Easy to build custom display cabinets, woodworking, carpentry

on mic Frankton welcome back to my shop aka the boardroom in this video I'm gonna build these awesome bow front display cabinets and I'm gonna show a few of my very favorite techniques to include how to apply a solid wood edge banding to a curved surface what and a simple way of joining cabinets using pocket screws and biscuits so let's get started the story of these cabinets starts North Powers Animal Hospital they commissioned me to build these to display cases to adorn the lobby of their newly constructed facility I gave the shop apprentices first real tool and that was an old tape measure and he loves this thing it goes with him everywhere first thing I do is make a template of the curve and I do that using a quarter inch MDF and this shop made drawing though the bottom of the cabinets will be 19 inches deep the top will be 14 inches deep and this bow connects those two points I think a lot of the commercially available drawing bows are really good the problem is for cabinet work none of them are really long enough so my clever solution is just to cut a piece of quarter inch MDF to the proper length to use some eyelets and string to create my own a drawing bow and I use a spring clamp to hold the setting once I have the curve drawn out appropriately on my template material I rough it out on the bandsaw this curve is fairly shallow so the disk sander is not the best tool for the job but I come back with a thin piece of plywood that has a little flex to it and some a coarse grit sandpaper to finish bearing the curve this works real good it's real important that this curve be nice and fair as any imperfections will be transferred to the workpiece and I like to check to make sure that the curve is nice and smooth three ways I sight down the curve I run my hand down the curve to feel for any bumps or low spots and lastly I rock the curve on my bench this is a great indicator if there are some small imperfections the shop apprentice is at that stage where he wants more independence when I'm Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Senate my first measure will be to outlaw steel staples put into the side of plywood I have filleted my hands wide open several times due to these steel staples and that's annoying because I end up having to sand blood off of my projects once the templates looking good I rip a bunch of strips that are 19 inches wide and cut them to a length of 70 inches after that I used the template to give me a line to work to and I rough out the curve on the actual work pieces and before doing this I have myself an extra cup of coffee as I need to be on my a-game these parts are cut in left and right so that when they're glued together the better face shows out on both sides once I have all 12 pieces roughed out and separated into left and rights I take six of them and flush trim them to the template this is an extremely dusty process but I think the mess is worth it because the end results are awesome shifting gears I grab a couple of one and a half by three and a half's oh I'm sorry two by fours pardon my mistake and I use them to make a few clamping calls I get started by drawing out a nice arc and then I come back and darken that arc so it can be seen on camera then I head over the bandsaw and rough it out I stand back to my line at the mighty disc sander and I'm only doing this on one side then I use this to draw on the other ones and then I come back and do the other side of this one this ensures that the arcs are consistent across all three and after some more ab and sawing and sanding I'm left with three nice consistent clamping cauls now it's time to put these clamping cauls to use I think it's important to mention that this method of clamping two panels together using these calls probably doesn't put down the required pressure for wood glue that's not really what I'm going for here what I'm attempting to achieve is to glue these two pieces together and ensure that they dry nice and flat this method works great for that and after clamping the first four together I go ahead and throw two more on the pile to get this done a little quicker at this point the glue ups consists of one panel that has been routed to the template and one that has not now I come back again with a flush trim bit and I route the two pieces together so that that front face is perfectly flush next it's time to make some edge banding and I'm shooting for finished thickness of about an eighth of an inch and a little over an inch and half wide obviously to cover the width of two layers of plywood here's a pro tip when you're planning real thin pieces lift them up when you're putting them in and taking them out of the planer this helps to ensure that that end is pressed down on to the bed of the planer which reduces chatter and the chances that your planer will gobble up your workpiece like me in front of a cheeseburger once milled it's time to install the edge banding on to my cabinet sides and I start with the tops I do that so that the end grain on this piece will be covered up by the edge banding that I'll apply to the front edge these spring clamps decked out with used bike inner tubes really are my weapon of choice for this procedure the glue line left is nearly invisible let's take a closer look at one of my very favorite workholding tricks I like to use a hand screw to hold work pieces vertically this works great while edge banding but it works equally as well when hand planing routing or if you just want to stare lovingly at your workpiece while it's securely clamped in a vertical fashion same deal for the front edges glue and a whole bunch of these spring clamps make for a great connection between the cabinet side and the edge banding and the 1/8 inch thickness conforms admirably to this gentle curve as we're watching this clip it's painfully obvious that I was one clamp short and I find a sharp flush trim saw is about as good as anything to trim off the excess on the ends this tool is known as a lipping planer and it's designed to flush one surface up to another surface and it's real common in cabinet shops it's a fairly expensive tool and we'll take a closer look at it later in the video however if you don't have a lipping planer a block plane works pretty darn good nice shaving a few hundred more of those and I could make myself a toupee after some sanding the results are beautiful and one slick feature of a solid edge banding like this is the ability to come back and add a roundover or chamfer which I'll do later on in the build next item on the docket is once again very messy it's a rabbit to house the back that's three quarters by half inch which is the thickness of the back now that I've cut the rabbit in the side pieces I can actually now come back and cut the shelves to final dimension each shelf will be a slightly different depth due to the curve with the shelves cut to size I could now add a solid wood nosing to the edge of each shelf this is for two reasons one to cover up the edge them DF but more importantly is to add some strength to that shelf this model biscuit joiner which is a pretty high-end model it's really geared for the cabinet professional has a neat feature where I can adjust the cutter up and down and this is great when I'm adding no Zing's to shelves I cut the slots in the shelves then I adjust the cutter down slightly I make the cuts in the nosing x' then when I assemble everything and clamp and glue it together it leaves a little step that I can come back later and easily cut down flush with my lipping planer the end result is about a half a millimeter step that's easily remedied with the lipping planer doing what is known as a climb cut here and that's running the cutter backwards this has a tendency to lift the cutter up slightly so I need to make two passes I do this because it reduces the chance for tear out and leaves a better finished surface with an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny little bit of sanding this parts ready to go let's take a closer look at my lipping planer this tool is made in Barcelona Spain and you can tell that because the extension cord that they put on it is nice and pliable when it's about 75 degrees out but when it gets cold that is a borderline rigid extension cord and taking a look at the bottom the reference surface is next to the cutter head so I guess you'd say maybe the cutter head is cantilevered out but essentially one side is your reference side one side is the cutter side and that cutter can be adjusted up and down till it's cut and just perfectly flush overall I really like this tool I would give it a very good review - the extension cord if this type of procedure is something you find yourself doing a lot this tool can be a big time-saver however it is fairly expensive and it is a one-trick pony if this is something that you do infrequently a router with a flush trim bit works just as good [Music] I used my trusty dusty sliding table saw to cut the overhang off and I'm using the same flip top setting to trim this off as I did to cut the shelf to wit so I get a good result at this point all of the parts are cut to size and ready to go now it's time to work on some joinery and get these cases put together so I make a real simple template with a couple lines on it one to reference the back edge and then to tick marks where I'm gonna cut to biscuit slots this is going to help me align the shelves where I'm screwing everything together and if you're thinking to yourself man this guy's a total hack cabinet maker because he's using biscuits well you'd be right I'm a hack cabinet maker but not because I use biscuits biscuits are awesome for case construction well tell the biscuits slotting is complete I break out my pocket hole jig and I drill eight pocket holes on each side of each shelf and since the sides of the cabinet are double 3/4 layer thick for an inch and a half I'm able to use two inch pocket screws and not have a poke out the side this makes for an incredibly strong cabinet any and all edges get a small round over and I think this is very important especially in a commercial environment like a vet clinic a slightly rounded corner is going to be far less susceptible to denting than a 90-degree corner also it just feels better to the touch all surfaces are sanded to 180 grit including all the round overs which I do by hand with all the hard work put into making good parts cutting biscuit slots for alignment assembly is actually really easy and apparently I'm pretty proud of myself there come on where's it at you can do it but there it is the only key to using pocket screws to assemble cabinets is make sure not to over tighten the screw it's easy to split plywood or MDF the results are an attractive joint that's uber strong as I press on with construction it's easy going really the only challenges as the piece gets bigger it's starting to get pretty heavy I also add a couple of toe kick boards these are put in with pocket screws again the front ones are nicer pieces of cherry and the back is made out of whatever I have laying around moving around large case pieces that are made out of MDF can be a challenge going into a project like this I always have a plan laid out in my head hopefully it's a good plan of how I'm gonna assemble these things on the bench then get them off the bench and be able to move them around the shop while you're watching me pretend that I'm the Incredible Hulk would make for a great time to recommend a song so for this video I suggest the song girl buy back and pretty much anything Beck does is awesome but that's a particularly fun song so if you're in the mood give it a listen the connection between the cabinet in the back is very important the backs offer a great deal of shear strength and also prevent the cabinet from racking and in a free-standing piece of furniture like this that's critical lots of screws in a panel that snugly fits into the rabbeted opening is how I ensure that the backs can do their jobs one of the downsides of using pocket screws is the cutout needed for the screw is ugly so here's my soup secret trick for hiding those cutouts I had some extra material left over from cutting out the backs between that some glue and nails I have covered up the unsightly pocket holes lastly I sprayed coats of lacquer and it was off for delivery I don't mean to toot my own horn too much but I think the end result is really nice sleek modern yet they sit with a quiet confidence in the lobby of North Powers Animal Hospital and I laid out the shelves so that various sized bags of pet food can be stocked and taken down easily this video thank you very much for watching until next time

Channel: Mike Farrington

Views: 112,790

Keywords: cabinet making, cabinet maker, furniture making, furniture maker, fine woodworking, woodworking, easy to build cabinets, carpentry

Id: l-HnvbEziHw

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019