How to Build a Mid Century Modern Liquor Bar // Woodworking

what is up my dudes happy whatever day it is when you're watching this i trust everybody's doing well wherever you may be i well i did it again i built yet another whiskey cabinet i don't know what's wrong with me i i might have a problem this might be something i need to address in therapy uh in my defense this one was a commission uh and a secret commission at that and i will get into that shortly but it was a lot of fun to make and i'm really really stoked on how the project came out how the delivery went the whole process of the thing over the last couple of months has been really special so i want to dive into that i want to dive into a little bit of the concept i want to dive into a little bit of the technique this is a long video uh much longer than any of the videos i've done previously so i'm just going to go i'm going to talk i'm going to just say things and whatever comes out comes out if you have more questions or comments shoot them in the comment section below or dm me over on instagram and i'd be happy to answer any questions you got so without any further ado let's get into it so right off the jump let's talk about grain selection because this is really key to this piece uh i will get into the commission a little bit later and why i'm using these boards as as they are but this piece is a little bit larger than i've done in a while it was roughly 48 by 24 by 16 d right so uh all of the boards were 16 wide or needed to be at the end so there was a lot of book matching and what that meant was in order to get a visually balanced piece the grain especially on the exterior of the cabinet and on the doors had to be meticulously chosen uh and and matched up now luckily this log that i was working with was roughly sequentially uh stacked so it was easy to get a rough book match out of those boards that made my life a lot easier than it otherwise would have been but still it was all about choosing even the direction of that book match right because if that book match comes to a point what direction is that point going toward how is that moving the eye around a piece so all of those things really matter and now as i said this was a a log that i was working from this tree was felled from the client's uh father's backyard and consequently being a backyard tree there was a lot of beautiful grain there was a lot of movement there was some beautiful color to it but it did have a lot of checks a lot of knots uh the pith showed up in a number of different places and so you saw me using total boats high performance epoxy in order to kind of fill some of those cracks and gaps now if you're gonna use epoxy to do that one of my favorite moves is to just tint it black and let it blend into the wood especially with walnut it just kind of disappears you almost don't even notice it with some lighter colored woods it obviously does contrast but there's something really elegant about just black versus wood that works really well in almost all species so if you are gonna stabilize things that's just how i do it take it or leave it you can play with color i've done it in the past but black always seems to work well now again as i said there's a lot of book matches in this piece man um i mean the entire carcass is book matched the shelves are book matched the drawers are book matched the dividers are book matched the back panels are book matched the doors front and back are book matched everything is book matched in this piece uh and because it's a longer glue up right again the top and bottom are both uh 48 inches long i did use dominoes in order to just kind of make the glue up easier uh the jointer i'm using at this shop is 16 wide and so gluing up a little bit wider and cutting down the final thickness or final width rather uh you know this glue up is maybe 16 and a half wide so i wouldn't have been able to joint it if that that glue joint was really uh misaligned so that's why i'm using those dominoes they're not adding any extra strength they really are just for alignment purposes if you don't own a domino by the way you can use a biscuit joiner to do the exact same thing there's nothing wrong with that uh just and i do own a biscuit joiner it's just that because i have the domino there it's just easier for me to keep that there and accessible than you know break the the biscuit jointer in and out and then uh you know i'm doing a little hand tool work to actually build a machine jig which is a little bit funny sure um and without getting into all the details of how my shop works the machines were down that day uh but i still wanted to get some work done and get that jig built and you know i haven't built anything with purely hand tools in a while so i figured it'd be fun that's why you see me do that and so you know i'm about to do all of this joineries just a bunch of dados uh and domino dados and housings um and so you know there's a million different places on the internet you can learn how to do that it's a very very simple jig i built and it's just using a trim router so instead i think it's a good moment to kind of talk about the commission a little bit so a good good friend of mine jake um he turned 40 very recently and this entire project was a commission for his 40th birthday part for his 40th birthday rather and it was a surprise he had no idea about it he wanted to commission me for a long time but his wife wanted it to be a surprise and what we ended up doing was just lying to him for about six months we've been working on this since january his birthday uh is late april and so he approached me about it on on three or four different occasions uh and obviously spoke to his wife about it as well and we just kept being like uh you know i'm just so busy right now i don't know i like i'd love to do it i just don't know if i can do this in the time frame for your birthday yada yada yada there's a whole bunch of workarounds it was it was a lot of fun to just kind of put the ruse on honestly um but this piece was really special because again jake is is one of my closest friends and uh lauren wanted me to use the material from her father's house which turned out to be absolutely lovely walnut there's a lot of figure in this and it's it was really a joy to work with and it's all air dried and so it maintained a lot of those purples and greens and blacks and golds that that sometimes tend to fade with kill and dry and walnut so really it really was lovely um but of course again you know with with any uh trade-off right because it's a tree in the backyard of somebody and it's not like you know highly graded lumber right it's not first and seconds it's not clear uh there were a lot of knots there were a lot of things i needed to work around in order to make the visuals work so just bear in mind there's always going to be trade-offs to to whatever you do however the delivery which you'll see later in the video went really well he was very surprised it was a lot of fun um and i was just grateful to to be a part of that in some small way now on dados in housings and housed mortise and tenons uh very quickly perhaps it wasn't necessary uh the dadoes would have been strong given the orientation however my goal was to make a piece that would last for generations and having those those dominoes in there immensely strengthens that joint so for those of you who are wondering if that's necessary necessary may be a strong word um the right choice i think absolutely now on veneering this was you know i haven't done veneering in a long time and part of the thing that brings me joy about my work is is having the capacity to explore techniques or ideas that i want to explore in a given moment with a given object and uh i didn't think visually that this piece would work with a frame and panel door uh you know it's supposed to be in that mid-century modern vein to fit some of their other furniture and having a frame and panel just didn't feel right and frankly i haven't done veneers in a number of years i haven't done shops on veneers in you know five six seven years uh and so i wanted to explore this uh you know lauren was gracious enough to kind of give me the freedom to do what i thought was best for the peace and uh you know luckily it ended up being the right choice i think it it works really well with the final piece now these veneers are about 3 32 of an inch thick so they are on the beefy side by the time i actually laminated them and then ran everything through the sander i think it was probably closer to a sixteenth but if you are doing shop zone veneers i wouldn't go above one-eighth of an inch that's where i think you really start to get the veneers thick enough and woody enough if you will to have to deal with wood movement which defeats 90 percent of the point of doing veneers in the first place and then uh i did use mdf uh just because i had that on hand and it was very flat um and i also wanted the weight of the door to be substantial right so using something like apply which is a little bit lighter uh i wanted when you swing that door open to have the beef of a solid wood door um but have the the visuals of a veneered door right and so i have those uh edge bandings on that are about a half inch thick at the moment by the time i cut them uh after gluing up the veneers they ended up being about a quarter inch thick which is where i wanted them and you know that way i could run the veneers the full length of the door the visuals are uninterrupted uh but you know you don't have any of that exposed mdf on the outside i don't like iron on edge banding that's just me that's just a personal thing maybe that's just me being an elitist to some degree uh but i just i think it's a little bit of a cop out when they're more professional ways to do a thing this is not production furniture right i'm only making one of these things if i was making 50 edge banding probably the way that i go and then of course on on pressing veneers um you don't need a vacuum press i didn't feel like going to get mine because it's in my storage space an hour away so i just used some laminate and it worked out just fine there's nothing wrong with it remember we've been veneering for centuries long before we had vacuum presses and it worked out quite well uh and i also do just want to mention having again that total boat high performance epoxy to do the glue ups things like the the carcass glue up things like the door glue up the veneering it was so so helpful to have a 45 minute open time it was huge uh it really made life a lot easier and in order to kind of minimize bleed through on the veneers even though again there was no suction with the vacuum bag i did add a little bit of a silica thickener to the epoxy when i was going up the doors uh and you can see there was almost no bleed through at all so it's just something to bear in mind for your future endeavors if you are worried about that runniness you can get that silica thickener and work it in there uh and it works beautifully and now on to the apron now for the base unit of this cabinet um this is again like they had some very specific things that they wanted me to work in adjustable feet uh that mid-century modern aesthetic and so i decided to do a bent lamb for the apron for two reasons one to to bring a little bit of movement and curvature to an otherwise uh very boxy piece of furniture uh and two i really wanted to have the main cabinet kind of be the visual focus and almost hide the base unit underneath the cabinet as much as i could so having just that gentle curve while it does bring some visual interest it also pushes the apron underneath the cabinet just enough to kind of get out of the visual way right so it's almost hiding underneath the cabinet a bit and i think that that was really quite successful i think that the whole base unit i think works really nicely together and then of course turning the feet in order to um you know get that that mid-century look now i did do the joinery on the feet before i turned it and i did not plug the mortise as you can see i know some folks will like to plug the mortise or some folks will do the mortise after uh you turn the piece um i can't tell you why i chose to do it this way it was just easier to cut the mortise when the piece was square and i didn't obviously have any issues with the mortise blowing out the tools were nice and sharp uh you know turned it at a high speed and it was a okay one thing i will say i did and you can see right here is i made five of them obviously i only needed four feet but making that fifth one allowed me to make sure the process was gonna work on the other four feet before i screwed those up but also uh you know when i go to make the flat on the feet themselves in order to meet the tenon shoulder of the apron it allowed me to tinker and kind of figure out that process because that was kind of a shot in the dark and on that first one there was a little bit of a gap there was about a sixteenth gap on the bottom shoulder which i would have been absolutely frustrated and distraught over had that been on the final piece but having that extra bit there um you know allowed me to hone in that process so make an extra piece for whatever you're doing even if you're just milling things up right and you mill an extra piece up out of poplar so you can practice so you can know exactly what you're going to do before you do it because again this isn't production work this is one-off stuff and in half the time you're just figuring it out as you go right as my friend april likes to say everything is figure outable so figure it out uh cutting tenons on that curved apron you saw me do it with just a router and a fence it worked beautifully uh cut the shoulders back with the band saw and then rounded over the tenons with a rasp and fit it right in and again um you know this is just it's simple mortise and tenon work is just doing it on curved components so it takes a little bit of extra thought as to how you're going to approach the process itself but you can see me uh flattening out that face so that we get a nice clean shoulder meat and it fit beautifully ah the domino i mean what is there to say about the domino that hasn't already been said i will say this um i'm not sponsored by feztool uh but i've been using the domino for a long long time and i don't know who invented the domino but i think that person deserves a nobel prize like there is arguably no machine that has in in you know modern times that has put the small shop right like that kind of one to five person shop space uh on the map in in and give them the ability to produce uh at a rate that that meets that of a large production shop there's no machine that's done that more arguably than the domino it's a brilliant machine i don't know who invented it i don't know when it was invented obviously festool is the one who makes it but whoever that person is uh deserves huge thanks because it's a brilliant tool that's just my my domino you know you can take or leave uh the rest of the festool lineup they do make good stuff uh but the domino specifically it's just a brilliant tool that's all i have to say about that uh and now a little bit of hand tool work you know you gotta you gotta keep the the blade sharp when you go to do this um and i can't for whatever reason for better or for worse i can't ever just use a router bit to put an edge profile on a thing um because it feels disingenuous there's just something that you gain or i gain perhaps i don't want to speak for everybody but there's something that i gain from seeing a a line a detail that is cut in by hand that's shaped by hand that feels um uniform and organic but not overused right it's it's similar to the three quarter inch rule that i have right i never use three quarters of an inch thickness in anything ever because there's something so ubiquitous about three quarters of an inch that when you use it it feels i don't know disingenuous it feels produced it feels um like you've seen it a million times before and so i avoid three quarters of an inch i go 7 8. i'll go 13 16. uh i'll go 5 8 but i will never go three quarters of an inch and it's it's similar with an edge profile even when i'm doing these things on the door right here where you have this little bit of mild curvature where the doors meet it could have been straight i could have just put a chamfer there but there's something about that touch of the hand that elevates a piece and i like it's almost ineffable i can't quite articulate why it is that it matters but but it really like you can sense it almost right there's something just different about it and it works and i don't know why and that's all i have to say about that it really does and if you want to use uh router bits and round things over and do chamfers that way there's nothing wrong with that i'm not i'm not trying to dissuade you from that and saying that one way is better than the other uh do whatever makes you happy but there is something that elevates the touch of the hand elevates an object for some reason and and i'll be damned if i don't figure out by the end of my life how to articulate that but at this moment in time i don't quite know what it is so anywho back to the video uh you know turning brass again it's these details uh that i think are really interesting and make a piece the only reason i turn the brass poles is because i haven't been able to find brass poles that fit the aesthetic that i want and these are really really simple to make nothing more than a scraper and a skew and a file um i think overall this is the the second time that i've turned these polls and it took me maybe an hour to turn all three of them you know so it's really simple stuff and it works really well and you know i wanted to add texture in some way that was interesting i wanted to do something that brought a little bit of eric if you will into this object in this drawer front i was really happy with the way that that this kind of fits inside the piece it works and yet it's different it stands out and yet it's not loud um it kind of asks you to run your fingers over it and saber tooth again one of the sponsors of this build kind enough to supply me with excellent carving tools in order to explore these organic lines um i don't know there's just something that i really really enjoy about this drawer front that again is wildly different from anything else that's in the piece and yet it doesn't feel um misplaced so i was really happy with the way that turned out and then you know it's just it's a hardware time now my friends uh this this process is the same in any cabinet that you make still using those brusso hinges they're not a sponsor of this build they just make a fantastic product so i continue to use them and i will continue to use them and they're just made up in new jersey so that's a free shout out to uh bruce oh so some folks have asked me why i chose to use butt hinges on this piece though instead of like a soft closed euro hinge uh or even a knife hinge there's just something about butt hinges that felt right in this piece and to be honest i hate the way that that euro hinges look i hate the visuals of them i hate um the the pockets that you have to drill into an object in order to get them in there i just don't think they elevate a piece they're great for you know things like kitchen cabinets or or things of that nature but when you're dealing with a high-end piece it just feels i don't know it feels wrong in some way to have that kind of hardware in there again this is just my opinion i'm not trying to to dissuade anybody from using euro hinges do what makes you happy but in my opinion there's something very elegant there's something very nice about being able to open and close those doors without any resistance i like that experience and now this is going to be this is always one of the things i get the most questions about my finishing process uh liberon one of the sponsors of this build again um kind enough to supply me with some fantastic oils and waxes uh in the mix halls that you see there and so what i wanted to do walnut is she's she's a fickle beast you know because she's so beautiful and yet it's one of those woods that that oxidizes quickly and so over a decade or so it's going to start to get that you know amber orangey color and i didn't want that and so what i did was to create a toner using those mixols and the liberon oils and really what that does is it it's not a stain because it's not sitting on the wood and then finishing on top of that instead what it is is you're imbuing color into the initial coats of the finish and each time i mix up a new batch of finish i'll pour whatever's left over from the the last colored batch in there and so that color gets lighter and lighter over the five six seven coats that you apply and it creates this depth of color that really is incredible it's really kind of unmatched in uh in just rather than just putting a clear coat on top of it or doing a stain and so not only does it keep the walnut that walnut color that that beautiful brown red uh that i tried to match there but it also really i think adds to the depth of figure and and grain and it's just stunning and i'm really really happy with the way uh that it turned out again walnut's the only thing that i'll ever do this to is the only thing that i'll ever color um but when i do it just like it just works and it's just beautiful now one of the things that i had to do for the clients again doing commission work like there's always these components that you have to give to the client in order to give them the object that they want right and one of the things they wanted were trays for the liquor bottles to be able to pull out uh so that there was easy access so you could see all of your your bottles and accoutrement uh which i totally dug i thought that was fine but what i needed to do was find a way to hide those slides because nobody wants to see metal slides and so the trays have this nice little curvature to them and i made these fills on top of the trays so that when it's closed those slides completely disappear and i'm really quite happy with the way that turned out and again that figure man the figure in this walnut is just stunning like i was really lucky that that the tree that uh lauren provided me with was just beautiful it really really was um yeah i mean it's just making this object like it was it was a meditation in friendship and in gratitude not only gratitude for again the friendship and the commission but like the gratitude in the life that i have been lucky enough to build where i get to explore concepts and objects um gratitude for the folks who follow me on social media including you guys watching this video whatever it is 25 minutes in uh you know you guys are the ones who allow me to sell my content to to companies in order to make an actual living doing this thing so all of these things as i'm making this object and delivering this piece like just an immense amount of gratitude for for the life i get to live uh so thank you all and thanks to jake and lauren for allowing me to you know make such an object to take five six weeks and and focus on making a thing that i hope will bring them joy for many many decades and hopefully bring you know people joy for 100 years to come so that is that friends um i mean what a build what what a what a thing to be able to take part in i really am immensely grateful to jake and lauren to to you all to the process to this life i've been able to to partake in it's really a beautiful thing and it means a lot to me um i'm gonna stop rambling about that uh because this video is already long enough however before i go i do need to thank the sponsors of this build sabretooth for supplying me with excellent carving tools over the last however many months they've been wonderful they make a wonderful product uh and without their backing i wouldn't be able to kind of explore the absurdities the organic lines all of the things that i love to imbue in an object that really make you want to run your fingers over it and that that that's special um so if you want to get yourself some of those and explore that kind of carving technique code curtis 10 is going to get you 10 off over at their website so go do that and make a thing uh total boat as well for supplying me with all of the high performance epoxy not having to worry about those short open times when you're doing complicated glue ups is huge and there's a myriad of other reasons to use epoxy when doing bent laminations we don't that's a whole other video on just technique but if you want to get yourself some of that to do things like veneering or bent lambs you can now also use the code curtis 10 over there to get 10 off as well so go do that go do a thing go make some curvy worthy swirly things man play and have fun and you can also get uh the mix-alls that i used for the toner over at total boat's website 10 off again so go do that uh and then lastly liberon who i've been using for i don't know six seven years i've been using them for a while they make some of the best oils and waxes that i've ever used they're really really fantastic their steel wool is also fantastic so pick some up from them you can find their wares over at rockler so you know again support my sponsors so they continue to support me so i can continue to build objects and hopefully teach you guys about how to do them um so there you go uh and of course again thanks to uh jake and lauren for allowing me to kind of take part in this process it was a lot of fun uh so again gonna stop there this video is too long already friends until the next time i make things which is gonna be soon because i'm me you know how i do uh get out there in the shop make a thing find some joy in it and as always be good make good decisions and i'll catch y'all later you

Channel: ENCurtis

Views: 39,570

Keywords: woodworking, woodwork, wood working, diy, how to, modern furniture, furniture design, how to build a table, diy table, mid century modern, modern furniture project, woodworking project, modern media stand, diy woodworking, minimalist furniture, minimalist, minimalism, woodworking plans, whiskey cabinet, whiskey cabinet plans, how to build a liquor bar, liquor bar build, liquor bar designs, liquor bar ideas, walnut, walnut cabinets, Erik Curtis, erik curtis woodworking, ENCurtis

Id: HBKra8ZiFhk

Length: 28min 57sec (1737 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022