Jonathan Fritz

After my first couple of project videos, I got some feedback saying that I was using terms that viewers weren’t familiar with. With that in mind, I decided to make a series of videos that serve as introductory pieces to various wood working topics.

The goal is to highlight a particular tool or technique, explain its vocabulary, and why it’s useful in the shop. This is a good first shot at that concept, but I think I can improve on the idea in future videos.

Let me know if there are any terms or tools that you’d like to see in a future Woodworking Basics video.

Like many hipsters, I’m not just a computer programmer who practices woodworking on the weekends, maintains an excellent beard, and spends far too much money on craft beer. I also collect records, and my original record storage solution has recently overflowed into a pile of records that are sitting on top of my record player. It’s time for something new.

To accommodate my collection, I decided to build three boxes. Two with inner dimensions of 13″ cubed, and one with inner dimensions of 13″ x 13″ x 18.5″. The larger crate is about 1.5x wider than the smaller crates, and was intended to stack on top of the two smaller ones, which would sit side by side.

To make the crates visually interesting, I decided to make the ends like picture frames, with a different colour panel inserted into them to break up the negative space.

The frames were made from some rough poplar that I got from a tree that my dad cut down some time ago. The poplar was rough sawn when I got it, so I jointed it, planed it, and cut it down into 13″ x 1.5″ x 1.5″ strips that would form the frame edges.

With the edges cut to size, I used a simple jig that rides on top of my table saw fence to cut the mortises on one end of each strip. This jig allowed me to clamp the piece vertically, so that I could push it through the saw without fear of it rotating, and without getting my hand anywhere near the blade. It’s basically a super-cheap homemade version of a tenoning jig.

I cut a tenon on the other end of each edge using a simple crosscut sled with a stop block and a dado blade. To make sure that the joints fit together tightly, I started the dado blade lower than necessary and snuck up on the perfect width for the tenon. Just to cover my ass, I cut one extra edge for testing so that I didn’t have to fear ruining one of my production pieces.

With all of the joinery complete, I assembled the frames with some carpenter’s glue. One nice aspect of assembling a frame with mortise and tenon joints instead of mitred corners is that it’s dead simple to get the frames square. As long as the joinery is square, once the frames are clamped together, there is very little adjustment needed to ensure that each of the interior angles is 90 degrees.

Once the glue dried, I used a chamfer bit at the router table to soften the outside edges of the frames. I could have used a round-over bit here, but I wanted to leave the hard lines on the work, because they are meant to look sort of industrial and heavy, and I thought that soft edges would ruin that look.

Next, I used a rabbeting bit to cut a 1/4″ square rabbet along the inside rear of each frame. This is where the insert will sit, similar to the glass in an actual picture frame. If I were doing this again, I think I would have cut this rabbet at the table saw. The router made a real mess out of some of these cuts, chipping and tearing the wood away from the finished edge.

I asked a woodworker friend about it, and he told me that the cause might actually be the variety of the wood that I was using. He said that there are some varieties of ash that are often mistaken for poplar, and that they have a tendency to chip and tear. I guess that’s a risk that you take when using free lumber.

With my frames complete, it was time to build the panels that were to sit inside of them. I picked up some cheap knotty pine wainscotting from my local Home Depot, cut the pieces to a 10.5″ length, glued them into panels, and then cut the panels to their final size. I used a dado blade to cut a 1/4″ rabbet around the outside edge of each panel, which will correspond to the rabbet that I cut into the frames, giving me two flat surfaces to glue together.

Now that I had all of the pieces assembled for the ends of my crates, I needed some way to tie them together. I bought some 1″ x 8″ x 6′ clear poplar boards and cut them down into strips 1.5″ wide and 1/4″ thick. The two smaller boxes required 42 strips cut 14.5″ long, while the bigger box required 21 strips cut 19.5″ long.

I used carpenter’s glue and 3/4″ brad nails to tack seven strips to three sides of each set of frames. This was easy enough, albeit time consuming, once I figured out how to jig my frames up to keep them square to one another during assembly.

After a thorough sanding, I stained each of the boxes a deep red, and then glued the wainscoting panels into the frames. A coat of spray-on fast drying polyurethane will protect the boxes from incidental bumps and scratches.

After letting the finish cure for a day, I brought the boxes inside and re-organized my collection. They look great, and leave me plenty of space to fill up with even more records.

Stay tuned for the inevitable follow-up project, wherein a I build even more storage space for the records I will definitely buy over the next year or so.

This project started with a couple of hefty solid wood pallets that I got when my local Home Depot delivered some renovation materials to my home. They were each around 40″ square, and were made of what seemed to be a range of hard wood varieties.

I started at the pallets with a hammer and a crow bar, but soon resorted to cutting the deck boards off with a circular saw, as my prying was doing a lot of damage to the dry wood. Two pallets yields quite a few usable boards:

After a few hours of jointing, planing, and table sawing, I had processed most of the deck boards into thin strips, about 3/4″ square, that would be glued together to form laminate tops for my end tables. I made sure to hold a few boards back for building the frames of the tables.

The goal was to make two end tables, each with a table surface of about 24″ x 24″. since I intended to put a 1″ mitred border around the outside of each table top, I needed to make two 22″ x 22″ laminate pieces out of the strips that I had cut from the deck boards. I wanted to use my bench planer to clean up the laminate pieces, so I started by gluing the strips into four 22″ x 11″ boards.

After letting the glue cure overnight, I ran each of them through my planer to ensure a smooth surface and a uniform thickness. Next, I ran one edge of each piece across the jointer, and then glued jointed edges together to form two larger boards, each approximately 22″ x 22″.

After letting the glue cure again, I cut each table top to its final dimensions. Because the boards that I recovered from the pallets had nail holes and other imperfections in them, my table tops inherited some “character”. To ensure a smooth surface, I filled the nail holes with epoxy and sanded them flush.

Next, I cut some strips of hard maple out of some scrap that I had up on my stock shelf. These strips got mitred corners, and were affixed to the edges of each table top using glue and brad nails.

With the table tops finished, I moved on to the table frames. The original intent of this project was to use reclaimed pallet wood for every aspect of the tables, but getting the nails out of the pallet stretchers (the big heavy pieces that separate the deck boards) proved to be a real challenge, and I didn’t want to risk missing one and ruining a tool with it.

The scrap maple that I used to edge the table tops had originally been cut from some much longer pieces that I got as a part of a used tool purchase back when I first started building out my workshop. I have been saving it for a worthy project, and figured that my first piece of real furniture was reason enough to rip some of it down into 2″ x 2″ table legs.

I wanted to affix the table aprons (or stretchers – whatever you call the boards that run between the legs) to the legs with a mortise and tenon joint. I cut my mortises at the router, which left a rounded end to the cuts. I went back in with a 1/4″ chisel and squared them off. In the process, I learned that there’s a bit of technique to precision chisel work, and that I need a lot more practice at it.

With my legs in good shape, it was time to turn my attention to the aprons. The apron boards were cut from some of the pallet deckboards that I had set aside when cutting up the laminate strips. At the tablesaw, I ripped them to 3″ in height, and used my box joint blade (sort of a simple dado stack) to cut a simple tenon on each end.

With the fit looking good, I added an 1/8″ dado along the top inside edge of each apron. This slot will accept some table top fasteners that I bought off of Amazon. The intent of this hardware is give the wood grain that forms the table tops room expand and contract without cracking.

The glue-up for the table frames was a bit stressful. I worked as quickly as possible, and tried to remember to wipe away all of the excess glue. My first timer joinery was mostly hidden in the process, which is probably for the best.

Once I had the frames assembled and squared up, I clamped them to the bench and added some corner blocks to prevent them from twisting.

After another overnight wait for the glue to cure, it was time to affix the table frames to the tops. Before doing so, I sanded everything down through 120 grit, 200 grit, and 000 steel wool to prepare for the finish.

One of the things that I love about this project is the contrast of all the different varieties of wood that make up the laminate table tops. I didn’t want to lose this contrast when applying a finish, so I didn’t stain the wood at all. Instead, I just layered up some wipe-on polyurethane.

Each table got two coats, and the table tops got a third coat for good measure. I sanded with 000 steel wool between each coat to remove any imperfections.

The finished tables look great in our living room. I’m really proud of the way that they turned out, especially considering that they’re my very first large furniture project. Now I just need to find time to build a coffee table to match.

For the past three years, my wife and I have been attending Fan Expo in Toronto. In the past, I’ve described it to friends as Canadian ComiCon, which is a bit confusing, because there actually is a Toronto ComiCon, but it’s smaller and less well-attended than Fan Expo.

One of the features of Fan Expo is the Artist Alley, where local artists and more well known comic book artists sell prints of their work. Over the past two years, my wife and I have purchased eight large prints at the event, but until now, they’ve been sitting in a pile in our office, because we haven’t had any picture frames large enough to hold them.

I started out with some clear pine boards, all cut to approximately 22″ in length, jointed, and planed to around 5/8″ thick.

Next, I ripped the boards into 1.5″ strips, and cut them to length. Four of the prints were 11″ x 17″, while the other four were 12″ x 18″. Since the bezel on each of my frames is 1.5″ wide, I added 3″ to all of those dimensions to determine the final length of the strips.

With the strips cut to length, I mitred their ends. I also used my box joint blade and a sacrificial fence to cut a dado that would hold the glass along the short edge of each strip. Unfortunately, I neglected to take a picture of that step. Ah well.

With the cutting done, it was time to glue all of the frames into their final shapes. Since I don’t have enough clamps to secure eight frames all at once, this step took awhile to complete.

Mitred frames look cool, but glued end grain butt joints aren’t particularly strong, so I wanted to strengthen the corners of each piece. I used a simple jig to run each frame across the blade of my table saw, with its wide sides perpendicular to the table, and its long edges angled 45″ off of the table surface.

The result of this operation was an 1/8″ wide slot cut into each corner, running directly through the plane perpendicular to the mitre joint.

I glued a thin slice of pine into each of these slots, ensuring that the grain in the slice ran perpendicular to the mitre joint, strengthening it significantly.

With the glue dried, I cut away the excess material, added a chamfer around the edge of each frame, and gave them all a good sanding down to 220 grit.

After hitting each frame with a coat of Minwax pre-stain wood conditioner, I applied a coat of this Classic Black stain and polyurethane combination with a foam brush.

 

 

One coat in, this finish looked awful. The stain component of the product soaked into the wood unevenly, leaving a splotchy finish, and the polyurethane part of the product made it thicker than most of the stains that I’ve worked with, which really only made it harder to work with, and left an overly glossy finish behind.

In an effort to even out the finish, I sanded with 000 steel wool, and applied a second coat of the stain product. When that dried, I used steel wool to take the gloss off of the frames and wear down the edges, giving the them a sort of faux-worn look. Finally, I hit them with a satin spray polyurethane to seal the exposed wood.

While this was undoubtedly the long way to accomplish the finish that I ended up with, I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. My mitres are tight, my corners are square, and the worn edges look pretty cool with some of the art that we bought.

To finish the job, I ordered some 1/16″ thick glass panes from a local supplier that does custom cuts. The prints are sandwiched between the glass and a sheet of 3/16″ foam core, which is pinned in place with a few small brad nails.

This job has been taking up space in my shop for a couple months now, so it’s good to finally get it finished, and to get the prints that we bought two years ago up on the wall. They look great, and I’m really happy with the results.

My wife has a lot of books. We have a whole room in our house dedicated to storing them. We call it the library, because we’re snooty like that. Some of the other rooms of our house have dedicated shelves for specific kinds of books. In the kitchen, we keep cookbooks in a cupboard above our microwave, but that cupboard is now so full that we can’t add any more books to it.

To rectify the situation, my wife asked me to build her a counter top sized bookshelf that could accommodate her favourite cookbooks, so that they were out and easy to access, and more cupboard space was made available for the inevitable purchase of additional books. The plan was pretty simple. I’d build two triangle-ish end pieces, with slats joining them together. The whole construction would be angled backward at about 15 degrees, tilting the spines of the books up towards anybody who might be looking at the shelf.

I started with a 1″ x 6″ x 6′ piece of poplar from the Home Depot, which was actually 3/4″ x 5 1/2″ x 6′ long. Before I did anything else, I jointed and planed this piece to ensure that it was square, and milled it to a final thickness of 1/2″.

Since I wanted the end pieces of the shelf to be approximately 8″ x 8″ along their non-hypotenuse sides, the first job was to cut four 5 1/2″ x 9″ pieces from the poplar, and joint them together to form two 11″ x 9″ boards. These would later be cut down to the appropriate sizes to form the ends of the shelf.

With the glue dried, I cut the end pieces to size, and then mocked up a simple jig on my crosscut sled that allowed me to cut the angle bit that turned the end pieces from rectangles into sort-of-triangles.

Once the final size of the shelf ends was established, I could work on the joinery for the slats that would hold them together. I settled on 2″ by 1/2″ slats, each around 13″ long, which would give me a final interior shelf length of approximately 12″. I used my box joint blade to cut three slots along each of the straight edges for the slats to fit into.

The trick with this approach is to cut each slot just a little bit small, and then to sneak up on the final dimensions, fine tuning where necessary with a file and sand paper to achieve a tight joint. Thankfully, I didn’t screw anything up, and because my slats had been milled to a uniform size, they were all interchangeable.

With the slots cut out of both ends, I started to attach the slats, using glue and 3/4″ brad nails to tack it all together while the glue dried.

With all of the slats attached, the shelf really started to take shape.

Next, I needed to cut some triangle pieces that would act as feet for the shelf, tipping it backward so that the spines of the cookbooks were angled up toward the viewer. Since I needed them to be the same, I got smart and taped two pieces of scrap poplar together, then marked out the desired shape and ran them both through the table in a single pass.

Once cut, I glued the feet to the bottom of the shelf, and tacked them in place with brad nails from the other side. This required some temporary tape to hold the feet in place while I flipped the piece over and fired the brad nails. I swear, I’m constantly finding more uses for that blue painters’ tape. It’s great stuff to have around.

With the legs attached, the shelf really looked great. I gave the whole thing a good final sanding down to 220 grit in preparation for finish.

The finish consists of a single coat of brown stain that I had left over from a previous project, followed by a coat of wipe on polyurethane. Both coats were applied by hand with an old rag, and between coats, I sanded with 400 grit sand paper, as well as 000 steel wool.

After letting the finish cure on the bench for a couple of days, I brought the shelf inside, and Steph loaded it up with her favourite cookbooks. I’d say that it turned out pretty well.

Since my shop is only about 17’x11′, it can get a bit cozy at the best of times. As I’ve continued to work in it, I’ve realized that having a decent storage system and constantly cleaning up as I work are key to maintaining a safe and productive environment. So instead of tidying up my space, I decided to build some cupboards to enhance my storage game. After all, what’s the point of tidying if I don’t have anywhere to put all of my shit?

I started off with a 4×4 sheet of 1/2″ GIS plywood that was left over from building my workbench.

Using the table saw, I sliced the plywood into four one foot wide by four foot long strips. These would become the long sides of my cupboard boxes, which in turn meant that my cupboards would have a depth of about one foot.

On each strip, I marked out three dados – one on each end, to accept the end caps of the cupboards, and another in the middle, where a divider would split the box into two compartments, each two feet wide.

I cut the dados on my tablesaw, using a box joint set that makes perfect 1/2″ dados with flat bottoms. For the dados on the ends of the long strips, I set up a sacrificial fence so that the blade didn’t come into contact with my actual fence, which is made of metal, and eats sawblades for snacktime.

These are the finished sides of the cupboards. That line down the middle does not go all the way through the pieces.

Next, I cut the end caps for my cupboards. I needed six – one for each end of the two long boxes, and two more to split those boxes into two compartments. I made my end caps 12″ deep to match the width of the long pieces, and about 16″ tall, as that’s the height of the space where I want to hang my cupboards. This means that the final product will be two large cupboards, split into four 24″x16″ compartments.

With the end caps cut, I could assemble the large boxes. I glued the end caps into the dados that had been cut into the longer pieces, tacked everything together with my brad nailer, and then put it all in clamps to dry.

At this point, my 11’x17′ shop had two 2’x4′ boxes taking up most of the useable floor space in it. I found myself moving the boxes constantly to keep them out of the way while I continued to work.

Once the glue was dry, I cut some thin clear pine strips and tacked them around the front edges of each box, giving them a nice veneer that hid the edges of the plywood. While it’s easy to work with, and was cheap scrap left over from a previous project, the pine was actually too soft for this application. I fully expect it to be dented and scratched and chipped after a few years of hard use. In retrospect, something harder would have made more sense for this application, as the fronts of the cupboards will get a lot of abuse.

Here’s a shot of both boxes with the face trim complete

With the cupboard boxes functionally complete, it was time to start on cupboard doors. This was actually the real challenge of the project, since making the boxes consisted of scaling up techniques that I’ve already learned.

I started by cutting the outer frame pieces from some more clear pine, again left over from a previous project. I cut everything just a bit long, and was careful to avoid knots that might lead to trouble down the line. Once the pieces were planed and jointed, it was easy to see how they’d fit together.

I wanted to make rail and stile doors, which consist of an outer frame and a floating inner sheet of plywood, so the first step was to cut a dado on the inside of each of the rails and stiles that would accept the plywood that makes up the majority of the door surface.

The dado is 1/4″ wide, and was cut with a couple of passes across my standard table saw blade. The key to this technique is to flip the piece end over end with every pass, keeping the cut centred while slowly edging the fence out from the blade, sneaking up on a dado width that snugly accepts the plywood centre. Once I found that width, I left the fence in place, and used it to cut all of the other dados to the same width.

Because my saw blade isn’t 1/4″ wide, this approach left me with a bunch of garbage material down the centre of my dado. Once the width was determined, I could move the fence and take another pass to hog this material out. The finished dado fit snugly onto the plywood that would form the inside of my doors.

With the dados cut, I fashioned a tongue on the ends of each rail (the 16″ vertical edges of the cupboard doors). The first step was to figure out the length of each rail. I laid the stiles out on my cupboard boxes, set the rails on top, and worked out the final length of each rail, taking into account the fact that I was going to cut a tongue onto the end of the rail to fit into the dado on the stile.

The next step was to slice off the outer edges of the piece in a series of passes perpendicular to the table saw blade, leaving a tongue the width of the dado exposed. Because the tongue is the same width as the dado, it will butt into the dado on the accepting piece, creating a tight joint.

With the tongues and grooves cut to size, the doors could be dry fit together to test my cuts.

Once I was sure that everything was the right size, I glued each cupboard together. It’s important to note here that the plywood in the centre of the frame is floating. It is not glued into the frame, because it’s meant to leave space for the materials to expand and contract with the weather, without cracking the door.

Once the glue dried on the doors, I gave everything a thorough sanding and test fit my hinges. These are european-style hinges that allow the cupboards to open to 90 degrees, with the doors entirely perpendicular to the boxes. In this shot, the cupboards are upside-down. When hanging on the wall, the door will open upward, toward the ceiling.

Once I was sure that everything would fit, I removed the hardware and masked the pieces off for painting.

The cupboard boxes were painted the same grey as the walls of the shop, and the face trim was painted white. I used an alkalyde paint that I had left over from painting the trim on the outside of the garage. It’s meant to harden with a tough shell that resists damage, so my hope is that it will help the cupboards stand up to the abuse that they’re sure to receive in the shop.

The cupboard doors got the same white paint job as the trim. My 12′ work bench comes in really handy when painting 8′ of cupboard doors.

After letting the paint cure for a couple of days, I hanged the cupboard boxes on the wall above my work bench, screwing scraps of 2×4 into the studs in the wall, and affixing the cupboards to those scraps with 1 1/2″ wood screws. This probably isn’t the strongest way to hang cupboards, but it seems to be holding up ok, so here’s hoping that it doesn’t all come crashing down on me sometime soon.

Finally, I re-attached the hinges, and added some cheap friction slides that help the doors to stay open in their eternal struggle with gravity.

Look at all the space that I have on my workbench now that my shit is packed away into cupboards! I still need to do some organizing, especially in the left-most compartment, but it’s a start.

This project has been a long time in the works. There were a lot of stops and starts and distractions, so it took me four or five weeks to get them done. If I worked straight through, I suspect that I could have finished them in two hard weekends of work with no problem.

All in all, I’m really happy with how they turned out, and my experiment with rail and stile cupboard doors was a success. I’ll have to use that joint again, perhaps for some cheap picture frames, or maybe a box with slats for sides.