Making a Bandsaw Box

[Music] well hey there guys and welcome back on this week's show we're going to be making a bandsaw box now bandsaw boxes are a fun project that really have no limits as far as their shape and size you can make it in whatever configuration you want however there are things that you need to consider and that's what we're gonna start with the stock now for me I want to laminate some stock together so I'm going to be making the core of the box out of poplar and I'm going to be making the outer edges with walnut now for me I don't want to get any bigger than what my spindle sander will sand which is about three and three quarters of an inch so for my purposes though I'm going to have the center core being two inch thick poplar I'm going to laminate 3/4 of walnut on the front and the back that'll give us a total of about three and a half inches you know give or take a little bit in other words my spindle sander will be able to handle sanding the pieces without any problem so the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna get out that thickness planer we're gonna get out the bandsaw install a resaw blade in it we're gonna plane our poplar to two inches thick and I'm gonna do some resaw on the walnut and then plane it down to 3/4 of an inch [Applause] [Music] so now that we have our stock milled what I've done is I've cut it to a length of 7 inches the width is just under 6 and now the next step is to laminate our pieces of walnut to our piece of poplar so that we get a block of wood that is something like this which should equal about three and a half inches thick and it's exactly three and a half inches thick so we're going to glue this up put plenty of clamps on it and give it time for the glue to set up well the first thing that you want to do as soon as you're glue up is dry enough to use is you'll want to flatten out the bottom edge of your glue up now there's several ways you could do it you could do it on the table saw depending on the thickness though you may have to make one pass and then turn your piece over and make a second pass to clean this up you could also use a hand plane or in my case I actually used my jointer so the jointer was able to clean it up really nicely and give me perfectly ninety degrees between my sides and my bottom well now that you have that leveled out and everything looks good on the bottom half we need to head over to the bandsaw now the very first thing that we want to do here at least for me anyway is we need to cut the back of our bandsaw box off so it doesn't matter which side you choose is the back both could be the back but we still have our Reese all eight in so we're going to set our fence at approximately quarter of an inch some people do 3/8 some do less some do more whatever you want I only eyeball this at potentially a quarter of an inch there and we're just going to make the cut and cut the back off of our box [Applause] [Applause] so now take the piece that you just cut off and that will be our back we're gonna put that aside now what I've done is I've taken a piece of paper that is roughly the same size as this and I've applied spray adhesive to it and there you go you can hear my my timer going off that is the 3-minute timer what that is is after I've sprayed the spray adhesive on I have given it three minutes to let it tack up and it's just a plain white piece of paper which is very sticky now and we're gonna put this in place on the front side of our blank and the only purpose for this piece of paper is to give us something to draw on because walnut does not allow our pencil to show very well so I've got this piece of paper now and we can draw out at the shape of our bucks well this is the really nice thing about bandsaw boxes is you're really not limited to any kind of a shape other than your imagination and I don't have a clue here what I'm doing as far as the shape goes but let's try something a little a little different here let's do like like this alright alright sure I'll go with that I don't know what the point of that was but sure we'll do it and then I want maybe some legs on this they're not symmetrical they there's really nothing symmetrical about it and now we need our drawers and let's just see where we want to put our drawers so let's just say we're gonna put them here and we're gonna bring them down here just like that and then these will come up just like that I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this but again it's one of those things that we love about being saw boxes and that is the freedom to create whatever it is that you want so let's let's me make the shape of this one here like that and this one I brought kind of to a point so let's let's let's round this side like that and then we'll bring it up around and let's bring this side to a point yeah yeah like that I can dig that now I have no idea what this is all about I don't know what kind of a shape it is it's kind of a squished up weird thing and that's okay so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna clean up these lines to make them a little sharper and then we're gonna cut out our center pieces which will be for our drawers well first and foremost before you do any of the cutting of the bandsaw box you need to ensure that your blade is Square to the table I've said this before it for the table saw scroll saw a bandsaw it makes no difference what tool you're using check especially for something like this four pieces are all gonna fit back together afterwards check to make sure that your pieces are good to go with our story that your blade is Square to the table now for this you're gonna see a million tutorials online and everyone does it differently some of them do the outside profile first all that jazz that's not me I don't do that so we're gonna start off with cutting out the insides of these drawers now because I have a pointed piece here that's are going to be our entry point I like to make the entry points along with the grain because that will get glued back together and if you're in line with the grain it can help you hide that glue joint on the sides here where we're gonna put it back in so bottom line is here guys take it slow get your dust coat dust collection on and get those safety glasses on you're hearing etc etc and carefully now cut out the blocks for your drawer pieces [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well before we do any more cutting on the actual body of the box itself we're going to glue these kerf marks back together we're gonna get as much glue in that crack as we can even if we have to separate it a little bit with their hands carefully be careful not to split along the grain here but we're gonna get as much glue in here as we can we're gonna clamp it all together as well as on this little bottom corner here we're gonna do the same thing clamp that in tight like that once we get that done we're also gonna glue the back on now we can do a little bit of sanding here on the back you can see we have a tiny bit of tear-out I'm not concerned about that that's inside of the box but we don't want it to interfere with our glue up so you do want to give that a little bit of sanding and I can also see some saw kerf marks on here which means that if they're saw kerf marks on this part of the body there will also be saw marks on the other part so all I'm gonna do is with a piece of sandpaper attached to a 3/4 inch piece of MDF I'm going to give this a sanding until those saw marks are gone on both pieces and while we're gluing all this back together we are going to glue the back on and clamp it in place and set it aside well while we're waiting for that other stuff to dry up we can work on the drawers and our first thing that we want to do is we want to cut a slice off the front in the back which will be the front and back of our drawers and for that I have set my fence at approximately 3/8 of an inch doesn't have to be exact so what you want to do here on the bandsaw is make sure that your piece is completely supported and once you get that supported run it through and take off three-eighths of an inch slab off of either side if you're having problems getting it support it what you can always do is trace this profile and cut yourself a support block if it's too rocky or the design that you've made makes it so that this rocks on your bandsaw table you should really get some support under that so nothing wrong with creating a cradle just to run it through for these passes either way let's get that front in the back cut off of this off of these drawers [Music] [Music] now just like we did with our the backing of our box we're just going to use the sandpaper on the 3/4 MDF and we're gonna take off so it's all mesh no it doesn't fit much depending on what kind of a blade you use but a few good passes there should have this nice and smooth and the purpose we're getting it smooth is that we have a good surface to glue on to once we put the door back together so the next thing that you want to do now that you have these pieces sand it is you want to mark out for your drawers and for the drawer cavity where you want to cut so what we have is we have the core section of our drawer and we have to know which side is up so just compare it with your body of your bandsaw box and make sure that you're drawing the up part the right way you wouldn't want to cut it on the bottom so there time you open the drawer everything falls out but leave ample material here so that you can have something to glue to and just sketch out what you think might work for the interior of the drawer this is what I love about this project is that you can do whatever you want it's it's so forgiving I mean you don't have any real rules here so now that we have our drawers marked out we're gonna take them over to the bandsaw and cut away our waste area of the drawer before you do though check them in the holes in the body of your bandsaw box to make sure that you do have the tops of them marked as the tops [Music] and this would be the cavity now of our box and before we glue it together what I want to do is I want to take this over to the bandsaw r2 the oscillating drum sander and we're just going to clean up the inside of the box and we've got some sharp edges here on the what will be the entrance of the box we're gonna round those off as well don't touch any of this outer profile just yet we're gonna sand that a little later it's just the inside of the box and round off these sharp corners [Music] [Music] and now you want to take the front and the back that you cut earlier and we're going to carefully glue them back in place on our blank now you want to be careful with the alignment it doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect because we're gonna sand but you want to have it as close to perfect with the alignment as you can so get everything lined up nice and glue it together the front in the back back on to the core of your drawers well enough time has passed on our body glue up that we can now cut the outer profile of it our drawers are sitting over on the other side we can wait for those but for now let's get this cut out and that will be the body finished with the exception of sanding [Music] [Applause] [Music] well now with the profile or our drawing or whatever you want to call it of our box cutout we're going to go over to that oscillating spindle sander and we're going to give it a good sanding on the outside just cleaning up any cuts that don't look right or that sort of thing so stand it up guys [Music] well we've given the entire box a complete sanding on the outside to remove any of the saw marks that may have been caused by cutting it at the bandsaw and I think I'm going to give it a little more there are still a few areas there that are a little questionable to me take your time there's no rush I mean we don't need to pump these things out ten every hour we're not mass production so now what we're going to do is I'm going to take a piece of sandpaper a fairly coarse grit actually probably about 150 or 180 and we're going to get in around the inside edges here of our drawer openings and take away that sharp edge soften up those edges we're gonna soften up the outer edges of our bandsaw box now we could use a router bit but I don't want that much of a profile on it and if I did it would be a very small profile but for my liking I think I want to do it by hand and we're just gonna take it off that rough edge once we get that done we need to head over to the oscillating sander again and we're going to start sanding the boxes or basically the drawers of the boxes well although we try as best we can to do a careful glue up with these drawers of the bandsaw box we still get a little bit of a ridge here and of course there's going to be saw marks you can't avoid that with a bandsaw unless you're using a very fine toothed blade now you don't want to do too much sanding here because you don't want too sloppy of a fit in the holes of the box so only sand what is necessary and need it to take out the saw marks and try to even up any of the little ridges that you may have caused when you glued it together and with our drawers sand it now we can just do a test fit as to how they sit in our bandsaw box and you know so far so good well here's the problem now how do we get access to the drawer now there are a couple ways that you can go about this some of the styles are you could drill a through hole here about the size of your finger so that you can reach to the back and push the drawer out leaving this a much cleaner profile on the front or you could add a little handle to these drawers and I'm thinking that maybe I might like the handle route this time and I think I would like it to be a contrasting wood to match our poplar Center here so let's go to the wood rack and grab some some poplar well I've got the bandsaw box clamped down to my bench and I've got a sliding square and what I've done is the same piece of wood that I made the center core of this out of I've cut some quarter-inch wide or it's quarter inch thick by 3/8 of an inch wide pieces and I've just put a little 10 degree slice on either side just to to bevel it and in order to get the handles completely parallel with the base all I'm gonna do is use a sliding square put some glue on them put them in place on the drawer lining them up roughly Center at least the first one and then I'm going to release my square and that right there will roughly be the placement of the handle and we're doing a dry fit so once I'm happy with that then I'll glue it in place when I do the second one for my dry fit all I'm gonna do is make sure that the edge of this sliding square lines up with the edge of this handle and then I will be able to make sure that the handles line up vertically on the edges so nothing looks off even though it's such a weird shape box so I'm gonna go ahead now and glue these handles on and with the handles in place this box is pretty much done I think the only thing that I'm going to do to it now will be to place a couple coats of Danish oil on this and we'll go from there but let's apply a couple coats with this Danish oil and just see how it brings out some of the grains and there you have it a bandsaw box guys these are great projects to get more out of your bandsaw if you've had your bandsaw sitting in a corner collecting dust because it was given to you or whatever use it do something with it and this is a great project to get just started if anything it'll help you to get in gear and tune up those band saws and get them ready for this project because squareness of the blade to the table is extremely important and if your bandsaw has been a little off for quite some time but you just haven't bothered to deal with it now is the time and this could be the project for you to work on it with one of the great things about bandsaw boxes guys is that you've just the versatility you are not limited you saw how I just freehand it the design it doesn't have to be any special shape it doesn't have to look great it doesn't even have to be doesn't have to be a leaf or something fancy or square edges draw it out it doesn't matter what it looks like because you saw the results and you saw how great it looks and that was just some silly crazy not a square edge on the darn thing kind of fly by the seat of your pants built and they turn out great every time the only thing you have to watch out for is your entry cuts coming into the box try to keep them as inline with the grain as you can on the top drawer of this one I came in on an angle instead of straight in with the grain because I didn't want to do a sharp turn and that joint shows on my box and if I would have come straight in you would have never seen it because the one on the bottom drawer you cannot see because I was able to come in line running parallel with the grain something to keep in mind when you're sketching out your little box and how you're gonna bring your blade in to cut that drawer out another thing I would have done differently with this one is when I'm slicing off the front and back of the drawers that I think I did a quarter inch or 3/8 or whatever I did again see the measurements don't matter because it's all up to you whatever you want to do but either way cutting off the drawers the front and the back slice if I had it back I would have used my resaw wait for that I think it would've given a much cleaner cut and there was way too many saw marks there to sand out from my liking and because of that it actually made my drawers recess into the Box just a little bit about a sixteenth of an inch now I was considering shimming those out to make them flush but I kind of dig it I kind of like that inset look of those drawers so I'm not going to bother changing it or shimming it out what you see is what you get that's what I made and that's the way I like it and that's the way it's going to stay so this is what I mean versatility the other thing I wouldn't have done is I probably wouldn't have spilled half a can of Danish oil all over my bench had I you know not had so much clutter there and got distracted and that sort of thing that's alright it happens I cleaned it up we're good to go the inside of the drawers now it's up to you what you want to do for these I will eventually flock them and give them a nice colorful inside that's soft the way that that tape there that suede text or flocking does and we don't need a video of it here there is a video flocking on my channel if you're interested in that sort of thing just do a little search on it and you will find it guys I want to thank you for joining me this week I hope you're gonna try one of these bandsaw boxes yourself and take the opportunity to get your bandsaw back into motion in your shop and get it tuned up and to move ahead with some projects like this that are fun on the bandsaw it's not all about square corners and ninety degrees but give it a try as I have a lot of fun thanks for tuning in guys and I hope you're going to join me again next week for yet another woodworking video you

Channel: Acutabove Woodworking

Views: 75,372

Keywords: kenbo, kennyearrings, acutabove, band saw, bandsaw, band saw box, bandsaw box, walnut, poplar, rikon, Rikon, 10-326, 14 bandsaw, how to, tutorial, shop made, wood project, wooden box, wood, wood working, woodworking, table saw, diy, free form box, laminate, drawers, craft project, wood crafts, woodcraft

Id: qk5j5T1RBRE

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018