Krenov Inspired Coffee Table - Part 1 - Case Construction

hey folks hey guys doing well if you were all having a great day today I'm starting in on my coffee table build this morning and it's actually pretty exciting because it's 8 o'clock in the morning and I've got a solid 4 hours with no distractions this coffee table is going to be a two species project the main case for the top is going to be made out of mahogany and all the other components all of the drawer components the base legs all that is going to be made out of Ambrosian maple in a previous video on my second channel I covered designing this project in fusion 360 even if you don't have any interest in fusion 360 go towards the end of the video and kind of scroll around a little bit and you'll get an idea for how this project is actually going to look when it's all said and done and as far as the plan goes anyway that's that's the plan of how it's gonna look I'm starting with the case construction er that the top case construction and that's nothing but mahogany and as you can see this is some pretty awesome stuff this is a 20-inch wide actually a little bit more than 20 inches wide piece of mahogany it is crystal clear there are no defects and it's just it's just exciting to work on something this large that's the good news the bad news is while these two boards were acclimating to my shop which by the way they were one big board they were 20 inches wide about nine feet long cross cut it right in half to bring it home but while it was acclimating to my shop both of these developed a twist so much that I were a little thing I could use them in their full width State that's really unfortunate because not often do you see a piece of wood this wide and I don't want to risk completing the case construction by trying to hand plain here and there and ended up having a twisted case so instead I'm going to do the next best thing and that is rip each one of these pieces into three individual boards mill those flat and square four sides and then glue them back together so that I do have a little bit more narrow panels but they're gonna be flat and stable that's the goal anyway the there's two downsides that number one I can't get a can't use this full width panel without any glue seems that that's a huge bummer and number two I'm add a little bit more than 20 inches in width now and I do have one spot on one of these boards on the edge where I have to remove a little bit of a defect a chunk taken out so I'm going to be left with probably something around 19 inches in width which is a little bit more narrow than what I wanted for that particular for the coffee table in its location in the house but this is what we have and that's what I'm going to this is what we have this is what I have and that's that's what I'm working with and got to make it work something like that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I know you're not supposed to not supposed to talk bad about a product when you have an influence on people's purchasing history purchasing habits but this particular pointer eats blades so on this channel I've got a video showing a general guide to milling lumber a guide that will basically give you the most consistent results and best practices for each machine generally speaking because sometimes there are situations where it is beneficial to kind of deviate from that process and this is one of them so in that video I explained how jointing in the downhill direction a wide face first and then going to the planer to plane that opposite face flat and parallel to the first face and then back to the jointer explain how that was beneficial because that gives you both wide faces as options to put up against the fence to make sure you are jointing in the downhill direction in this case I do not care if I'm jointing in the downhill direction I just want to ensure that I have a really really good seam and the reason I'm not gonna care in this case is I'm going to alternate faces on the fence of the jointer to cancel out any type of error that there might be so let me bring you in closer and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about I'll use some blue tape to better illustrate this so you can see but basically you want your jointer fence to be dead-on 90 degrees to the bed of the jointer but let's just say you're off by a half a degree well if you are using let's just say we put this side up against the fence and this side up against the fence on the jointer and on both of these boards we are jointing this seam right here to make it perfect glue seam so let's just say we're off by just a tiny amount with this side up against the fence I'm going to put a little bit of an angle on here and that represents how much we are off well if we use the exact same side of the fence or exact same side of this board up against the fence for this same seam then we're gonna be off that same amount on the other side now this is exaggerated you're not going to be off by that amount but to ensure that you completely cancel everything out what you can do is alternate the sides of the board up against the fence so if I'm joining this bottom edge or this right side face of this board I can use this side up against the fence even if it is off by a degree half a degree whatever it is and then to make an opposing angle the exact opposite then what I would do is put this side up against the fence so if we are off we will be consistently off on each side so that once these two edges are these two short faces are joined together these top faces and bottom faces will remain flat and parallel to one another if we were trying to glue it up in the opposite sense then you'll see that obviously these boards would want to go like this to make that seem nice and flat so - to prevent all this I'm going to put opposite faces up against the fence of the jointer so this side up against the fence of the jointer and then this side up against the fence of the jointer that might mean that I'll be jointing downhill on one of these boards but I've got a helical head in the jointer it should be should be all right it's always a good idea to do a dry run of your glue-ups to make sure you have all your clamps and everything that you need readily handy and you can run into any problems you might have during that time rather than when you actually have glue on the boards so I've got all of my pipe clamps that I need an f-stop clamps and really I'm not putting much pressure on these joints because if the joint is milled properly a lot of pressure isn't isn't needed so just three pipe clamps per joint and three pipe clamps per glue up I should say and I'm gonna use some f-style clamps to clamp everything together along its seam to make sure all the faces stay nice and flush and don't bow out during glue up all right day two on the coffee table build I finished up yesterday by gluing these panels back together and I made a mistake when I did that I should have came back and cleaned up the glue squeeze-out once it starts to tack up and get a little bit rubbery I just completely forgot about it so this morning I came back and lightly planed off the glue squeeze-out the reason you want to get take care of it before it really fully hardens is the glue bond will form a it's a stronger bond than the wood itself so when you peel up that glue squeeze-out if it's already completely hardened oftentimes you'll pull up a little bit of wood and I didn't want that to happen so I used my smoothing plane to just touch up the top surface of all the panels and it's not perfect right now as far as the glue seam on the top but it's plenty good enough to proceed with the rest of the project and then the final sanding will take care of all that so next up is to joint one of the edges on each one of these panels at the jointer and then go to the table saw to each one of these panels to their final width now this fresh edge can go up against the fence it is 90 degrees to both of these sides over here and because I want a little bit of continuous grain definitely for the side top and then side I want the grain to flow from one to the other because that's visually what you'll be able to see I want to cut the pieces just in that order so a five and a half inch piece for the side then the center section and then another five and a half inch piece however if I change my fence position to cut this piece then the larger piece then one of these smaller once again I risk the opportunity of not I risk the chance of these pieces not being the exact same size so whatever this is plus the top plus just a tiny bit more for the blade kerf I'm gonna make that cut first that way I can reset my fence so that I can cut both side pieces at the exact same time making sure they are the exact same height and then cut the center section with the top section out moving the fence back and forth a couple times that just basically means our pieces are more consistent so on one whole panel we have this piece that is extra this piece which will be the bottom and then this five and a half inch piece which will be the center divider now the second panel was cut the same way except this extra piece over here was cut once again so that way we have a second five and a half inch piece and then the other two cuts were duplicated so again we have this center section which will be the top and then this piece over here instead of it being the center divider it is the other side so as you can see here these two side pieces have some grain continuity it flows between the pieces so that way when it's all said and done we put this one in the middle and you can't do this one-handed we add these side pieces like so that's going to be I guess the basis of our structure and the visual grain that we can see the sides on top will have a grain that flows all the way around I'm not worried about the bottom not worried about the middle all of my case pieces are going to have through joinery cut on the end grain of every single piece so these horizontal pieces will have through dovetails cut on the end of the tail section these vertical sides will have pins cut on here both top and bottom and then this Center vertical divider will have through Moore's and tenon joinery cut on it well Tenon's cut on this which will go into mortises on these pieces over here very similar to this project I created last year this is just a very simple box but it has some eye-catching through dovetails on all four corners and then a through mortise and tenon shelf here in the middle it's going to be the exact same situation but in this orientation I'm not gonna have a horizontal shelf in the middle instead I'm gonna have a vertical divider with through mortise and tenon joints up here the only difference is this particular project has through mortise enter through Tenon's right here that are proud of the surface on this project they're going to be shaved flush so that the middle of the table all the center section of the table there's not going to be anything interfering the ends the corners I should say those through dovetails they are still going to be nice and proud but it doesn't make sense to cut this one short instead when we go through the milling process which we already have it's best to cut the center section to be the exact same size as the sides that way when I use my my marking gauge here to establish the shoulder line of all the joints I know that for consistency's sake if all of these are the exact same height and I am referencing off the outside end grain and I know the center section on the through tenon piece in the middle it will be the exact same as the center section on the sides so now I can go ahead and mark all of my pieces if I wanted the joints to be nice and flush and smooth when it was all said and done then really all I have to do is transfer my thickness to my marking gauge just like that locking it down and now my marking gauge is set to the exact thickness of my material but like I said I want an offset so I'm going to use a spacer now this is just a little bit thicker than what I want visually just looking at it without the joint being cut at all but this gives me a little bit of leeway to sand it down because I do have some burning on the end grain of some of my pieces so we'll have to touch up the end grain that's no problem so now I can use this spacer as my set thickness and we'll tighten this down now I can transfer this this particular thickness or this size joint to every single end grain piece of the top case the pin boards get marked on just the wide faces and the tail boards as well as the through tenon board those get marked on all four faces adjacent to the end grain so the first thing for me to cut are the tails on the wide pieces I may tails first instead of pins first kind of guy but before I do any cutting it's been a little while since I used a handsaw so let's practice a little bit you you practice for everything else you want to get better at one as well practice for making accurate cuts with a handsaw as well so to the other bench I'm going to cut these by hand but I'm going to use a guide now in this particular project I cut all of these joints both the dovetail joints and amours and tenon joints by hand but this one's going to be a little bit more of a focal point in my room I haven't used a handsaw in quite a while and I just want to get it done so I'm going to stick with using a dovetail guide for the entire process so before I get started I do want to show you these couple guides that I've had over the years because honestly I learned how to use a handsaw with a magnetic guide and it's nothing more than an aid to help you learn and understand what is necessary as far as your body mechanics as far as what to look for out of the saw to create a precise joint so you can use these to train yourself and then no longer use these if you don't want to or you can continue to use them it really doesn't matter but I'm gonna be using this one so let me bring in closer and show you how this works you may have seen me use these guides on my channel in the past these are David Barron dovetail guys David Burton tools and this green one is a 1 to 5 ratio and this one is a 1 to 8 ratio and that just refers to how steep the angle is for the side of the tails I really like these they have sandpaper down here on the bottom and a really strong magnet and the magnet is for holding your saw so they are designed with Japanese pull saws in mind so you can hook up with the magnet here and make the cut as needed so long as you keep the saw tracking up against the side now the magnet will help you but you can still deviate from that and bend it so this will basically teach muscle memory and teach you how to to cut straight as far as your body mechanics pulling and pushing the saw forward and backward I like these however I like this one better this can do everything that these can do plus a little bit more this is a Katz Moses dovetail guide and this particular one is a six to one ratio and it's only got one angled face right here and this is for your tails you can use it with both a Japanese pull saw or in my case I prefer a western-style saw that cuts on the push stroke so you can still cut your tails like so and if you need to cut pins well your angle you don't need your angle perpendicular to the endgrain what you do is you spin it 90 degrees and now the shaft of the guide down here has that matching angle so it tilts it in this direction or you spin it around and it tilts it in that direction but both of these adjacent faces over here cut 90 degrees so you are still cutting 90 degrees for your pins now what this thing can do that those can't do is there's also a 90 degree face for cutting perfectly plumb or square to this face I should say that those particular ones don't do there there's another guide you can buy that has specific setup for a 90 degree cut but this one's built-in as well so this face right here referencing off of the face of your material and now you have a 90 degree cut or a 90 degree face on this side I'm cutting plywood so it's gonna keep tearing out but you can use it on either side as well if I'm using this without the camera I'm trying to show you by putting on that side but I would have it on my side and it cuts very easily and just cut into a tail piece or a tail cutter but basically there's all kinds of guides out there these are fantastic this one in my opinion is just a little bit better and I think it's a little bit less expensive as well but I'm gonna use this to make all the dovetail cuts and the tenon cuts on this project this is my tail board I'm going to do the layout for it and it's a simplified layout I don't need to have any reference lines on the long grain face of the board for me to follow with my saw because all that's gonna be taken care of with this guide instead all I need to do is lay it out on the end grain now what I do know is I want to have a larger half pin on each end and then smaller full pins in the middle and that's just a visual thing that I want to do to make it feel like the entire joint the dovetail joint is inside the piece rather than running its full length it's just gonna give it a little bit more visual interest now as far as doing the layout I can use a couple of these dividers to establish both the half pin as well as the spacing in between but I think I think this distance right here on my little square is an appropriate distance for the half pin and then I'll shoot for about I guess about a third of that for the full pin on the inside so just out of consistency sake I'll use this to mark my half pin or yeah my half pin on either side and then we can walk off a distance here to see if spacing is right on this divider so one two three four five six and seven I want my seventh one to be a little bit on the outside of this reference line here when that will be the actual distance of the full pin on inside so I need to increase this but I did it seven times so whatever our increase this distance on the divider it multiplies by seven so I think that's good and then I'll walk it off once again for seven duplexes and seven I'm too much so I'm gonna go in just a little bit all right I like that placement that that distance over here so that's going to be the distance of my full pin on the inside so to actually mark this now I can push down just a little bit to establish one point two three four five six and I'm not gonna go on the opposite side instead I'm gonna pick up go to this other reference point and then walk it off the other direction went to report back and six and what that did is it gave me some little points in here to put my pencil in and strike the line across the top the bigger spaces represent the end grain of each one of the tails and the space in between represents how much space is available for all of the pins when cutting the tails the exact placement of the saw blade isn't too critical just align the magnetic guide so that the saw blade lands on top of the pencil line and solloway you don't have to be on one side or the other keep in mind that the guide is just a guide its job is to keep you on track to make a good cut but it won't prevent you from making a bad cut if your body mechanics are wrong and what I mean by that is you still need to focus on tracking the sauce straight forward and straight back and making sure to never see a gap between the saw and the guide you can still bend the saw a little bit and make a bad cut so get your body out of the way of your sawing arm and relax your hand somewhat as if you're you're holding an egg or a baby bird you don't want to grip it too tight if you feel the saw binding or you see the blade Bend just slightly more often than not the problem you're having is you are probably holding the saw just a little bit too tight in your hand a really really loose grip is all you need you can chisel out the waist in between the tails if you want but I always use a cheap coping saw to remove the majority of the waste then I can chisel to the line going half depth from one side and then half depth from the other side I normally pair away at the half pin material the waste on the half pin shoulders from the short face and that is to ensure a nice clean line on the short face of the half pin area all right all of the tails are completely done and that took a lot longer than what I had anticipated so I ran out of time for today we're gonna pick up tomorrow with cutting the pins but I don't want these boards to be laying flat overnight I want to put a spacer block in between them and clamp them together that way air can still flow in between them and and yeah so tails done that took a lot longer than what I thought see you tomorrow well good morning hope you're all having a great day today I finished up yesterday cutting in details and today I'm going to cut the pins and tenon and hopefully get the whole box top assembled but in order for me to work just a little bit faster here in the shop I'm going to shut up and I'm gonna let J I get to talk today not you hold on I'm going to let J narrate the rest of this video and I'm just going to actually sit back and watch him work alright so next up is cutting the pins and to do so we need to first transfer the tail geometry to the pin board and it's critical that the pieces are not only ninety degrees to one another but the shoulder line of the tail board is perfectly lined up with the interior face of the pin board then the tails can be traced with a marking knife and to prevent the marking knife from wandering start off with a super light pass and then follow that with a slightly heavier pass oftentimes when there is repetition involved I'll complete the first one off-camera to get a feel for the process so here is the first completed joint it's exactly what I'm looking for crisp joints with no gaps one down and hopefully I can make the other three look just the same cutting the pins is just like cutting the tails except the guide is rotated so that the saw blade is perpendicular to the endgrain face and it is angled left and right the same degree as the angle on the tail cuts the most important thing is that they saw teeth touch the marking knife line but 100% of the saw blade has to be on the waist side of the marking knife line for all of these cuts as well as detail cuts I pulled the guide away when I got close to full depth at that point the cut Direction is established and all I'm focusing on is getting to the appropriate depth the rest of the process is identical to the tail boards I use a cheap coping saw to remove the majority of the waste chisel to the mark engage lime going to a depth of about half the thickness flip the board over and chisel the other half of the waste away then all of the inside corners are cleaned up and a slight Hollow is cut into the face of the shoulder just to verify that nothing is in the way when the joint is assembled if the joint is properly laid out with a marking knife all the cuts are made with the saw on the layout line but 100% on the waste side of the cut and you verify all of the cleanup work is nice and square with a small machinist square then there shouldn't be a need for any test fitting everything should line up on the very first try at this point I had all the deaf children once completed and next up were the through mortise and tenon joints for the vertical divider and I was a little bit back and forth on the placement of this I normally always lean on symmetry for placement but in this case with this being with this piece being such a focal point in my living room I thought it would look more interesting if the vertical divider was offset to one side maybe uh maybe a one-third two-third placement something like that and I asked for opinions on Instagram and ended up getting basically makes mixed opinions so I don the decision overnight but ultimately decided that it should be in the center because when looking at this from the front I thought it would look nice to have the you know different size drawers and the vertical piece being offset to one side but when looking at it from the top I thought it would just it would just look weird if you're sitting at the couch for looking at it and see the top of it and all of the through Tenon's were offset to one side I just thought that aspect of it would look a little bit weird so Center it is when laying out the dovetails I just used a pencil because the dovetail pattern is pretty generic and it's easy to it's easy to visualize but because these Tenon's were going to be there's gonna be less of them and a little bit more random in size I used blue painters tape just to get a better visual representation of the actual tenon size I planned on using the magnetic dovetail guide for the tenon cuts as well because it does have a 90 degree feature in it but at the time I made a last-minute decision to use the table saw instead these are simple 90 degree cuts it's not a complicated layout and it's just too easy to get perfectly accurate and repeatable cuts with a table saw and a miter gauge and because the waist area was large enough I used the bandsaw instead of a coping saw to remove the bulk of the waste I did make sure to not get close to my marking gauge line just the same way I would would have if I used the coping saw the rest of the waste can then be cleaned up with chisels with the same process as the dovetail joints which is a little halfway through on one side flip the board over and chisel half way - on the other side - more consistently lay out the mortises I made a quick guide out of plywood and a piece of thick hardwood the width of the plywood base determines the location of the mortise from one end of the case and the hardwood block gives me something to clamp to these were just super glued together so it'd be easy to break them apart later so now the plywood base can be lined up and clamped to one end of the tale board and the tenon board can be clamped to the hardwood block this securely holds the tenon board in its exact location where the mortises will be while I trace around it with mark the knife cutting into a piece of exterior grade painters tape now I used exterior grade tape here because it's thicker it cuts cleaner and it leaves more of a more of a pronounced wall to reference the chisel against as you cut the mortises then the tenon board can be removed and the base of the plywood guide can be used to establish the fourth edge of each mortise I first saw this tape layout method being used by Mike Peck ovitch and if you've never used this tape method before I highly recommend giving it a try it's extremely handy for laying out precise joinery in the middle of wider panels especially we don't have a panel gauge before chiseling the mortises I used a drill to hog out as much of the waste as possible and I started out with a smaller bit to try and get close to the inside corners but soon realized that less holes with a larger bit would speed the process up quite a bit and in this case it's mahogany it's really easy to chisel anyway if this was say Hickory or something really hard I probably would have stuck to just using the smaller drill bit then it's just a matter of chiseling out the rest of the waste when there's more supporting material it is easy to have the chisel wander and dig into areas that you don't want removed when making cuts with the grain so for that reason the cross grain cuts are made first so that when I get to the cuts that have the grain in the same direction as the chisel it's more easy to slice off waste in thinner more predictable amounts just like with the dovetail joints the interior faces are checked with a straight edge and a slight hollow is cut to verify that nothing will snag while the joint is seated and once again just like with the dovetail joints if everything is cut on the appropriate side of the marking lines and all of the faces are square and nothing is sticking up in the way where it shouldn't be there is no need for a test fit it should just fit on the very first try individually these joints fit together really tight so I told myself and my Instagram followers that I probably wasn't going to do a dry assembly because the fear of having to take this thing apart when all the joints are so tight now no dry assembly until I was ready to glue everything together but I just I just could not resist I had to see this thing all together before I moved on to the next phase of the project and that's where I'm going to end this video this video covered the entire case construction so far and the case is definitely an eye-catching piece of the project with the exposed joinery but my goal is to make the base just as eye catching with more exposed to joinery and what I think will be an interesting cove section that'll be cut on the table saw so the next video should cover the entire base if you're watching this on youtube be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next video check out the description for more information as well as relevant links and if you've made it this far in the video then give yourself a pat on the back I know this is a rather long woodworking video so thanks for watching you guys take care have a great day and I'll talk to you in the next video

Channel: Jay Bates

Views: 176,145

Keywords: jayscustomcreations, jay bates, easy woodworking project, woodworking, woodshop, woodworking projects, make, build

Id: CZt9xS-WvEE

Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 29 2018