Dovetailed Bookcase Build - Hand Tool Woodworking

hi i'm rob cosman welcome to my shop i want to introduce you to a piece of furniture i built in 2011 it was a hand tool project from rough lumber to finished nothing but hand tools if you're interested or thinking about doing that i'm going to show you some of the processes and procedures you might like this i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help you take your woodworking to the next level if you're new to our channel be sure to subscribe turn on that notification bell and don't forget to turn on the notification on your mobile device so you'll know every time we release a new video good all right back to the bench this is a bookcase with adjustable shelves made out of white northern white pine uh it is 32 inches long or wide 41 inches tall and 9 and 5 8 inches deep your drawer your shelves are eight and three quarter i'm going to walk you through all the different procedures that we did and give you a little insight actually demonstrate a few of them for you so when i say we did it all by hand or i did it all by hand what i mean is we bought lumber from the lumber yard so this has been milled cut actually and it has been dried and then that's how we get it so it's got a rough surface on all four edges or two surfaces and two edges and then it's been random lengths and random widths we go through and with hand planes scrub plane jointer smoother squares winding sticks we make each piece flat smooth and square on all six surfaces before we actually start so when you look at that and you realize each one of these boards in the back all of those pieces that in itself is a lot of work all right so let's start with the actual construction the most obvious are the dovetails on the top two corners now by the way this was made as i mentioned in 2011 and it's actually survived quite well in my home there's a few marks on it but that's to be expected after that number of years and it's i did it out of pine and i really like pine because it ages so beautifully it just keeps this deeper and deeper patina over the years whereas most woods either get bleached out or get so dark you lose all the figure this one just keeps getting better so what we used here was called a mitered edge dovetail so it's a combination of a miter and a through dovetail if you look at it it looks pretty normal down here but on the top side where you should see pins right to the end you don't see any here instead we take these last two bits and we we cut it in in a miter so that you can carry this bead all the way around nice and neat if it was a normal through dovetail you actually have a butt joint here and it's pretty impossible to carry a bead all the way through that so that's on the two top corners and i've done videos on these and it shows you exactly how to do this what's complicated is about this one is as you're putting it together these tails have to seat down here at the bottom at the same time the miters front and back close and that's always a bit of a precarious moment in the process of cutting the joint requires really careful layout so the rest of the case was put together with something called a through wedge tenon i wanted these shelves to be adjustable so that you can you don't have a fixed height you can accommodate whatever books you have but in order to make it strong that bottom shelf had to be fixed and we did what's called a through wedge tenon so the board itself is sitting in a shallow dado a dado is a groove cut across the width of the board and then these parts that you see right here actually a continuation of this piece with the exception of the walnut so the mortise which is a rectangular shaped hole is actually flared it's wider on this side than it is on this side so it looks kind of like an internal dovetail before you put it together you make two cuts in this portion called the tenon and after you've assembled it you drive wedges that are the same shape as what would be the void before you apply them and you glue them and pound them in and they push this portion of the tenon in that direction and this portion in that direction and when the one two three four five pieces are all glued together they become one piece and it creates an internal dovetail a very strong joint but you have to be very careful in the layout and i've done videos on this we can leave a link to that yes a very careful layout because when that wedge goes in you have to make sure that it brings these pieces tight so that they fill that opening and it's nice and clean so that's on both corners makes a very very strong joint so to dress this up a little bit i already mentioned it once we cut a bead on the inside and this is cut with a molding plane i'm actually going to demonstrate it for you but we use the bead on the inside of the top and the two sides we use the bead on this piece now what you're looking at right here is just a block of wood that we cut a bead on there and glued it to the underside so that we can stiffen up this piece typically a bookcase is going to have things set on it and you don't want that to sag over time so that really beefs it up on the back and the actual back itself helps to support this from sagging in the middle and then in order to make these a little bit stronger i can get that out rather than make it out of a two inch thick piece of lumber which would make it really heavy we applied two pieces and again use the bead down here in the bottom just to dress it up a little bit but that helps to stiffen that drawer i pardon me that shelf so let me show you how we did this these are old antique planes that i've picked up at various places so that creates a bead you can see the profile as you look down the end and i'm going to try it out on a piece of pine so you simply go through and continue cutting until you have the entire profile this is set a little more aggressively than i normally would but now when you're done you have that profile and if the blade is nice and sharp you don't have to sand it's already finished now this plane's in hard shape if you look down there it's not no longer straight so it's a little bit awkward to use but you can make them yourself and it's if you're looking and saying why didn't you use a router well use one of those one time and you'll understand why it's so interesting and fun to do no dust no danger no noise hey if you like this video we have more our newsletter has subscriber only content monthly discount on tools and anything we bring out that's new subscribers get first crack at it click on the link below let's get back to work now to make this piece period appropriate i didn't want to use plywood on the back so these are actually solid wood boards solid pine boards but we put we did what was kind of a modified ship lap so that as they remember now you've got a long what is that span you've got 30 almost 31 inches of wood so there's going to be a fair bit of seasonal expansion as the humidity increases these boards are going to absorb some of it and they're going to expand and as they shrink in the winter when it dries out they're going to shrink so the gap is going to change a little bit but because that beads in there that kind of allows for that so what's happened is the this piece actually i'll turn this around and show you from the back side so the first thing we had to do is cut a groove a quarter inch groove all the way around the top three pieces and i'll show you what i did for that i actually make this plane it's i use it enough that it justified making them so very similar to this one except the profile so we've got a quarter inch blade in there and you simply run that over the piece you're cutting until it bottoms out that's the nice part of this is you never have to worry about the depth being uniform because it will go until it can no longer cut and what's happening is this part is bottoming out right here so i really like it when i'm building drawers because i never have to worry about the drawer bottom not fitting properly because the depth of the groove is not uniform that guarantees it so with that groove all the way around what we did is this first piece is secured down here with one brass screw and it's it's pretty much bottomed out all the way around so and this piece is secured right here and this one doesn't move for the most part neither does this one so all of your expansion is going to take place in these two joints and in these two joints this piece has to be allowed has to be allowed to move in both directions now we're going to flip this around again and look at this side so this will make sense so since this one can't go that way it can only come this way this piece has got a bead cut on it and it has a tongue and that tongue slips underneath this piece so there's a rabbet cut on the end of this so as this moves that groove right there is going to get a little wider a little narrower over here this same piece has a bead cut on this side and the tongue on it and that fits underneath the rabbet on this piece now this center piece has a rabbet on both sides it doesn't have a tongue it doesn't have a bead on it so what we did over here we reversed over here so that now you're going to get a little bit of movement here and the two screws that we put in we put them in the center one is in a hole the exact diameter of the screw shaft but this one and this one are in a larger diameter hole so there's a little bit of movement a little bit of allowance there and then everything just seems to work and over the period of however long it's been nothing has happened the sides haven't blown apart and as i mentioned occasionally you'll see a little wider groove on one side than the other but the bead makes all that blend in and you really don't notice it now in case you're wondering what these lines are this is just oxidation from a shelf sitting in there or books being on there that it's changed the color but you have to be able to live with type of that thing if you're going to build with solid wood and actually have it functioning and we put a uh we put the same supportive piece down here so the bottom is only three quarter but that piece being on there and glued to it stiffens that up substantially and then i never like to have i never like to have flat sides on the bottom i find that it's too easy to make it rock so i always do something to create more or less feet that just will make for a more stable or if you have to come in and adjust one you've got a lot less material to remove so that is a northern white pine bookcase it's like i said it can be a little bit of intimidating at first but if you take it one piece at a time and master each one of those processes do the whole thing and you'll end up with something like this it'll last for centuries and you'll have a ton of fun doing it hope you enjoyed this if you like my work and enjoy my style of teaching click on any one of these videos and help take your woodworking to the next level i've always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the link below the chisel and plane icon it'll take you to our site and introduce you to all the tools that we actually manufacture right here in our shop it'll also give you information on our online and in-person workshops

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 26,444

Keywords: bookcase, bookcase build, bookcase diy, bookcase ideas, bookcase tour, dovetail bookcase build plans, dovetailed bookcase build, dovetailed bookcase build guide, dovetailed bookcase build instructions, hand cut, hand tool woodworking, hand tools, joinery, rob cosman, shaker bookcase, shaker bookcase plans, woodworking for beginners, woodworking projects

Id: 60RqbbQPhVY

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2022