the shelf faces never crack they're gonna look super nice and you know something like that I did run by the client and just made sure that that's what he was looking for but in my experience the all flat panels especially when they use them in this method unless you biskits them and dowel them they're really always going to move a little bit so you will wind up with some cracking so if you can give yourself a reveal it's somewhere for that cracking to go and usually saves you so as I nail these on I'm cutting them on the little rigid portable miter saw and this is just the kind of Mac maximize my productivity and minimize a time that I have to get off and go on to the table I'm working up on my table because it is the largest flat reference surface in my shop the floor in my shop is in terrible shape it's totally wonky and wobbly but working on the table the table seven foot by 12 foot everything's nice and flat and with the weather still being a little cold is actually much warmer up here than it is on the ground so that was also a nice welcome change now this piece that goes on the center shelf I can't install because that's where I'm gonna split this cabinet in half I'm actually after-the-fact gonna cut that cabinet using the jigsaw and that's gonna allow me to break the middle cabinet down into two pieces which will absolutely be able to get down the stairs but I don't show me cutting the cabinet it was sort of an afterthought when I realized the scale of this thing it would be much better to cut it in half but you will see me put it back together when I get on site now I'm just making sure to clean any glue squeeze-out with a wet rag to I want to make sure that I do the nicest job that I can and glue squeeze-out can be a pain to paint and the painters would have to chip it out so I do my best to remove it so that nobody else has a problem with it so now I'm gonna take some ready patch and just patch in all those nail holes that I just made you know this took maybe about an hour but I think it was worth it I just like to give the client the best finished product that I can and then let the painter go from there so I just take the ready patch patch in all the little nail holes that I see and then I go back in there with a sander and I'm using this Mirka 6-inch DeRose sander what you're gonna see in a second the thing is unbelievable and it really got this thing sanded down to a glass smooth finish I have this sander hooked up to a vacuum underneath the table and it's a big help for when you know I'm doing a project like this and not to worry about wearing a respirator the vacuum is HEPA filtered and that basically completes my assembly in the shop now at the clients house you can see that middle cabinet broken down into two pieces and the way that this thing on the walls pretty specific so the first thing I have to do is cut his existing base molding using an oscillating tool and pull that out very gently now I'm cutting it straight against the wall and I will cope in some other base molding in the future but one of the things that I think is most important whenever you're removing trim in a finished house always remove the nails from the trim as soon as the trim comes off the wall those nails will find their way into furniture or onto corners of walls they'll scratch the floors so I always like to do you know a good practice take those out as soon as you get there now getting my bottom cabinet in place I can take this upper section of that middle and put it on there and you can see all my spacer blocks they're in in place so that this thing has the correct dimensions I don't have to worry about the kerf of that cut that we made to you know split that cabinet in half I'm using 3/4 inch plywood to block them back together with some glue and that's definitely gonna hold really well I can bring the side cabinet in now and I can use a little bit of glue and some nails to secure this piece and these are gonna be secured basically on the face and also in the back with some Brad nails and then I'm also going to take some screws and put them through that Center shelf area and just tie this whole thing in together super tight with nails screws and clamps you can see moving through getting the other section on again getting some more clamps in there getting a proper amount of Brad nails and some screws in on that other shelf I am extremely confident in the stability and the rigidity of this cabinet it firmed up really really well when all that glue dried and this thing is gonna be here for a long time now all the due diligence that I did when I was building this thing in the shop it all comes to play here you know it makes a difference that everything fit together nicely and that I spent the extra time to you know mock this thing up and temporarily nail in trim that I knew I was gonna take off because now I'm able to put this thing together very simply I can finally add that face of the cabinet for the center TV shelf now I just did add some screws to tighten everything up on the right flanking unit but with this face frame installed basically completes the shelving section of this project which was a huge sigh of relief and I can work on both the header and the base molding now as well I have the header up there just sort of hanging around so I can make sure that all my Stiles are looking good check for my dimensions the next thing will be for me to install the base now this is gonna get a matching base molding that matches the rest of the room but at the time that I shot this I did not have it it has since been installed and there are a bunch of photos and videos on my Instagram if you want to check it out here I'm trying to split the seam on that Stiles because the piece is not long enough to get all the way to the end of this cabinet but I have my little cordless miter saw down here so I'm able to quickly and efficiently do the work get everything cut get it nailed into place once I'm finished with the base I can work on to the header up there and that's gonna get crown molding on it also not in this video just because I did not have it set up for that at the moment but there is now a crown molding on there but I still want to make sure this thing is nice and tight and square in case the client were to decide at the last minute that he didn't want crown I Square this thing up make sure everything's nice and tight glue it and nail it into place again with the inch and a quarter 18 gauge brad nails now with a unit like this it is extremely extremely important to tether this unit to the wall so what you're gonna see me do in just a minute is I grab some angle brackets and I go up onto the top of this cabinet and ice make sure that I hit studs and I screw two pieces of angle from the top of the cabinet into the wall just in case a little kid were to try and climb on this or even an adult trying to reach for something you know this unit's pretty having it could definitely do some damage once I install the 3/4 inch plywood top on the cabinet it is essentially complete now I did decide to put this 3/4 top on there just because a lot of times people want to put things on top of their cabinets and I didn't want there to be a cavity up there that was surprise to anyone so the 3/4 inch plywood was a nice touch again kept everything nice and firm really looking great I am very happy with how this thing came out all right that about does it for this project thank you so much for watching this thing came out great it went together really easily simple material the pre-primed finger joint pine from my local lumberyard worked out really well the simple face frames everything about this can be accomplished without the need for really specialized tools you could really do this with a table saw and a miter saw and a brad nailer if you have any questions leave them down below I'd be happy to answer them if you want to see behind the scenes footage when I'm working on a project like this I post every day on my Instagram right here at make everything shop I answer questions and I give a little insight to my day-to-day here in the shop so you should definitely check that out if you like this video give it a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more content like this I hope to see you on the next one again I'm Christopher making everything thanks so much for watching

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 934,034

Rating: 4.8938861 out of 5

Keywords: make, cabinet, maker, woodworking, millwork, how to make a cabinet, how to woodworking, make everything, sawstop, table saw, miter saw, how to make a shelf, diy shelf, diy shelving, easy shelving, planer, brad nailer, trim, installation, woodshop, carpentry, carpenter, bosch, ryobi brad nailer, pintrest, country modern, modern book case, bookshelf, storage, diy storage, easy storage

Id: z_A2Fd191eU

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/FewSell]

I came into this expecting to say that glue and brad nails are how 99% of cabinet makers build cabinets, but this guy used pre-primed material and the glue isn't going to stick very well.

It'll hold up for a while, but this is a cheap and shitty way to do things.

[u/filmnuts]

It’ll probably hold up just fine for quite a while, but it would have been much stronger and longer-lasting if he had used pretty much any other type of joinery, like dados or dowels.

Also, that dude should be wearing eye-protection when using his miter saw.

[u/iowajosh]

Glue does not adhere well to painted surfaces.

[u/sektabox]

The the joint where PVA glue is applied over primer/paint will be as strong as the adhesion strength of the primer/paint.