History's Most Misunderstood Chest || Six Board Chest

in today's video we're cutting dovetails blast and flies nailing trick shots messing stuff up fixing stuff up making a sweet chest and then possibly ruining the whole thing right at the end so here we go I decided I was going to make a six board chest to hold some of my kids toys and puzzles and stuff like that you might be thinking of a nailed together project it looks like one of these two it seems like most of these kind of chests are built more or less like in this diagram even on Google almost all the search results are nailed together chests you gotta start scroll until you find any that are dovetailed a little Flack here and there for using rough wood and just want to point out that look even this part is too nasty for me cutting this off with pretty much any project you gotta get the boards flat and square to start doing any joinery and stuff like that most of these boards I passed over the machines got a flat face squared up Edge and then I sent it through the planer [Music] and next on this table saw cut it looks like a pretty safe cut to me but if you've been following along then you'll probably know that this clip was taken quite a while ago because I've tried to change up my habits since posting this video anytime you glue up a project glue is going to drip all over the bars of your clamps there's a bunch of different things you could do waxing the bars and everything but packing tape works the best right about now you're probably thinking I thought this guy said he was making a six board chest well I could have called it a six panel chest but that just doesn't have the same ring to it that and I just couldn't find 16 inch wide boards so I glue these bad boys up with little finger glue spread action making panels you don't need dowels or dominoes or anything like that since these boards are all the same thickness a clamp right on the seam doesn't get any easier than this give the clamps a little love squeeze get that glue squeeze out wipe it off and I don't use anything to prevent the glue dripping on my workbench partly because I'm just an uncivilized Barbarian but also because I get some sort of weird satisfaction from just popping off those glue drips with a chisel some of these boards were too wide for my jointer there's a bunch of different ways you go about taking care of that but first I want to take a minute to talk about a very cool product from the sponsor of today's video brilliant.org I love learning something every day and Brilliant is the best way to learn math and computer science check out some of these interactive math lessons from Basics to Advanced you can get it all in fun and bite-sized lessons I've had the premium subscription for over a month now and let me tell you this platform is totally built for busy people and there is so much more you can browse through their thousands of lessons on things like AI data science neural networks and you can get it all for free for a full 30 days just go to brilliant.org Frank's workbench but wait there's more the first 200 of you will get 20 off of brilliant's annual premium subscription big shout out to brilliant you guys gotta check out their website I'm going to use hand planes because planar sleds are for dorks now I'm just playing I just like to use hand planes if you haven't heard of a planer sled it's actually a super useful Contraption for small shops or if you just don't have a jointer you secure the piece of wood to a flat surface like some plywood or melamine and then you just send it through the planer to get a flat face it works best on thick hard and stiff wood because the rollers on a planter can Flex out thin or soft wood so I'll get this bad boy locked into the bench top Mark the high spots and then I hit it with a scrub plane first which is going to take off the major high spots then I switch over to a finer set plane which I'd periodically rub paraffin wax on the bottom of it to make it slide easier and then just go ahead and flatten it out and smooth it out with that next I'm going corner to corner because those were the two high Corners the Border was a little bit twisted so I go corner to corner and kind of feather out towards the two low corners after taking off the twist I go back to planing straight down the board foreign and then check this out you can use the edge of the plane as like a little straight edge point it corner to corner see if there's any high spots or if it's looking flat if it's looking good with that then I'll just double check with the winding sticks something about winding sticks that some people Miss is that it has to be longer than your board is wide that way it magnifies any twist you would see one side sticking up more than the other this one's looking pretty good so we got one face flat next Gotta Get The Edge squared up to that flattened face gotta true this edge up in two different ways one has to be straight along the length and also we need to make sure that it's Square to the trued up face that we just did before this one was a little bit high on the side closest to the camera on the bench side so I put the plane over on that high side and take a couple passes to get that squared up foreign [Applause] s that you're not Machining it's especially important to keep track of what is the true face and true Edge or the flat face and squared up Edge because when you glue this up it's not exactly like when you're gluing up a panel of machined boards these aren't exactly the same thickness so I'm putting the trued faces down on those bars and flushing up the bottom of the boards as I squeeze this in the clamps the top of this panel is definitely not flat you can still see some of the scrub plane tracks let's take a look at this they're definitely not the same thickness that board on the left is clearly thicker than the board on the right when the glue dries I'll clean this thing up it's too wide for my planer and I'm not about to use an orbital sander because Woodworkers use hand planes but honestly it's just easier to get a flat surface than with the sander hey I got nothing against sanding but it can be pretty hard to keep a flat surface when you're using a tool like this and since we're going to be cutting joinery and fitting trim around this chest I want to save any sanding until right before applying the Finish so in case you haven't noticed there is a lot of knots in these pine boards so after I get them all glued up I go through real carefully looking for any little voids or holes little cracks and stuff like that that need to be filled in with epoxy I use masking tape and tape on the back side of where I'm going to pour the epoxy because I used some epoxy that cures very slowly that way it seeps in deep into the crack and fully fills it but because it cures so slowly if I don't tape the back side this would drip all the way through it would find a way all the way through and get all over the bench top this is the stuff I use by the way it's pretty solid stuff after the epoxy cures I knock it down to the surface level with a hand blade hand plane works great because it keeps it flat and it just takes that epoxy off very easily next I need to do something about squaring up these edges the first way I'm going to show is using a circular saw just clamp down a saw guide and run that sucker down with my circular saw [Applause] foreign that it's just sickening but it definitely does help to have a nice saw and this saw is awesome the blade just to perfectly square and it holds that setting very very well next we're going to square up an edge the old-fashioned way the fun way the slow way or maybe even the dumb way just depending on your perspective I think it's the fun way start by sawing down that pencil line with a handsaw with pine you always got to be careful at the end of the cut that you don't break it out because it can take some long grain with you if you if you go hard there and then I just take a little block plane and square up that edge you gotta squirt in two directions Square to the edge lengthwise and square to the face it's always a good thing when the edges get squared because that means it's time to start doing some joinery I use this marking gauge to Mark a baseline for what's going to be some dovetails and then I use some dividers to start laying out those dovetails dividers are cool because they just help keep evenly spaced and evenly sized dovetails after the dividers I finished marking out for the dovetails using a dovetail marker give myself some lines to cut to there's a ton of different options for dovetail markers any of them are going to work just fine you could even make your own but a bunch of people have emailed me asking which one I use this one is by a company called Sterling toolworks and it's pretty cool but honestly it's not going to make or break your dovetails I kind of like how they look all colored on here with the pen they all look so perfect now let's see how badly I can screw it up with a saw these boards are all 16 inches wide which means that I've got to saw a pretty good distance away from where it's actually clamped in the Vise because of that you can see a lot of extra wood movement going on which can make sawing a little bit tougher there is a quick and easy fix for this though clamped on one of my winding sticks and it totally stiffens and cuts down on the vibration when you're sawing far away from where it's clamped in the Vise I'll be honest though I only did this though once for the purpose of making this demonstration for all the other boards I just clamped them in and cut them like normal maybe I'm just lazy all right [Music] and I'm just going to town cutting these dovetails using my most expensive and least favorite dovetail saw [Music] after sawing down all those dovetail lines I grab a coping saw and you can see that board's moving a lot there at the end and of course the winding stick trick would work again but like I said maybe it's laziness I don't know but this worked out just fine [Music] all these little hollowed out spots are called pen recesses because that's where the dovetail pins slide into it's now almost done just need to flip the orientation of this board put it in there long ways and take off the last little bit on both ends a little extra chiseling or knifing or something will help keep that shoulder line more clean when it gets sewn off the board's pretty far away from the Vise in this one too but it doesn't vibrate nearly as much because as I'm sawing forward with my left hand I'm pulling the board towards me and it just keeps it more stable the last thing to do on these tail boards is to drop the Chisel right into the shoulder line that I marked earlier and just knock it about halfway down from one side then I'll flip this board over chisel down the rest of the way from the other side and then we're done with the tail boards chisel work is just some of the best stuff in woodworking but you got to be careful because those things can get you all right so after that fun stuff is all done I dropped that tail board on top of what's going to be the pin board and I just marked those out with a pencil carry the lines down to the Baseline with a square and then I'm ready to cut those out too [Music] I try to saw these things straight down keeping the saw as best I can inside the line so that it's going to be cutting on the waist side it's going to get removed [Music] it's going to pop these suckers out with a coping saw and my wife told me recently the one thing really missing from any of my videos lately has been no trick shots laughs [Music] [Laughter] and this whole time there has been a fly that's been driving me nuts buzzing around my head and stuff is that ever happened to you guys in the shop well this thing made the big mistake of Landing assault gun no squished bug on my fresh panel and no more fly guaranteed to be the most fun you've ever had taken out flies check out the link in the description and here what I'm doing is pairing Away part of the joint that's hidden from view you won't see this in the corner and this will just make it easier and smoother to assemble and here is the Moment of Truth knocking these things together and seeing how they fit together there's always for me a sense of kind of anticipation and also either relief or maybe a little bit of frustration but I was definitely happy with how this corner looked it wasn't perfect but I'll take it so now with all the dovetails cut for the main box structure it's time to glue this thing up I'm using some liquid hide glue I really love using this stuff for joinery uh one thing I wish I would have done differently is not put the glue right there in the bottom of the recess only using the glue on the vertical Parts would have actually worked a little bit better this corner worked fine but the in a minute you'll see I had some issue when I did two corners at the same time so here on this next one when I'm gluing up two corners at the same time some of the glue in The Recess started to gel up by the time I was assembling it so I had to bring out the hammer to try to seat those dovetails all the way down in The Recess after the glue up dries I'm gonna plane that down with a block plane this is again one of those points where a hand plane works a lot better than a sander if I use a sander there's a pretty good chance it would dish it down there the edges and I can't have that because I'm going to be attaching a trim board here in just a minute when it comes to attaching the base to this chest I'm going to be doing something that's so simple and so effective that the base actually gets tighter over time I'll nail the base on with these cut nails and I'm using dividers which are just going to get the nails perfectly placed around the perimeter of the base these kind of nails always need pilot holes the nails are tapered in One Direction only so if I put the nail in like this it would definitely split that board if I put it in this way it won't at least that's the idea let's see what happens after driving all the nails I set them down below the surface with a nail punch now when it comes to fitting this trim board I put it up next to the bench and I Mark the baselines directly off the chest take a little knife Mark right on that edge go over to the other side Mark again that's going to give the two bass lines to make this exactly the right length once I cut the dovetails [Music] foreign I've shown this trick before in a couple of other videos but I think it's always worth repeating again a couple of vertical lines drawn on the inside of the Vise make it super quick and easy to clamp a board straight up and down the Vise and start sawing [Music] marking this pin board was a little tricky just because that board was so long that I just had to hold the tail board on top of it steady and Mark it like that [Music] and since this board's not 16 inches wide I can use my bench hook which they kind of are pretty useful for doing this that way if I hammer a little bit too hard I don't send a chisel halfway into my bench top foreign so first I shaped this profile into just a miter just an angled piece and I don't know I just felt like it looks so blah kind of boring I don't know so I pulled out this old molding plane that I made a little while ago there's a video on it and I just uh put that on there and made it into a Cove foreign I don't know about you guys but I think that looks a lot better so unfortunately when I cut these dovetails I did not miter the top of it so that means when I put these things together I'm gonna have to figure out a way to take care of this business going on smooth that out [Music] this worked pretty good for now but before it was all said and done I wrapped some sandpaper around a marker and smoothed it out with that foreign [Music] to make these trim pieces look a little bit better I take a bow saw and cut out a little shape here [Laughter] and then I clean that up with a Spoke shave pretty handy little tool I still haven't cut these trim boards to a final length so to do that I put the Baseline right up to the edge and then I mark on the back of it right where it needs to be cut give myself a line and cut it off [Music] [Applause] [Music] with that business all taken care of I get ready to put some glue blocks on the trim pieces and I realize I'm doing a cross grain glue up right here but that doesn't actually matter there's not enough wood movement to make that matter on a piece that small and I get better compressive strength with vertical Grain on that glue block the chest is going to sit right down on these glue blocks like feet so every time you set it down that nailed on base is actually going to be secured even tighter over time doing it this way will make the trim piece be a little bit elevated above whatever surface the bench is sitting on right now it's just dry fit nothing's attached I'm going to go ahead and drill some pilot holes get ready for some nails then I glue up the trim pieces make that all one unit before attaching it to the chest okay since all the Grain and the wood on the trim pieces is going to be going the same direction as all the Grain on the chest I decided I was going to go ahead and put a little bit of glue in addition to the nails to attach the trim to the chest and again here I'm going to be using some cut nails to attach the trim to the chest these are a little bit smaller than the nails I used to attach the base to the chest [Music] at this point I had just glued up this trim piece so I haven't cleaned up those dovetails yet so after I nail this thing on I am going to set those nails down below the surface that way I can plane everything up without running into nails with my plane the hinges I picked up for this project are pretty sweet so I'm going to scribe around these and try to get them fit nicely onto the lid foreign there's something so darn satisfying about when a hinge just fits nicely into place and I would say that you really need to be careful in this part but I I don't even want to talk about it it's still too raw I use an awl to Mark out the screw hole locations always want to hinge the lighter component first so in this case we want to attach the hinges to the lid and then attach the lid to the chest and these screws while super cool are a little bit long and a screw thread poking through the top of my lid on my chest is not exactly the look I'm going for so I go ahead and just thread the holes just getting some threads ready and those holes where it's going to go and then I'm going to shorten these screws [Music] and next I just kind of boy scouted up by getting prepared putting the stuff I'm going to need within the quick Arms Reach I like to use that rail as a little Shelf and it's a little bit of a circus act trying to hold the lid in place right in those hinge recesses at least until you get the first couple of screws in but luckily for me I had one of my best buddies in the world show up right in the clutch come help his old man out trim this lid I'm going to drop this thing right into the 45 degree marker I'll cut the miter holding it up right to the corner of the lid and then I go around to the other side and mark the other corner with a knife and that's going to give me the mark of exactly where to cut the second miter almost all hand sawing works best with long smooth strokes this is the one exception I've ever found it actually works best with like short choppy Strokes one of my favorite tools for anything that I'm where I'm doing miners are these spring clamps and glue up the miters spring clamp it together and then before the glue is even cured I can get that positioned and attached to the chest the lid is basically just a big glued up panel so there's going to be quite a bit of wood movement for that reason I only glue the first couple of inches on the side and then glue all along the front edge the rest of it just gets held on with nails [Music] once the glue dries I flush that up with the block plane now this is one area where you could totally use a random orbital sander and you wouldn't have any problems at all [Music] I decided I was going to paint this project went with some earth green milk paint I had never used milk paint before and I was kind of under the impression this was supposed to be pretty much foolproof well I must be a fool because I ran into some issues I mixed it up just like it said shook it up waited the amount of time it said and it was mostly foam it was very difficult to paint this stuff on it took forever and it wasn't until pretty much I was done with that first coat before the paint actually got into like a more thin watery consistency at this point I was pretty sure that I just ruined my project but figured hey we'll just see it through I ended up spraying on some shellac I was worried that brushing it on might move the paint around or something I guess I could have tried a sample but come on what's next like reading the instructions before assembling Ikea furniture I don't think so it took probably about I think four coats of the sprayed on shellac before I didn't have any more dry spots this was definitely unlike any paint I've used before and I'll be honest I pretty much hated it until it was completely done and I don't know if it got better if it grew on me or if it just looked better with the lighting inside but even though I like it now I'm not sure I really understand the hype behind milk paint and I'm not really in a huge hurry to use it again probably just needs some practice using it on my part though I figured a little wax action couldn't hurt and that's the best way I've found to apply paste wax is by taking a big glob of it and putting it inside of a cloth and then spreading it around like that anytime I use shellac I always paste wax it giving that kind of a slippery surface that the paste wax provides helps decrease scratches and stuff like that happening in the shellac here's a final look around at the project and whether or not it can hold a bunch of puzzles and games and stuff is yet to be determined but I can confirm that it will hold two kids who's in here in there

Channel: Frank's Workbench

Views: 88,215

Keywords: woodworking, hand tools, hand tool woodworking, franks workbench, traditional woodworking, handtools, woodworking hand tools, woodworking handtools, handtool woodworking, hand tool woodoworking projects

Id: B6dG4qdRF4E

Length: 30min 7sec (1807 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023