Making A Wooden Box - Veneering the Lid

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop in this video we're going to cover making a wooden box now the hardest part of that is the lid and that's what i'm going to focus on i've got a beautiful piece of walnut but you can see the twists in that trying to make a lid of that would be a disaster i'm going to show you my secret to doing it so you'll be able to do it as well i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new to our channel make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell which will alert you whenever we release a new video anytime we use a new tool or technique we'll leave a description down below so that make it easier for you to find all right let's get back to work hi i've been woodworking for probably 50 years or more i started when i was a young child and making boxes has always been top of my list i thoroughly love it gets you a chance to take a pretty small pretty piece of wood and really make a feature out of it when i teach it folks get really excited about building the box itself you get to use some dovetails which is an incredibly strong way to build the actual box frame you can get away with really thin sides because the dovetail will add so much strength the problem area has always been in the lid in fact if you look at this one real closely you can see that this solid bird's eye lid has shrunk that was flush at one point now it's actually sucked in there oh maybe a thirty second of an inch however it has stayed flat which is the real challenge now here's an example of where you can use a solid lid solid wood top but it's sitting inside of a very stable frame and in that circumstance there's not an issue but when you start using solid wood like this you get much beyond three inches and you have to start dealing with cupping and twisting and the problem with the twist is that you no longer get a nice fit when the lid is closed now i've got a way of dealing with that and that's what i'm going to show you it's involved using a core in this case the core of this lid which is white oak by the way is mdf and the reason i prefer mdf more so than plywood is in thin sections it stands this tends to stay nice and flat where plywood doesn't and i don't hide the fact that's what i've done so if you look at this closely you'll see end grain well that piece of mdf has been banded on four sides and then a thin layer of veneer top and bottom and we're actually going to cut our own veneer i'm going to share with you what allen peter shared with me which was how do you take a pretty piece of wood and get the most mileage out of it if we were to make it out if we were going to make that lid out of one solid piece that one nice pretty piece of wood makes one lid but if you take that same piece of wood and slice it multiple times you can get a lot of boxes out of it and you add the stability as well so what we're going to do is walk through the process of prepping the mdf getting the four bands put on it and then we're going to take this piece process it down i'm going to show you how to slice your own veneer how to glue it on and how to end up with what should be a nice stable lid for your box i want to get a lid about eight inches wide out of this so i've got to look it over and see what we got for defects so we want this section right here and i don't know what's going on there although it doesn't go all the way through we have some bad checks out here now because this is badly twisted i want to cut rip that on the band saw you do that on the table saw and it's almost for sure going to bind on you so let's uh i'm using a dry erase marker because it doesn't it doesn't go down deep into the wood and i'm just making some rough marks that we can use on the band saw this is really twisted [Music] now i'm going gonna surface that first before i take any more off oh that thing is twisted i'm gonna see if i can use my scrub plane it's so bad i'm almost undecided as to which part to tackle first we might only be able to get veneer out of this all right take that over to the jointer and see what we can do [Music] i'm going to plane this so that i get an acceptable glue surface and this will be the side that gets glued to the mdf so i want to get rid of there's some there's some nicks in those knives you can see it right there i want to get rid of all of that i'm not going to go for a perfect surface because all i need is just a nice smooth flat surface that'll lay well on the on the mdf okay not the prettiest piece of wood i've ever seen but it's good for this demonstration so our next step with this cut it down to cut it down to close to the final size and then go over to the band saw and start ripping some veneer off and it's a it's a big cut cutting through eight inches of of walnuts it's a tough cut now i've got that set for actually it's less than the thickness of of that square so i'm going to move that over a little bit more take a little thicker piece we can always plane off more from the outside now a little bit too low i'm just going to make a quick touch like that you can see that that's looking pretty parallel top to bottom that's a thin piece doesn't leave us a lot for air see if we can do it don't push too fast i forgot to hook up the vacuum i'll make sure i do that on the next one so there's our slice and that came out it's already starting to twist but that's all right we'll pull that flat when we veneer it but it's a nice uniform thickness [Music] that'll make a good top or bottom now we'll do that we've got to go through or we've got to go back and make sure this is nice and flat and also smooth that up same way we did the other one so that that side is ready to glue once it's glued to the piece of mdf it's nice and solid and we can go in and we can plane that but to try to go in and play a surface plane a piece like that before you glue it on is going to be almost impossible so do it while it's still in this form okay so there's our two pieces and that should be just perfect so what we'll do is we'll glue those on that'll be the glue side this will be the glue side once it's glued then we can go in and clean that up with the plane it'll make us a nice top there's our core i'm going to use 3 16 now the nice thing is i had some leftover walnut that came from that same board so it's gonna have the same color so we'll glue these two pieces on like this and then flush them off here and here and then we'll glue these two pieces on so not nearly as much on the side but in case i want to do a wood hinge on this i want to have plenty of material so that's why the back band and the front band are going to be a half by half and the outside the ends are only going to be 3 16. and i i prefer to cut these with a crosscut saw and my bench hook as opposed to running to the chop saw the table saw all right so these have to be done first then once the glue's dry we can push them off put that in the vise now in addition to having a gluing this to the edge of this piece of mdf we're also going to have the veneer top and bottom supporting it so there's no way this piece is ever going to come off then we'll just rub that in there and get it to get some initial tack make sure that it's hanging over on all four sides so now when you do that make sure you put some downward pressure let the glue let the glue disperse just go back and make sure that we've got an overhang we're good flip that around do the other side all right this has been on here for about a half an hour which is enough so glad i found out actually i knew about it but it was uh amazing amid they convinced me to actually try it and jake and such a time saver oh it's huge if you're not doing that you need to start all right so we do this first one gotta hang i'll get to hang this part over the edge just so that this will lay as flat as possible i realize it's still sticking up back there and what i'm going to do i've got the blade out fairly far before i adjust it and bring it back in i'm going to get all four of these close and then i don't have to change the setting of my blade four different times a little bit of magic wax on there i don't wanna i don't want to hit the mdf you can feel with your fingers extremely closely that's good flip that over now i've got some glue down in here that i need to get off that's good remember lots of weight on my right hand that keeps the plane registering on the mdf so that there's no way it's going to tip this way okay so that's close enough that we should be able to just plane those i'm using my fingernail to make sure that that's not sticking up at all i don't want to prevent that next piece from gluing on gluing against the mdf over the entire length of the board still can catch my fingernail there just a little bit so there now do the same thing with this one i made those a little bit thicker this way than they are that way so that when i put it on i can make sure that i make sure that i have a little excess on both sides i can flush it up now i'm i'm going to just take a quick pass on there clean up the saw marks okay that's good if you haven't seen our video on edge banding plywood we'll leave a link below at the end of it i did a test to show how strong that joint between solid wood and mdf is on the edge and you might be surprised so just give that a little rub and that helps to get it nice and tacky and line it up and we'll do the same thing with this one out on the end first pull it down firmly make sure it's hanging over on both sides okay so i always save my scraps of uh mdf because they they're fantastic for certain tasks at tasks and one of them is making calls so i've got a bunch of one inch stock one inch mdf so i need these calls to be i'm gonna i just want them to be just just barely bigger so that's twelve and five eighths it's gonna be yeah i'm gonna go 12 and 5 8. 12 and 5 8 by 7 and 7 8. i just need one on each side that's the nice thing about using that one inch mdf the uh it's thick enough that one slab on each side for something this big will work perfectly so okay that still needs some more time to dry before we flush off those bands but now what we need to do and we can use this as our pattern we need to come in here and trim these it's going to be a lot easier if these are the same size because then we can put them on and you can tell whether or not everything anything is shifted let's look and see what we have to avoid for defects we've got one here and we've got a bit of a split there which would be nice to avoid if we can i'm gonna put my magnifiers on have a closer look at that okay so we've got a crack right there and it goes through on that side as well now the good news is that when it's glued down it should be okay because i can't avoid it we'll make sure it's on the inside now this one has a little bit of a defect right there but that's going to be on the inside and from this side looks pretty clean again we've got to avoid that these aren't going to be exact mirror image because in order to have the plane side down they're going to be opposite but when you're opening up the lid who's going to sit there and compare sides so what i'll do and i i prefer the look of this as down here so i'll put this on come over here as close as i can right up tight to that now you should be able to see this red pen now this stuff is thick enough we should be able to trim that on the table saw okay we got a defect right there we've got to avoid [Music] i'm going to take this over with me just so we can have some weight down there a day down to hold that in place as we trim it if you try to cut that on the crosscut sled with the sticking up in the air like that you're going to get a real ragged edge on the bottom side no bad splintering so we're good there now i've got to turn that around actually i'll just do it on this side so all right let's go have a close look at this [Music] i did not see that now that's going to be on the inside so the fact that it's going to be glued all the way around means it's going to be well supported where it's not going to be supported is up here as that little feathered edge gets hand planed and i don't know if there's anything we can do uh maybe when we when we glue it when we put it on we'll just bend that a little bit put some glue in there and then we'll have to put some tape over this so that it won't adhere to the call but that might give us a little bit of uh a little bit of extra strength to that piece okay we got to wait for that those uh bands to dry enough that we can flush them off and then we'll go ahead and glue this up now you're going to encounter a problem when you cut your own veneer especially on a bandsaw is that you're going to get variations in thickness in fact we checked this with the micrometer and it was out 30 thousand various places problem with that is you put a rigid call like this and clamp it down there's gonna be areas where there's a lot of pressure there's gonna be areas where there isn't any pressure because this cannot give to fill it in so when i first started doing this 100 years ago you used to be able to get this cushion kitchen flooring and it was a pretty rigid foam underneath it that would really bounce back and it it wouldn't stay compressed and i would cut it up and i would lay it so you'd have your call have a piece of that foam have your piece at your veneering another piece of the foam and the other call then when you put pressure on the calls that cushion would apply pressure even the pressure out over the entire surface and you'd have an enough pressure all the way around to get good glue contact well can't get that stuff anymore now this is what i have on my floors just to walk on and that's not bad but it's not as strong as i would like i don't know where you're going to find stuff like this but we're in an old bowling alley and when we took this place over they had this stuff installed in where the pin set so that the balls would bounce around a lot candle pin bowling which is the style of bowling they have here you actually can use your dead wood as uh to knock down other pins so the more action of the balls and pins bouncing around the better the higher your score now this stuff measures is that three quarter jake yeah it is three quarters of an inch in thickness and it's really stiff but uh there's a little bit of give so i'm gonna go in and i'm gonna cut up two of these one on either side and i think it'll do the trick it's just the right just the right lengths yeah i'm going to avoid those holes because i want to have good pressure everywhere i think i can cut this on the bandsaw without being a problem [Music] [Applause] [Music] doesn't stink as bad as i expected [Music] this is a good argument for for using a uh a veneer press a vacuum press but on small stuff like that are what we're doing [Music] i like the uh i was going to say hassle-free method of just using some calls but we've long since passed the hassle mark [Music] so okay same as what we did on the edges i'll keep this hanging over quite a bit just to keep the glue off my bench okay now i got a little bit of glue on here that came from my fingers so i'll just clean that off just using the chisel as a scraper this side now clean these ends up and we'll in the final fit we'll perfect this but for right now we just want them flush you always want to go in never out that way you're not breaking out that outside bit lot of pressure on the forward side and i think we're going to have to apply a lot of pressure in order to compress that and have it do the job we want make sure there isn't any thing on there that's gonna create uneven pressure and get some glue or something on there i think this is going to do a good job now i'm just doing a bit of a dry run and i think the way we'll do this is we'll put these we'll glue these on we'll masking tape them all and on you know one two three four six seven eight spots to hold that in place so it doesn't shift now i'd like to use my big heavy c-clamps and i don't think i'm going to be able to in fact i almost know we're not that's too bad because they these would provide more pressure than the others ah just sixteenth of an inch too big well we'll have to use this f clamps instead okay got to make sure everything is ready this is the one that we need to do a repair on no actually that's not the one and make sure we get that right it can't be that bad of a defect because i can't find it where is it jake okay oh it is right there what up there yep okay so we put some glue in that and put a piece of packing tape over it and that'll keep the glue well actually you know what we don't need to do that at all because it's going against that and it's not going to stick to it okay there's my notch trowel for spreading the glue now i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to put it on this one and then i'm going to go in and do the little repair on here in fact i think maybe i'll do this first so the idea is i'm just going to try to force some glue into there and the same thing on this side okay you can see the glue squeezing out when we do that so we know we've got some in there okay let's go can i always put more on it's a little awkward trying to get it off i've got too much already i typically only glue one side and i always want to make sure you have enough glue on the outside edge you can you can live with not having maybe enough in the middle some in a few spots but the outside edge will lift and you'll hate it okay this one on flip that around hold it in place you got to make sure you have everything you need this isn't the time to realize that you forgot something in a different part of the shop or house doesn't hurt to have a checklist okay i've got i've got ample glue on all the outside edges i got enough in the middle no this way put that in place now see if we can't tape that down keep it from moving it's going to be tough because that stuff is so twisted trying to pull that bottom piece up while i'm pushing down on the top now that is slid a little bit this way there's not a lot i can do about it i've got a little bit of excess there anyway so i'm okay line that up i'm gonna go one two three four at first and i'm gonna apply the pressure actually i'm gonna reach in as far as i can with those clamps not a lot of pressure at first that way we don't end up causing it to slide one way or the other then we'll go in from either side so we're getting lots of clamping pressure in the middle but that that one inch mdf will would spread that pressure for us anyway okay now i'm gonna put some remember we've got to get that that foam to conform enough to the irregularities and the thickness of the end of the veneer and it'll apply enough pressure to get some good gluing so now i think we'll get to make it a little bit easier i'm going to put it up on its side so the clamps are the handles are over here i'm going to go one on that edge one more now i'm going to go two more and i'll show you where i'll put them i want some i uh these this clamps in there quite a ways so i'm going to put one right out here to give that a little more clamping pressure right in the middle in the middle of this edge that is okay go through and check them all again to make sure everything's tight i think that's going to do a great job on putting pressure everywhere i see squeeze out most places we'll give that a half an hour or so to dry and we'll come back and just flush it up have a quick look and hopefully this will be the solution you're looking for for box lids that you want to stay nice and flat i took off most of the clamps but i want to save the last four for when we film see what kind of a spring back there is on that rubber the fact that the clamps are still tight is good that's the problem with some of the other stuff you use it squeezes and then it doesn't it doesn't push back so then you don't have any amount of pressure on your glue up no hollow spots well this is the one where we didn't think it was gonna stick this is that little repair job we did probably should have put a piece of tape on that now we'll do i'll trim one side and then we'll i'll trim one side and one end and then we'll use the table saw to do the other two went on a little bit crooked but we had some we had some extra so it's not a big deal and you could use a flush trim bit if you wanted to but the amount of time it would take to set it up hand plane is just as fast or faster a little more blade okay i'm flush on that side but i still have material on this side meaning the side closest to me the fact that we were able to take that or use wood from that same piece for the band it's really going to make a nice job [Applause] of disguising or hiding that glue joint but as i said i'm not trying to fool anybody now i'm going to take those big hunks of glue off with a chisel [Music] aim your chisel to cut in that way you don't end up breaking fiber off on the outside actually we could have done that over there as well i'm just going to take a small cut [Music] that one stands up quite a bit that one didn't okay let's clean up this face i can't remember which direction we have to plane so we'll just try it and see start with a really light blade exposure now rather than gunk up the plane i'd like to get that masking tape off be careful not to dig in a little bit of rubber will come off all right let's get a quick look at this a little high in the edges you could always sand this if you wanted but i think we can plane it now i'm working these outside edges because it's just a little bit higher than this in the middle that would have been as a result of when we cut it on the bandsaw still the case over here if you're not familiar with planting a wide surface you want to make overlapping passes anywhere from a quarter to a third of the width of the blade and then when you sharpen your blade if you treat the corners with a little feathering you can blend overlapping passes so that you don't have any what we call plane tracks i'm going to pull that blade in a little bit you see any i think that's clean so there's oh i don't have my headgear that's that little fracture that we had but you know what with the finish on there that might not even be noticeable and it would be on the inside we still have you look at the thickness that we had and there's where we're down to actually we took a little more off of this side so i can go back in and take a little more material off of this but that should produce a nice stable lid for a box a little bit thicker if i was going to do a box that size i probably would have used 3 8 mdf but i didn't have any at the time but i'm going to i'm going to make a box and we'll actually use this lid on it there you go if you enjoy my method of work and like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level now i've always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you to all of our tools that we actually manufacture right here as well as our workshops both in person and online good luck

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 62,542

Rating: 4.9396553 out of 5

Keywords: making a wooden box, how to make a wooden box, make a wooden box, wooden box, wooden box diy, wooden box making, box making, diy wood box, how to make a wood box easy, how to make a wood box with hinged lid, make a wood box, make a wood box with hand tools, make a wood box with lid, make wood box, veneering a box, wood box, rob cosman, woodworking

Id: 97vAJg-KcFE

Length: 51min 55sec (3115 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020