(groovy brass music)
Marc: I'm going to try and make this hinge
installation as easy at it can possibly be.
That means no tape measure, no rulers, no nothing.
All we're going to do is transfer marks,
that's exactly why we did it this way.
If you remember the jig that we used on the legs before is
based on a center mark, and we can transfer the center mark
from the existing mortise holes that are already here,
we can transfer those directly to the door.
Instead of measuring from the top down and the bottom up,
and basically doing things that can multiply our error,
taking the marks directly from the work piece
and transferring them to the next work piece is
really the most accurate way to do this.
Let me show you the details.
You can see I have my center lines marked for each one of
the mortises here, and the idea is really fairly simple.
I want to place the door in this location and
transfer those marks directly to the door.
Of course I can't transfer them the way they are
right now because the door is sitting on the bottom,
giving us the extra wide gap at the top.
So what I look to do is either use scrap wood,
very thin strips of scrap wood,
or in this case I had a old feeler gauge set that I just
took apart and grabbed the right feeler gauges so that
I have the same distance at the top and the bottom.
It doesn't matter what the number is,
I just want them to be the same and I want them to
essentially immobilize the door while it's in position.
I lay one stack at the bottom, put the door in place,
and then wedge the other stack in the top.
Now it's as easy as marking the pencil
line and transferring it to the door.
Now I'm going to transfer those marks
from the front face to the side.
If you remember, I told you that we should probably leave
the router alone so that by the time we get to this point
the fence is already set and we don't need to change anything,
and that's exactly what we did.
It's ready to go, all I need to do is
clamp the jig on and start routing.
(grinding)
Now it's time to peg the tenons in the door.
I pre-drill for the dowels and then tap
them into place with a little bit of glue.
(tapping)
After a quick trim I use the hollow chisel mortiser,
just like before, to make the holes for the ebony plugs.
Just like before I can insert the ebony plug,
put a little glue in first.
The hinges are very easy to install.
I just pre-drill with a self-centering bit and
drive the screw with the help of a little wax.
(bouncy synth music)
Well, let's see how it goes.
The fit looks pretty good.
If those are even slightly off I'm
not going to be able to get them in.
Fortunately they're going in.
One down, one to go.
We are cruising for the finish line.
One of the final things that I need to focus
on is the handles for the unit, and there are
hundreds of things that we could potentially do,
anything from making your own, to buying.
And if you're making your own there's just so many options.
Nailing down one that looks good and represents
the piece the way you want it to is really the trick.
I've come up with this little stacked handle here.
It basically consists of three pieces,
now this is just a mockup I made out of bubinga.
Consists of three different pieces,
the bottom one is the thickest one and has a nice
little cove cut out in it, and that's for the fingers.
The idea is that one will go on the right side and
one will go on the left side, and we'll make a nice
image when the doors are closed, but when you pull the
doors apart you see that it's two separate handles.
It's going to take a lot of fine finesse
work but it will be worth it in the end.
I'm going to make these out of ebony.
Each handle is glued up from three pieces of ebony:
A thick piece on the bottom and two thin pieces on top.
The drum sander is great for creating thin strips.
Now the bottom piece receives a nice cove at the router table.
Each strip is trimmed to the appropriate width
at the table saw using the gripper push pad,
it's really the only thing that makes this a safe cut.
Each piece is cut to length at the miter saw.
With a little bit of sanding on the edges
I basically have my three-ply sandwich of ebony,
and all I need to do is glue these three together,
just keeping the back nice and flush.
I'm going to use a couple scrap pieces of MDF here to do that.
What I'm going to do here is us a combination
of wood glue and a fast-drying CA glue,
and that way I get the best of both worlds.
I get a hold quickly, but then I also have the wood glue
that's going to dry over the course of a few minutes.
I actually do this by eye, it's pretty easy to
tell when it's off and when everything is centered.
A little bit of quick activator should help close that joint up.
And a couple of spring clamps should do the rest.
Using the same CA glue trick as before,
I attach the handles to the doors.
A good square helps to make sure that
the handles are even with each other.
And a clamp on each handle gives the pressure
we need for the yellow glue to do its job.
All right folks, here it is, this is the big moment.
The cabinet is pretty much done, the only thing I have
left to do is the little back panel magnetic strips.
Those still need a little bit of sanding and I'm going to
finish them separately, but the cabinet itself is done.
Now in about a week I have to deliver this piece,
and that means about a 13 hour drive
all the way up to northern California.
With this in the back of the car,
that's a whole lot of fumes for me to be breathing in.
So I want to get it finished as soon as possible,
let it off gas, let it start curing, and then hopefully by
the time we get it there everything will be good to go.
The finish I'm going to use is Arm-R-Seal,
my default finish if anything.
The reason I'm doing that, and this would have been a great
project for me to experiment with the water-based finishes,
but I have a little trouble sometimes ordering the things,
the order of events in the video,
and how I actually would do them in real time in my shop,
they don't necessarily make sense in the video.
I didn't want to pre-finish all of the parts and then
have to deal with that during the assembly, so for the sake
of continuity in the video I just put the piece together and
then separated the finishing into a whole separate sequence.
The finishing itself is something that
we've done many times before on the show.
I even have it on my DVD, A Simple Varnish Finish.
I'm going to follow that exact
process to finish the entire thing.
This is really a special moment in the life cycle
of your project, is when you apply the finish
to it and you see everything come to life.
I can't wait to get started so we're going to jump right in.
I apply a liberal coat of varnish
to the surface and let it soak in.
Then I wipe off the excess with a cloth rag.
Even the back receives the care and attention it deserves.
For a detailed review of this wiping varnish finishing method,
check out my DVD, A Simple Varnish Finish,
available at Rockler stores and TheWoodWhisperer.com
(percussive music)
If you can believe it, the gadget station is finally done,
and in fact we leave for our road trip tomorrow to deliver it,
so I couldn't have cut it any closer.
I'd like to show you some of the details.
We've talked about these things along the way
but it's nice to see it in the final product
and how it affects the look of the piece.
We'll start with the outside and
then we'll move on to the inside.
The first thing that I'd like to point out is the grain flow.
In this piece that was a major consideration from day one.
I wanted to make sure that I used similar looking boards,
or cut my pieces all from the same board so that the
grain would flow continuously throughout the piece,
and that's a repeated theme inside and out.
The most noticeable, at least for me, is this top rail.
In fact I even modified and veered off from the traditional
structure of a door, which normally has your stiles,
like this one, where the stile goes all the
way up and the rails rest between the stiles.
Well I abandoned that here in the center for the sake
of grain continuity, because I thought it would look cool.
The top rail you see goes all the way across,
and the grain just continues right across there.
Same thing with the bottom rail.
In order to do that I needed to bring
my stiles up in between the rails.
That's the justification for doing that.
There are structural reasons why that's the tradition,
but in a small cabinet like this I don't think
it's really going to be much of an issue,
and I think this was a good choice for the sake of the look.
The other thing to look at is how the
sides and the top have a grain continuity.
If you remember when we cut those boards out initially,
if they weren't cut from the same board they
were cut from very similar looking boards so that
it would flow all the way throughout the piece,
and I think it really does add to the final look.
The other thing you may notice here is that the sides,
the legs, the top, the bottom,
those actually look significantly different
from the wood that was used for everything else.
We didn't really talk about this
before but I could point it out now.
You notice how on the end grain
it's kind of on a 45 degree angle.
That's a riff sawn board, and that's what gives us this
straight line look that we get on the legs, top and bottom.
But on the front, this was an entirely different board.
This is actually flat sawn bubinga.
You can see that the grain lines are horizontal
to the face of the board, so what you wind
up with is a little bit more of a wavy look,
and the doors themselves, the door frames do
differ in that way from the rest of the case.
Someone may not like that but I thought it
looked really cool, so I went with it.
Looking at the front again you could see these spalted maple
panels are bookmatched, and you'll notice there is
a little bit of a difference here, just in the amount
of material that I removed between those panels,
and then I did a little bit of sanding.
The thickness of the material and the way that the spalting
takes place, it doesn't just all go straight down,
and this image is not continuous all the way through,
it changes as you go through the thickness of a board.
The further those two slices get from each
other, the more likelihood there is that
they will look a little bit different.
Just in the little bit of space that must have been between
these two slices of that board, there's a pretty decent
difference between them in terms of the amount of spalting.
But for the most part you could still
tell that it is a bookmatched set.
Overall it looks, I think it looks pretty cool.
The other thing to notice at the front here are
the ebony handles and how those came out.
I don't know, I just thought it was a cool idea,
I'm not really even sure I could give you a whole lot of
justification for what I did and why it looks the way it does,
but I thought it fit well with the piece,
they're very functional because you can get your
fingers right before them and open the door.
I like those a lot.
Let's take a look at the inside.
The inside of the cabinet is pretty straightforward.
We've just got three shelves for the electronics,
bottom shelf for the surge protector,
and the way you run the cords through the back and down
to the bottom is probably the most interesting part here.
Those little strips that we made are
held in with the rare earth magnets.
The idea is you take a strip off,
you run your cords through,
gives you plenty of room to work,
you set your piece of electronics down and now all
we're really going to have is a single wire that's
going through the back and down to the bottom.
I don't want to have to see this hole the whole time,
I want to be able to put this back in place.
The little strip goes back into the dado on the side,
and the magnet holds it in place, and there's just
enough room for a cord to sneak out behind there.
And in some cases you may just be able to put the cord
through this middle section and then pull it over to the side,
and now that piece of electronics is not only connected,
but it can't be pulled back and out through
the back of the unit, so it holds it in place.
Each one of those back panels, there's six of them,
each one of them is removable and they are all grain matched.
If you look very closely you'll notice
that they were cut from the same board.
When you step back and look from a distance it's actually
hard to notice that those back panel pieces will come
out if you pull them, so kind of a neat hidden trick there.
In the back there's not really a whole lot to show you,
it's just the back of the system.
You could see how this is wide open, plenty of circulation
room for heat to escape up and out the back of the cabinet.
That, my friends, is the gadget station,
and the only thing left to do is to take the long
road trip up to northern California and deliver it.
(bright blues music)