Making a Big 21 Drawer Apothecary Cabinet Out of Walnut

welcome back to the pro works channel my name is john and here we go with another large apothecary cabinet build this walnut one is following the mahogany one i just finished uh this one's gonna be similar in size about six feet long and three feet tall or so but this one will be 20 inches deep and have an inch and a half thick case work so it's very very heavy in the end normally i just do between 12 and 16 inches deep and a three quarter inch thick case work but there was a certain look the client was after so i got started here i started with a 100 board foot of eight quarter walnut and what you see me doing here is just doing some preliminary milling some joining and planing just to reveal the grain so that i can see what boards need to go where i want to put the nice boards on the top and sides and of course the nicest pieces for the drawer fronts and then i want to put any boards that have defects or extra sapwood on the bottom or towards the inside of the case i did some jointing with the track saw here and you can see that i'm doing this in two passes and also these boards had a bit of a bow to them so you could see towards the middle i'm not taking much material off but at the ends i'm taking between a quarter to a half inch off on each board which would have just been an absolute pain to do with the jointer if i could have done it at all after the track saw i'm here at the jointer just cleaning up that cut edge because the tracks i wasn't leaving the best finish with the crosscut blade after that i can take it over to the table saw and rip that other edge nice and square and then get ready for the glue up for these panels and what do we have here all right so i finally caved and i bought a festool domino this is the df700 which is the domino xl and i bought this mostly for this project specifically but i also had some other larger projects in mind that i knew it would come in handy with and one of the main reasons i wanted it was the option to cut loose mortises so that you had a little bit of wiggle room when you're assembling your pieces so on a project like this i'm putting you know a case together with a bunch of dividers there's a lot of things going together at once and the option to kind of have your vertical pieces slide back and forth about an eighth of an inch is pretty attractive and gives you a little bit of leeway when you're gluing up your pieces after gluing up the walnut panels i can move over to the inner dividers which are going to be made up of pine this is five quarter pine that i milled down to an inch thick and it's going to have a walnut edging glued to the front of it i use pine to save weight and a little bit of money this cabinet was enormous and very heavy so using the pine really came in handy i probably could have cut a little bit more weight by cutting reliefs in the dividers but it was something i felt was a little bit too much work for the reward as far as milling this material i like to take two days to start the project of just dedicated milling there's a lot of material to go through here so taking the time two full days in a row of just milling and gluing up panels to get everything ready for the next steps is something i found to be successful is for me i already showed you the domino xl which i'll show again later for the joinery of the case but i also got some other tools and one of those is the tso products parallel guide system which is what these blue rails are connected to the track saw these allow you to make parallel cuts on panels as you see here they have little stops on each piece which allow you to make repeatable cuts on multiple pieces in a row now this piece right here is one of the sides which would be easy to throw through the table saw but a piece like this which is the bottom i believe is a lot more cumbersome and difficult to throw through the table saw at least in my case i usually get burning some sometimes the blade will dig into the side and leave a little bit of a divot that's hard to fix so it's easier to take the tool to the work piece especially when these pieces weigh about 45 pounds each now in my head 45 pounds doesn't sound like that much but when it's stretched over a six foot by 20 inch piece of wood it starts to spread out and and feel heavier than it really is and here i'm getting started with the outside case joinery i'm using the domino like i mentioned these are 10 millimeter dominoes and then when i bump over to the inner dividers i lowered the dominoes to an eight millimeter i just spaced these out evenly along the edge of the board using the pin system on the domino fence i probably could have used less dominoes but this for me at least was the quickest way to do it using that pin system there's a bit of overkill and the glue up was definitely stressful with how many dominoes i had to pound together but i don't think this thing's going to be coming apart anytime soon the joinery for the dividers is a little bit more complicated as far as spacing them all out evenly these are the ends of the dividers which i'm just putting some mortises in but i'm using the base of the fence i think which is flush with the table which is flush with the divider and that will come in handy in the next clip or two i'll start from one side of the cabinet and work my way out as opposed to starting from either side and working my way towards the middle that could leave me with too small or too large of a drawer cavity i'll put a spacer up against the side and clamp down a straight edge this spacer is equal to one drawer width nine inches plus the thickness of a divider which is one inch so we have a ten inch spacer and i clamp down my straight edge then i'll flip the domino upright and put the base of that fence up against the straight edge and that will sort of work its way out so that the dividers that i made earlier will sit flush with that straight edge and i can keep working my way out with each divider there were six dividers total so i had to do this six times for each panel for a total of 12 times because i'm working from the end of the board i didn't cut my top and bottom panels to their final length until all of the divider joinery was cut if i had not waited i would have just went by the drawing measurements which would have left me with something a little bit too short there's always a little bit of error here and there and in this case there was about a third thirty second to a sixteenth of an inch for each one that kind of compounded over the length of the board and left me with about a quarter inch of extra length over the length of this panel which you see me cutting to final length here and after that i can get the dominoes cut for the rest of them and do my first dry fit moving on to the dados i've shown this jig in the past what this jig allows me to do is cut dados on both sides of the board lined up perfectly for this piece right here it only needs dados on one side so the jig is not necessarily showing its full potential here but i'll show that a little bit later the board slips into the jig and then i have two slots that accept a router bit in this case i switched to a pattern bit instead of using a guide bushing this worked out perfectly and it gives me the exact width data that i need for the dividers to install later on moving on to the dividers i had to switch the spacers out on the jig to equal the thickness of the dividers which is one inch and that's what you see me doing there i slip the divider in and i start routing the grooves this is the two grooves on the first side of the board and then you'll see me flip the jig there is potential for the board to slip around in my other video i did use a registration block so that things wouldn't slip around but in this instance i didn't really feel i needed it because these boards were big enough and there was enough friction that it wasn't really that big of a deal and so i'll get this last one routed and you'll see that these two grooves on each side line up perfectly i used a rabbeting bit to rout a rabbit in the back of the case pieces these side pieces got through rabbits whereas the top and bottom got stopped rabbits and then i just cleaned up the corners after the piece was glued up and then i pre-finished the inside of the case pieces as well as the dividers with a couple coats of water-based polyurethane now moving on to the glue up this was honestly the most stressful glue up i've ever completed but the keyword is completed so that is good there's a lot of dominoes here and some of them were a lot more snug than i was hoping i was hoping that the epoxy that i used was going to lubricate these joints but it really didn't do as much as i was hoping the dividers here went in simply it was not much of an issue getting these together but the hard part is getting the top piece on and lining everything up it's sort of like a whack-a-mole thing and i did use pocket hole screws again towards the middle of the boards and those are my clamps for the middle because i don't have clamps that would reach there and setting up calls for all of these joints would be too much work to do by myself so you see me getting the dominoes installed for the top pieces and then putting this top panel on i'm going to skip showing how long it took me to get all these things lined up but i eventually got everything somewhat seated and i started putting the clamps on i used a series of pipe clamps towards the outside pieces and i used those large 48 inch parallel clamps on the front and back of the case with the case glued together i could try to move it for the first time and you can see me struggle with that i had to move this thing a bunch of times throughout this project and i try to do it as few times as possible but there's sometimes i just had to move it to get to the top or bottom of it to get some sanding done but it wasn't too bad once i committed to actually doing it and here you can see me getting the short dividers glued into those dados and once again i'm using a slow setting epoxy using a paint brush to kind of paint that on there and i try to put more of it towards the front of the cabinet knowing that when i put these dividers in it'll start to push that epoxy towards the back so i try to put a liberal amount towards the front and hoping that it gets pushed towards the back you know it's just the nature of the beast that some of these fit really snug and some of them fit somewhat loose you can see i'm installing this one with just odd looking hand pressure but most of them required some mallet hits this one was sort of the oddball of the bunch with the casework mostly done just requiring a little bit of cleanup here and there i got started on the second major part of this project which is obviously the 21 huge drawers now i ordered this piece of walnut specifically for the drawer fronts because it has extra width that'll give me that nine inch height for the drawer fronts i started the resawing process on the table saw and then moved over to the band saw to finish it off but there was a lot more tension in this board than i was hoping and i ended up bungling the whole thing you can see here that i ended up playing the boards down to about a quarter inch thick because that's just really the only option i had i did end up buying a second piece of walnut in case this happened and it did happen but then when i went to go use that second board there was way too much sapwood and i wasn't willing to include that much sapwood on the drawer front so you can see that sapwood here on the left side of the board so i ended up combining these two boards to get the necessary thickness for the drawer fronts so i got to use that first board as the actual show face and then the bulk of the board was that second board with all the sapwood so in the end everything looks nice the the grain match across the drawers looks beautiful and you'll see that towards the end of the project just because i got a domino doesn't mean i forgot about my trusty dowelmax jig this was a little side project i did on autocad in fusion360 and then i cut out all the recesses in the kaizen foam with the cnc router and that way i can organize my dell max nicely in that nikita sustainer anyways i use the dowelmax for all of the drawer joinery and there was about 880 holes i think to drill 440 on the side pieces and 440 on the front and back pieces now i usually do my half blind lock joint but i just wanted something a little bit more sturdy because these drawers were about 19 to 20 inches deep you can see me using the new workbench that i made with this ratchet clamp in the dog holes and that ended up working out nicely even though this was one of the most labor intensive boring processes i've ever done it took me about a full day just to get all the dowel holes drilled for these drawers i had a little bit of help going up these drawers this is my daughter norah she loves coming to the shop but she just hasn't been in here much recently because i've had so many large messy projects in the shop lately so she snuck in this time and i let her stay on the workbench she's an expert at spreading glue around everywhere which in this case was helpful i guess she put some of the dowels in place and then i handled the clamps now these drawers don't fit perfectly right off the clamp and that's by design i don't want these to be too loose so i start to fit them i usually use a hand plane to clean up the edges but i started doing this on the last project i make a plunge cut on the jointer and i make sure not to get the drawer front right away because i don't want the reveal to be messed up so i'll get the bottom of this drawer trimmed down so that it fits in the cavity and then i'll flush up the top and bottom of the drawer front by hand if you see the back of that drawer it's actually upside down that's because the cabinet was upside down i just didn't feel like flipping it over for this process it didn't affect anything and all the drawers fit nicely in the end and now i'm moving on to edge profiles and sanding i put an eighth inch round over on all of the edges which really cleans everything up and brings everything together nicely putting the edge profiles on these drawers takes a little bit of time but once you find the rhythm and what order you want to do all the edges it goes by a lot quicker than it started and then i can put a finish on the underside of the cabinet i did this by itself because i wanted to be able to flip the cabinet up and do the rest of the finish separately i put three coats of this oil modified water-based polyurethane which is the best of both worlds it gives you that nice rich hue of the oil finishes but it's also easy to apply and clean up like a water-based finish i can apply three coats within a few hours as opposed to an oil-based finish which might be one coat per day you can see me spraying the finish on these drawer boxes i put a shellac finish on the majority of the boxes and then i just did the oil modified finish on the drawer front i enlisted the help of some local muscle this is my brother-in-law and father-in-law to help me get this cabinet down onto the ground so that i could continue with the rest of the finishing process in the past i've been hesitant to use spray finishes just because i wasn't sure if i'd be good at it or if i had the right setup in my shop with how small it is but i'm glad i jumped into it for this project the finish came out really nice and smooth my first coat was definitely not as good as the last coats but you know you get better as you go and i know the next couple projects i'll be even better so if you're thinking about it i would just jump in and see how it goes the last few steps were to number the drawer boxes install the drawer bottoms and then install the drawer pulls i created this little jig that just slips over the top and left side of each drawer box so that i can accurately pre-drill all the holes for the screws and that's a wrap if you've made it this far in the video thank you for watching this was a lot of fun to build it was very labor intensive and very heavy but in the end it was worth it if you want a custom apothecary cabinet like this shoot me an email this is kind of what i do nowadays i really enjoy building these and if you want to see these while they're in progress follow me on instagram at pillarworks thanks for watching you

Channel: parillaworks

Views: 17,700

Rating: 4.9729934 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, diy, do it yourself, apothecary cabinet, parillaworks, domino xl, df700, tso parallel guide system, dowelmax, oil modified polyurethane, minwax polyurethane, spraystation 5500, apothecary chest

Id: kFfKRNxN8R8

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021