One Tree to Build One Cabinet

hey Johnny here and today I'll show you how I managed to take this stack of 13 Walnut slabs basically a whole tree and turn it into a single hardwood cap and it's a huge surprise for my wife who's been asking for this particular piece for 4 years now oh my gosh it is Jazzy I had two main challenges on this project one my resolve to kind of push myself and make every build better than the last and two I have a onewe deadline to pull off this whole thing you might be thinking Johnny those two things are directly at odds with each other yes yes they are so this is all black walnut locally sourced by my buddy Zach Wix who's a sawyer here in Oklahoma City Zach will take down dying walnut trees or stuff that he's rescuing from the landfill and he Mills those up on his portable sawmill and on top of that Zach's out there planting hundreds of seedlings to more than replenish what he's cutting down Zack recently posted about selling a stack of slabs from his personal stash that he's had sitting in his garage air drying for the last 2 years and these slabs are all from the same tree which a stack of slabs cut from the same tree and stack back in order is called a bull so I bought an entire bull of Walnut 13 slabs in total all at about an inch and 1 half thick for 1,00 bucks I did the math and with the roughly 220 board foot he sold me that works out to five bucks a board foot and that is a crazy good deal I mean normally dried ready to use Walnut slabs go for about 20 to 25 bucks a board foot which means that stack of Walnut slabs should have run me somewhere around $5,000 but again I managed to get it for 1,00 bucks and I decided to use these slabs to build a thing that my wife has been wanting for years and that is a buffet cabinet or a sideboard but what I didn't realize is that this is going to take the majority of the slabs to build a single cabinet but I'm intentionally making this cabinet a beefy boy and if you're unfamiliar a buffet slideboard is a cabinet that usually sits in the dining room by the formal dining table and they're mostly used to store dishes and silverware usually the stuff you bust out if you were having a fancy dinner which in our house only happens for like a big holiday meal but Katie has been wanting one of these for 4 years now to the point where it's kind of a running joke between us that every time I mention that I'm starting a new project she asked me if I'm building her Buffet cabinet and the answer is always no well this time with Mother's Day week away and this being Katie's first Mother's Day as a new mom I want to make it extra special for her and build that Buffet cabinet that she's been wanting now I'm still going to build that dining table that I mentioned in the last video but that project is on hold for at least one more video while I tackle this secret project instead and so far I've gone through the process of Milling up these slabs and turning them into dimensional Lumber that I can use to build this piece which turning slabs into dimensional Lumber is a bunch of extra work but again this was such a good deal it's going to be worth it even if I was to buy dimensional Walnut boards those are running about 12 to 13 bucks a board foot so it's still a really great bargain and makes all that extra work of Milling the wood worth that extra time another thing to consider is that air dried Walnut usually has more variations in color versus the kill dried stuff and the killr stuff usually has a very homogeneous kind of washed out overall brown color which is totally fine I mean sometimes that's exactly what you're looking for but the air dried stuff can have a bunch of color variations from shades of tan Browns Reds all the way to the really bright white sapwood and I'm going to build this Buffet cabinet entirely from solid wood I mean there's not going to be a single scrap of plywood on this whole piece mark it down so I think that that color variation of these slabs is going to give the whole piece sort of a unique look and side note I really struggle with joining a straight edge on these boards I mean they're just too long to run through my Joiner and I didn't have much luck getting perfect straight edges with the joining sled running it through my table saw either so this led me to try a technique that I've heard about but I've never actually tried for myself and that's using my track saww to make a cut between two boards to get a straight edge essentially joining boards with a tracks saww and of course this seems like one of those Tik Tok woodworking hacks but like most things on Tik Tok reality is a little bit different I mean it kind of worked but that edge was pretty rough so what I ended up having to do was use that to reference off the fence of my table saw to cut a straight edge flip that over cut another straight edge and then finally after all of this I had boards jointed well enough to do a glue up and another thing that I'm continuing with on this project is the deadline I have one week to build this fairly difficult Furniture piece and I've never been a fast maker but with this build I have a single week to get this project done which really adds to the stress normally I like to take 2 to 3 weeks sometimes longer but on this build I have one week and if anything goes wrong if I have any setbacks I'm going to be in trouble and if you're a maker yourself or if you watch my videos you know that that's never the case no project ever goes perfectly to plan but when I'm planning these builds I always have this sense of optimism I feel like I can do anything I tell myself it'll all be fine just basically don't sleep for the next week and this project will be a breeze so that's where my head is at starting this build all right I want to talk about the design of this project and the design of this piece is a little bit more straightforward and that's for a reason I've got all those really beautiful wood slabs and with all the color variations they're going to make the cabinet really pop and I think that's going to be kind of the star of the show so I don't want to do too much and for the doors I'm going to use a whole slab but then I'll carve in a pattern into the slab and then inlay epoxy into that pattern and I've got something else cooked up for the doors but I'll show you that later on because at this point in the build I didn't even have that part figure it [Music] out so with only a week to build this project I'm going to rely heavily on my CNC and maybe that's cheating there's always strong opinions one way or the other when I use this machine but I want to talk about something else that the CNC does for me and the main reason why I use it or actually it's the secondary reason I mean the main reason why I use this machine is it lets me design projects with details that I wouldn't otherwise be able to achieve so it kind of unlocks that superpower and a great example of that is that record cabinet that I did recently with those 3D tamper doors but on this project it's all about efficiency and time management and a little bit about the design the machine is basically a whole shop of woodworking tools rolled into one and I can do a lot of those tasks all in one operation so on this project the CNC has taken the place of my table saw at times my Joiner my planer a handheld router other tools and it just brings a level of precision that when using handheld power tools takes a bunch of time to set up to get that same Precision now it may sound like I'm trying to sell everyone on a CNC machine that's really not what I'm doing I have an avid machine I love it but they don't pay me anything to sell them or talk about them my goal with this channel since day one is to do what other YouTube creators did for me when I first got started and I want to kind of inspire and encourage more people to start making and maybe sell a few t-shirts along the way like this Wing It tea that I'm wearing right now or that maker tea or even my trust the process te all designed by my tattoo artist Brandon cutter I've got a link for that down down below but I digress the point I guess I'm trying to make is that this machine unlocks a whole new level of superpowers for what I can do in the shop and how efficiently I can do them so I love using my CNC but I also understand that that's not your thing to fill out the rest of the epoxy form I'm using a couple off Cuts left over from Milling the slabs and to make these fit properly I do have to do a little bit of a modification by cutting these down and I want to explain the Japanese wave pattern that I inlaid into the slabs the idea is this piece is going to go along with that kamiko dining table that I'm building next but not necessarily match it completely and if if you're new here kamiko is a thousand-year-old plus Japanese woodworking technique of creating patterns from strips of wood so I want this Buffet to look in place sitting next to that table but the whole time that I was designing this piece I have one sentence that my wife likes to say running through my head over and over she doesn't like Jazzy things and I would say that I don't either but then I go and build stuff like the paper table which is extra Jazzy so the trick is to add a touch of jazz without doing too much and since the doors are the main design feature of this build I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible but I can't help but think these doors need something else I just didn't know what that was at the time I'm inlaying epoxy on the slabs that will become the doors of the cabinet and I'm going to do this in a three-step process the first pour is going to lock everything in place and fill the voids and for all of these pores I'm using total boat thick set epoxy and this is sort of their medium por epoxy I mean you can pour up to an inch thick but I usually keep it around a/2 inch just just to stay on the safe side it has a 3:1 mix ratio and then to pigment it black I add some India ink and what I really like about this epoxy is how well it flows and that slower curing time with slabs like this they're going to release Air into the epoxy and this takes about a day to cure and has a lower surface tension so it gives time for those bubbles to escape before everything sets up and now a quick word from this video sponsor and I appreciate all of you who watch these ads as this is how I'm able to keep the lights on here at Johnny pills looking for the Vegas experience but don't want to leave your house enter Golden Nugget online casino did you know Golden Nugget online casino now has an online casino app where you can play all your favorite casino games right on your phone or tablet and the best part is I'm partnering with golden nugget online casino this video to let you know about an awesome deal they have going on right now but first let me tell you all about the app Golden Nugget online casino is a real money online gambling out you can play a variety of casino games including slots Blackjack roulette and live dealer games Golden Nugget online casino is fully regulated and licensed to legally operate you can safely and confidently play your favorite casino games with one of the longest standing Casino brands in the USA you can quickly navigate through all the available games and play right on your phone or tablet Golden Nugget online casino also offers exciting and rewarding promotions including exclusive limited time offers and bonuses loyalty programs and more if you like the games that you saw download The Golden Nugget online casino app today use my promo code Johnny builds and new customers who deposit $5 will get $50 in Casino credits so drop a comment and tell me what game you want me to play next thanks the Golden Nugget online casino for sponsoring this video I didn't show you all eight panel glue UPS because honestly it's just the same thing over and over I mean if you've seen one panel glue up you've seen them all I'm taking back to the CNC to cut in the datos and cut out the profiles of the individual panels that I'm making and like I mentioned this is a huge timesaver for me because there's 10 panels total that make up this whole Buffet cabinet I know I said I glued up eight panels but I'm cutting three vertical panels from this first piece so as long as I don't do anything dumb like put a screw in the wrong place that destroys my only half-in compression bit I should be fine remember earlier when I said that I can't afford any setbacks this was just a dumb mistake on my part probably because I'm trying to work too fast and it reminds me of something our range instructors told us in Police Academy at the pistol range and side note for those who don't know I'm a retired police officer having spent 20 years working for the Oklahoma City Police Department with most of that time spent as a detective and a hostage negotiator so the range instructors had a saying that they would drill into our heads which goes like this smooth is fast and it makes sense trust me just hear me out if you're trying to go fast you end up making a lot of mistakes and that can get real bumpy but if you're trying to be smooth and efficient you mitigate those mistakes and therefore you work faster so smooth is fast but I'm working too fast to the point where I didn't stop to think that an easy solution that would work for holding down the panels on the CNC is just the glue on these tabs and not risk the bit getting anywhere close to those hold down screws and if I just slow down a little bit I can actually work faster and that makes sense trust me so the vast majority of these uh carves of the pattern went really really well but because of some of the natural cracks and voids in the wood itself I did have some pieces kind of break off right there right there so I literally went in there and crawled around on the floor and managed to uh to find some um so I can repair those I'm just going to use a little bit of a wood glue and CA glue just to kind of put it back in place it's just got to hold enough for the epoxy to get down in there it back I always like to say to those who say that I'm not a woodworker that you're right I'm a maker I don't want to pigeon hole myself into just working with wood I like all aspects of making and Fabrication including metal work and just like how I talk about a CNC unlocks certain superpowers I feel the same way about welding and how it unlocks superpowers as well here we go there's something sort of Primal about fusing metal together not that cavemen were welding but you get what I mean working with metal is just undeniably cool but I also understand there's a level of intimidation when it comes to learning how to weld and I want to bust that myth welding is pretty straightforward and anyone can learn so I partnered with Lincoln Electric this year to hopefully introduce metal working to more folks like you now there is a big difference between the super technical welding and those that are building a base for a piece of furniture and I don't want to take anything away from the really skilled welders who go through a bunch of schooling and on the job training to hone their craft honestly I'm an a what they do but on the other side of that is the idea that it's okay to make a couple ugly welds along the way and I'm not suggesting you should try to make ugly welds but rather that it's okay to make ugly welds as you get started and learn the process getting back to the epoxy it's the following day and I did have a few bubbles from Air escaping the wood but since this is that slower curing epoxy I was easily able to dig out those bubbles with a chisel before doing the third and final pour on this panel of doors for that Buffet C after another day of curing it's time to pull this out of the form and I feel like I've got the process of building epoxy forms down at this point I mean I had zero leaks but one thing that I would change is that I would go ahead and add some of that stuckle tape to the sides of the form to prevent all that tear out that I'm getting where the Sid of the form kind of touches that raw edge of the melamine the bottom pops off easily since I did use some mold release but the sides are causing a few more issues so it's back onto the CNC and I'm using this massive 3 and 34in flattening bit and I'll slowly remove the epoxy taking very shallow passes until I reveal that Japanese wave epoxy inlay I often spent a few weeks coming up with my designs and I try to get as much of the project built in digital form before I begin making the real thing and that's how I come up with this next process where I'm going to use the stop datos to assemble the cabinet this is going to allow me to assemble the cabinet in a way that hides all the internal joinery and will be exceptionally strong after cleaning up the tabs from the CNC I'm cutting in the Tenon that slides into the dado at 3/4 of an inch on these 1-in panels which further helps hide the joinery and to allow the panel to fit all the way through the stop dat and rest flush with the front of the cabinet I have to cut off the front end of that Tenon over on the band saww I did have one vertical panel that needed some additional work and that's the center divider that had matching dats on either side the first side was carved on the CNC but the second side I need to cut with a router using a guide bushing and I completely messed this up when using a guide bushing for template routing your offset is equal to half the difference of the outer diameter of the guide bushing minus the outer diameter of the router bit in my case I have a/ in guide bushing and a/ quinch router bit so the offset should have been an eighth of an inch but I mistakenly set it at a/ quar inch outside meaning I cut a 1-in dado versus a 3/4 in Dado like I needed I mentioned earlier that I was going to add to the design later on and often as I'm building the project I'm constantly trying to come up with different ways to elev at the piece along the way and I'd say most of the time these ideas get scrapped because you don't want to overdesign a piece often I think it's the most difficult part of Designing furniture and that's focusing on the main design details and letting those do the talking for the entire piece but even with that mind set I'm always trying to come up with something else to add while I'm building and on this particular piece I felt like it was just missing something so I came up with the idea to add koi fish to the Japanese W pattern on the door and I'm going to carve those in on the CNC but do that in a three-step process so I can pour in three different colors epoxy along the way and this feels a little bit like a gamble I think this piece really needs the extra detail and I think it's going to tie in nicely with that Japanese inspired kamiko dining table that I'm building next but like I mentioned earlier Katie prefers a more simple or subtle design and pouring white and orange epoxy may be a step too far but I'm pretty confident that this point this is the thing that this cabinet needs so that's what I'm going to do and just hope that it's not too Jack Jazzy this Walnut had plenty of knot holes and cracks to fill and again I'm on a time crunch so I'm using my Polymer crack filling glue gun to fill these and this isn't something I would want to do on a tabletop since you can just basically pick these out with a fingernail but on a piece like this it works great and it's way faster than filling these with epoxy which is often a multi-day process and I get questions every time this thing shows up in one of my videos no this isn't a standard glue gun this is a kit specifically for filling knot holes on wood and you use this tinted polymer black in my case and these kits are pretty pricey I think I paid 350 bucks for this particular kit but on the rare times I do use it it is the perfect tool for the job but if I had more time I would use epoxy as that's much more durable getting back to the koi fish carbs on the door panel it's the next day and the epoxy has cured so I can carve in the next portion of the koifish and I left this panel on my CNC for 3 Days in the exact same spot referencing that exact same work zero and this means that I can carve over the same areas I've already cut and poured epoxy with extreme accuracy now this next round of carves is to add in the orange spots that you often see on koi fish and while orange is my wife's favorite color I'm not sure she wants a pop of orange in her furniture so I'm definitely taking a huge Risk by doing this and my wife's a really good person she's not going to just say that she hates it no matter what she'll pretend she likes it but I'll no she doesn't have a good Poker Face I told you in the beginning of this video that I wasn't going to use a single piece of plywood on this build but I hate to admit that I lied I need to build the drawers and I only have 2 days left to complete this build with so many steps left to go for such a simple Design This Buffet cabinet has a crazy number of steps to build and I think I really underestimated just how much work it was going to be so for that reason I'm building the drawers out of plywood and the whole time I'm just telling myself that I'll come back back and remake the drawers when I have a little bit more free time but let's be honest I'm never going to come back and make Hardware drawers like I want to the minute I start the next project I'll have moved on forever and those plywood drawers while ugly are going to be completely functional meaning I'll likely never feel the need to rebuild the drawers but if I tell you that my intent was to build those from Walnut does that at least make it seem a little bit better Katie if you're watching remember it's the thought that counts and while you do deserve fancy bespoke dovetailed hardwood drawers you get Home Depot plywood drawers instead I'm sorry and even with that shortcut of building drawers quickly from plywood I'm up against the clock if I'm going to finish this in time for Mother's Day I'm going to need an absolute Miracle it may seem like this isn't that difficult of a project to knock out in one week and if I wasn't filming every every step that would probably be true but just like the camera adds 10 lb maybe 40 in my case filming the process slows everything down by about 75% and I'm not complaining I mean I chose this life but you may have noticed this project features almost no what I call Talking Heads where I get in front of the camera to explain what I'm doing or about to do and that's because I felt extra rushed and when I feel rushed I don't want to stop and explain I just want to keep my head down keep working and maybe that's a good thing every time I drop a video I get a fair share of comments saying that I talk too much and maybe one day YouTube will create a way to watch videos with little or no volume but until that day comes maybe doing a few less Talking Heads is a good thing so while the drawers themselves are made from plywood the drawer faces are more Walnut with that same Japanese wave pattern carved in so at least when you open up the cabinet you'll see just the drawer faces and not the plywood drawers behind them there's a little saying in the metal working world that must be true because it Rhymes and that saying is Bondo and paint make me the welder I ain't terrible Grammer but also sort of true and this is something else that may drive metal workking purist crazy but I promise you they've all done this I have a couple pits and uneven surfaces that I want to hide and a quick coat of Bondo takes care of that real fast and then I'll come back and paint the base black and while it may seem odd to use spray paint on a project like this you can get a really nice paint job from a rattle can the trick is just go slow build up the layers while avoiding the temptation to just cover the whole piece in one go which is going to always lead to drips getting back to the cabinet it's time to assemble everything and it's time to say that if you watch this far into the video i' like to give a thanks to all the viewers who do that so if you watch this far into the video leave this comment below and in one week I'll pick a random comment to send a fre Johnny builds t-shirt of your choice also if you enjoy these projects and my videos and my incessant narration make sure to hit that subscribe button is I've got some really exciting builds planned and I'm super excited about that kamiko dining table that I've got coming in the next build and this time I promise it will be the next video I've also got some really interesting ideas for that one so make sure you get subscribed and turn on notifications so you don't miss any of my new videos and a huge thank you to everyone who has subscribed already I mean I wouldn't get to do what I love on a daily basis if it wasn't for you so truly thank you this cabinet needs a back panel and once again due to time constraints I'm going to make it out of plywood but at least I have the decency to cover the plywood with the veneer and I'll use a halfin rabbiting bit to cut in the groove to accept the/ in thick sheet of plywood that I'm using this does leave me with some spots to Chisel out if I had been smarter I would have cut this rabbit in before adding those interior panels into the cabinet but honestly it doesn't take take that long to clean that up getting back to the door panel it needs another flatting pass on the CNC to clean up the epoxy and the reveal of those koi fish is extra satisfying and I think this was a good move adding these but again I'll know by Katie's reaction if this was the way to go and for now I'm just going to power through turning this panel into the [Music] [Applause] doors with my current Table Saw Set up this panel is too large to cross cut so I'll use my track saw to cut it in half first but I am very excited about some new equipment that I've got incoming from Grizzly including a three-phase sliding table saw which would have been able to do these cross Cuts easily so look for that to pop up in the next video or so I'm going to improvise a little bit on the pools and the way this cabinet sits at about a 30 in tall my thought is the pull should be at the top of the door so I'm just going to use a chamfer bit to cut in just enough of a recess so you can get your fingers around the back of the door and pull it open and had I added any sort of pull Hardware I I think this would have taken away from the door so this is just a super simple solution to solve that [Music] problem all right back to the base it's ready for a clear coat and again I'm just using a rattle can to spray on four to five coats of this lacquer this should protect the paint job and prevent any scratches getting back to the drawers I can attach those drawer faces and even though I'm not a fan of these plywood drawers I am digging the integrated hardwood slides and these are much easier to do than actual drawer slide Hardware on top of just looking a thousand times better getting back to the base I realized some of you might have seen what I welded up earlier and thought it looked a bit short and that's because my plan was to finish out those legs with Walnut inserts that slot inside the metal base and add an extra 4 in to the height so I've got to get these cut to an inch thick which matches the steel and then I cut in a tenin a bit under 3/4 of an inch to slot into the leg I also left the angled ends open so I could plug these with Walnut as well and something that's barely going to be noticeable but I think if you do happen to notice it it's going to be a nice touch now there are a million different finishes out there but this Total booat Wood honey is becoming my go-to and not just because I'm sponsored by totalboat I've been sponsored by totalboat for years and in that time I've used a bunch of other finishes but nothing is as easy as wood honey you literally just rub it in and buff it off but beyond that it looks really really good on this wall Walnut and this is where I'm seeing that payoff from using the air dried Walnut versus buying dimensional Kil dried Walnut and it's hard for you the viewer to see just how beautiful and Vary the deepness of the brown is and all the subtle colors in this wood in real life but trust me this is looking really good and since it's a piece that lives in my own home I can always refinish it if that Sheen Fades away in a few years one of the last things I need to do is make the back panel again I'm using this ugly Home Depot half-in plywood but at least this time I'm going to cover it up with veneers all I had available was a 2x8 sheet of Walnut and a 2 by8 sheet of maple so the idea is to put the maple veneer on the inside of the cabinet it's really dark inside the cabinet and I think this is going to help to kind of brighten that up and have a really good contrast and then the back side I'll use Walnut veneer and these are pressure sensitive veneers meaning they have an adhesive on the back already and this is activated by Rolling it with one of these pressure rollers so it's a super simple way to quickly add a veneer off camera I drilled in some elongated holes on the crossmembers of the buffet a base to attach it to the underside of the cabinet and I'm just going to use some threaded inserts and some quarter2 bolts to hold it all down and I've got just a few more steps to wrap this up and I just want to admit this was a stressful build I'm not a fast maker I hate feeling rushed but at the same time I'm really loving how this piece turned out and I really hope Katie loves it as well she's probably my toughest critic and honestly I need that when you're too close to these projects like I am sometimes you can Overlook certain details or you get excited about a design detail and you think it looks cool but maybe no one else agrees and my wife knows what she likes and she expects quality so I feel like knowing that helps push me on these builds especially when it's for her and I value her opinion on everything I make I mean on most builds she's the audience of one that I'm really trying to impress and with this being her first Mother's Day as a new mom she deserves the best but I hope I didn't Jazz it up too much so let's go see what she thinks all right right so this is the thing that you've been asking for 4 years now and I figured with Mother's Day right around the corner this being your first Mother's Day as a new mom uh I wanted to make it really special for you so I built you oh my gosh it is Jazzy I told you this is beautiful oh my God this is where our board games are going to go so not fancy uh dishes and silverware board games board games I need a place for board games perfect orange is my favorite color this was all made from a stack of slabs that was essentially an entire tree oh that's cool you crushed it little Jazzy I'll take the Jazz to get to get my Buffet so so when I started this project I had two real challenges one make this one of my best builds today and yeah I think I accomplished that but please let me know what you think down in the comments below and my second goal was to build this piece of furniture in one week did I accomplish that goal absolutely not you just watched me do it so you know that it only took 34 minutes to build thanks video editing magic you did it again I don't know Andy I'm just not that big of a jazz fan and I've even been to where Jazz was invented the Mecca of jazz Salt Lake City Utah they even named their NBA team after that you know the mountains beautiful the music me

Channel: Jonny Builds

Views: 293,583

Keywords: buffet, buffet cabinet, sideboard, epoxy, epoxy resin, woodworking, jonny builds, blacktail studio, john malecki, live edge slab, walnut, woodworking projects, woodworking projects ideas, woodworking projects that sell, how to, how to build cabinets, home renovation, home improvement, how to basic, epoxy resin art, amazing woodworking projects ideas

Id: D-hbA3hndZ8

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2024