How To Build Mid Century Modern TV Stand, Credenza, Media Console | Woodworking

about eight years ago I built this. then three years ago I started a YouTube channel and about ten months after that I decided to make a video on an updated version. then probably 18 months ago I had an idea for another version so I drew it all out and basically set it aside to work on other projects until about two months ago when I built this this replaced this which reminded me that I wanted to build this so let's build this you know my videos have been lacking lately tall skinny white dudes wearing glasses with baseball hats enter Sean Boyd from Sean Boyd made this no but in all sincerity he really is a great designer builder maker of videos and human being I'm gonna throw a link to one of his videos in the description so you can check him out after this one he really does build awesome stuff so I highly urge you to go check it out seriously but we have a lot of work to do so let's get into it up to this point all we've been doing is breaking down the plywood portions of the build which is gonna consist of a top bottom two sides two vertical partitions and two shelves and as you're seeing we did this with a combination of a table saw and a track saw and at this point everything's cut only two rough dimensions and we'll go over refining everything as we go through each step and the first of those steps is going to be cutting our four outside pieces to size but before we do that let's go over a quick refresher on how to make a trapezoidal box so here these top angles need to be 75 degrees and the bottom angles need to be 105 degrees in other words both are 15 degrees off of 90 to do this we're gonna set our blade to seven and a half degrees away from 45 and that's because seven and a half is half of 15 now we can cut all the bevels on all of our pieces that make up the bottom two joints just like any ordinary cross cut on the table saw for the top joints though we need to do something different as you can see here the angle that we need and the angle of the blade don't match up and in fact we can't even tilt our blade far enough to make that cut so instead we're gonna flip our piece of vertical use a jig and make the cut that way now in the real world the order of operations gonna be a little bit different so let's work through that now basically instead of starting with our horizontal cuts we're gonna start with our vertical cuts and the reason for this is you have almost no control in determining the length of the piece when you're making your vertical cuts but with the horizontal cuts you can set your fence to dial things in just where you want them in the end now the big question that I always get whenever I show this is how do I determine the exact size of my side panels and more important the bottom panel and the real answer is I don't kinda really what I do is shoot roughly for whatever size I want when I'm cutting my top and side panels no math required just whatever's in the neighborhood of what I had in mind then I let all of that determine the size of my bottom panel again with no mouth instead I just use some tape to do a quick dry assembly of my top and side panels make a first cut on my bottom panel hold it up to my other pieces mark a line and then take a few passes on the table saw just sneaking up on the line until it fits just right so I'm not shooting for a number rather just cutting it to fit a gap okay the next thing we want to do is get some thin hardwood strips on the Front's of the pieces that'll eventually become the vertical partitions and the shelves already had some thin pieces of walnut laying around but if you didn't you're just gonna cut 1/8 to quarter inch thick piece that's just slightly wider than your plywood then you're gonna glue it on and you can use some tape or some fancy clamps once that's had time to dry you can trim off the excess any number of ways personally I like using my table saw with a jig that holds the surface of the plywood perfectly in line with the blade so just the overhanging material gets cut free and I know it's kind of hard to see what's going on in this shot so here's a quick little drug that hopefully explains it a little bit more ok now back to the case pieces before we glue them up we're gonna need to cut some dados and rabbets into them now conventional wisdom would tell you that you need to cut datas into the top and bottom pieces to accept the vertical partitions but you'll notice that I'm only cutting them into the bottom pieces and you're gonna see why in just a minute but in any case you're gonna cut two of those and then rabbits along the backs of all four pieces once that was done the last thing we wanted to do before calling it a night was get the exterior pieces glued up and here we're just gonna use the tape method sometimes I'll use Domino's and these joints to reinforce them but honestly the biggest benefit to that for me is just that it helps make the glue up go more smoothly when you just have one set of hands unfortunately I couldn't do that here because I broke my smallest Domino bit but fortunately I've got extra sets of hands but the next morning the case was nice and dry and we could start fitting our vertical partitions so we started by cutting one edge of each piece nice and square then we fit that end into the dado did our best to hold the piece perpendicular to the bottom and mark the line so that we can make the cuts on the other ends so at this point the vertical partitions are sized just right but before we install them we're gonna cut another set of datas into these pieces which are gonna eventually hold the shelves now at this point we're gonna go ahead and cut those two they're finished depths and we're also going to cut our shelf pieces to they're finished steps since they're gonna be exactly the same okay now you'll remember we didn't cut dedos into the top of the case and I said we'd come back to that decision and well now we're back so this whole piece is gonna get a face frame on it eventually and that's gonna cover up the data's and really the most important thing is that these vertical pieces be nice and square and parallel to one another and that's because drawers are going to go in between them and fitting drawers into a square opening is a lot easier than something that's out of square and honestly because this box is a trapezoid the likelihood of you cutting datas that end up being perfectly placed top and bottom just isn't that high at least not for me maybe you're better than me and you can nail it but I know that I won't so I'm saving myself the headache instead I'm just gonna install the partitions and use these squares to get them just perfect and that's gonna hold pretty tight then to make sure that they don't move I'm gonna cut these little scrap pieces of walnut out and glue them to the underside of the top and this is something that nobody's ever gonna see unless they're really obsessed with this piece and are willing to get down on their hands and knees or if they I don't know watch this video all right next we're going to set our blade to 15 degrees so that we can start fitting our shelf pieces so we'll start by cross-cutting one edge of each shelf and this is gonna leave an edge that matches the angle of the cabinet side piece next we can put our blade back to 90 degrees hold that piece up to the cabinet and Mark out a line where we need to cut it so that it fits just right then we'll take a few passes airing on the side of too long until it fits just right now on the England side we didn't cut a dado so we're gonna do something similar to what we did on the top only here I'm cutting a much beefier longer strip of hardwood with a 15 degree angle on one side then I'm gonna install these on the underside of the shelf for extra support and honestly you could skip this step if you wanted all right now let's make the face ring so here I want to use slightly chunkier pieces to give the cabinet a more substantial look and that will be to sort of match the visual weight of the base otherwise things might start to look out of balance so here I'm ripping a few pieces of walnut to about one and a quarter inches wide then it's really just a matter of working your way around the perimeter matching the angles and cutting your pieces to length one regret that I have is I should have spent more time milling the walnut to size for this use the pieces we used had a little bit more curve in them than I would have liked and we ended up having to nail them in to get them to hold flat either way while gluing them on I want them to be proud mostly on the inside edge of the cabinet but with the outside I'm also gonna leave them ever so slightly proud and that's so that we can get a really clean and flush look after they dry by using a flush trim bit on the router now let's set the cabinet aside for a bit and start making our base we started off by making a few templates of our leg shapes and you could do this with the C&C if you have one I used my X carve but I've also shown how to do this by hand in another video so I'm gonna link to that below and actually sean has a whole video about this on his channel so I'm also gonna link to that from there we could cut the pieces free using a table saw and then roughed out the general shape on the bandsaw after that we use some templating bits on the router to mimic the shapes and you'll notice in these shots that we're leaving some parts namely the end grain and the parts where the connections will be made and we'll get to those in a minute on the table saw using a sled so here we're gonna make a quick sled jig for cutting the end grains and the connecting phases so we start by setting the fence and taking one pass to establish a cut line and what's important here is that we don't touch the fence again after we've done this next we use the template that we are made to line up exactly where we need to cut our connecting face and I should say this is a non crucial cut you just want to be close and consistent then we could put our actual work pieces in and make the cuts to clear away the material next we're gonna do the same thing for the face of our short legs and actually before we do that let's look at how the whole base comes together so that you have a better reference point so it's pretty much just a pair of these two pieces that form a cross these two will get dominoed together and these will get dominoed into the existing piece but before they get connected we'll also attach these support pieces that the cabinet can rest on top of to support the ends and I'm not an engineer but in my head the thing that this base has going for it is that there's sort of equal but opposite forces being applied so while weight here would be pushing this down forcing the joint apart weight here is also pushing down and forcing the joint together at least that's how it works in my head all right back to the sled here we're using the template and making some stops that hold it exactly where the edge is flush with the sled finally we're gonna do the same thing to the connecting face on this short piece like we did on the longer piece before the animation sequence and again here closing consistent is what's important not exact so at this point we can go ahead and do an initial glue up and that's gonna consist of gluing the two shorter pieces together and all of the little support blocks that go on the connecting faces and right now we're just very crudely cutting those out and we're gonna attach them as some oversized blocks and the reason for that's going to become obvious in this next shot where you see me using the template of the entire leg shape to trace on to the assembly so far and once that was done we're gonna go through the exact same process again of roughing out the shape on the bandsaw template routing the bulk of it and then using a sled to make some final cuts on the end grain now right here you're probably thinking that I should have just made this out of one piece because of the seam but remember that you won't see that because the other two pieces still need to get glued on and actually the grain direction would look worse and it would be weaker if I tried to make this out of one piece all right let's get back to the cabinet the next step was to make some drawer boxes and we decided to class it up with some bloom drawer slides blum blum rhymes with plum plum I don't know anyway Shawn walked me through how he goes about this and it's kind of confusing at first but he has an entire video that covers all this on his channel so I'm gonna link to that one as well and while he builds the drawer boxes I'll use this as an opportunity to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video as you guys know I personally use Squarespace and have been using them for my website for some time now in fact Shawn does too and the reason that he I and countless others do is because it makes our lives so much easier building your site with Squarespace is insanely easy you don't need to be a designer to make it look great and that's because they're the designers they have tons of modern templates to choose from all of which employ the latest HTML CSS and JavaScript techniques and every template that they offer is optimized to work with mobile browsers so no matter how a person navigates to your site desktop phone tablet it doesn't matter your site's gonna look great beyond that they offer 24/7 email support which is really helpful I've used it a couple times when I've needed help and they've always been really quick to get me on the right path and like I said the biggest benefit for me is how easy it is to update in this clip you've been watching me update my website for an auction page that I'm making to sell this piece that I'm building in the video it's got an embedded form that people can use to bid all of the info a really nice carousel image gallery and absolutely zero coding was required and it only took me a couple minutes to put it together so if you're thinking about starting a website for any purpose or even if you have an existing website you want to yourself to check them out head over to Squarespace comm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash four-eyes and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain all right thanks Squarespace okay so Sean's put together our three drawer boxes and now we can start attaching the hardware and like I said he has a full tutorial over on his channel that goes into detail either way I don't think that I'm at a point of understanding it well enough to explain it in a video but I'll wrap my head around it as I use them a few more times and if you want to understand it better check out Sean's video here I use the cat's Moses dovetail jig to make a perpendicular 90-degree cut in the back of my boxes and I think the hardware goes through this notch if I recall correctly these holes I'm drilling here are first support pins that hold the back of the drawer up again I think in any case once that's all done installing the hardware itself is actually really easy just a pair of clips on the underside front of the drawer box and then the slider in the cabinet and once these things are in I have to say that they're super smooth and really nice top-quality stuff works like a plumber with the drawer boxes in I could start making the drawer faces so here I'm prepping my pieces and what I usually like to do here is measure my opening factor in my gaps and that tells me the size of that my drawer faces should be then I cut them out just ever so slightly wider than they actually need to be for the length I'm gonna go ahead and finalize that right now and I just want to make sure that all three are exactly the same before we attach them we need to cut in some handles so I made myself two templates that look like this one of these will be for the drawer boxes and the other ones are gonna be for the drawer faces and this way the drawer box won't be seen or felt when you go to pull the drawers open so using the templates I roughed out the material using a jigsaw and then use my router with a flush trim bit to clean it up at this point I could start installing and basically I'm going to start from the bottom and work my way up and one of the cool things about these handles is a clamp can fit right in the opening which makes it really easy to hold them in position while you screw them in now since I cut my drawer slightly wider than they needed to be I should end up with a last piece that needs to be trimmed just a little tiny bit so technically it's a smaller drawer face than the other two but it's such a little difference that you're I can't see it but what it does do is allow me to make consistent gaps that go all the way around and that's something that your eyes a lot more likely to pick up on here I'm making the back panel and I made this out of four pieces so that I could leave a gap that ran the length of the piece slightly above and below the shelf line and this will leave plenty of room for somebody to pull cables through somehow I forgot to film myself attaching it but it's just a couple screws to attach the base to the legs I'm going to use some of these figure 8 clips and I'm not really looking for strength here gravity is gonna be doing most of the work I really just need something to keep the base in place when I built the predecessor to this piece at the end of the video I had this little monologue about the idea that form follows function in it I argued that it should but only to a certain extent in other words we shouldn't be so rigid that we always favor utility in her personality tangentially I get a lot of questions about designing furniture and oftentimes people ask me if I use things like the golden rectangle or ratio in my designs and the truth is I don't I mean I think it's okay for somebody to start there but I wouldn't ever blindly follow it as gospel be at the golden ratio or form strictly following function if we pay too much attention to those quote unquote rules then everything has to be evolving towards one inevitable point and that frankly sounds really boring so I say take that faith and put it into something more important like yourself and your ability to make something beautifully inefficient special thanks to Levi Wilson Jake Vance Taylor Hudson Tristan Morris Mark Armstrong Heath Lacey machiya Galecki or Macy ikuko lucky apologies for the name butchering and the rest of my patreon members for supporting this channel you all are the engine that keeps this thing going so thank you seriously and if you want to find out how you can support the show too and snag one of these sweet four-eyes shirts click the link in the description check it out and see if it's right for you and there's always no pressure alright see in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 303,046

Keywords: woodworking, wood working, woodwork, wood work, mid century modern furniture, DIY furniture, How to build a Media Console, TV Stand, Credenza

Id: tFy9Qze8nY4

Length: 21min 10sec (1270 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019