dining room credenza
about eight years ago i built this. thenthree years ago i started a youtube channel and about ten months after thati decided to make a video on an updated version. then probably 18 months ago ihad an idea for another version so i drew it all out and basically set itaside to work on other projects until about two months ago when i built this this replaced this which reminded methat i wanted to build this so let's build this you know my videos have been lackinglately tall skinny white dudes wearing glasses with baseball hats enter seanboyd from sean boyd made this no but in
all sincerity he really is a greatdesigner builder maker of videos and human being i'm gonna throw a link toone of his videos in the description so you can check him out after this one hereally does build awesome stuff so i highly urge you to go check it outseriously but we have a lot of work to do so let's get into it up to this pointall we've been doing is breaking down the plywood portions of the build whichis gonna consist of a top bottom two sides two vertical partitions and twoshelves and as you're seeing we did this with a combination of a table saw and atrack saw and at this point everything's cut only two rough dimensions and we'llgo over refining everything as we go
through each step and the first of thosesteps is going to be cutting our four outside pieces to size but before we dothat let's go over a quick refresher on how to make a trapezoidal box so herethese top angles need to be 75 degrees and the bottom angles need to be 105degrees in other words both are 15 degrees off of 90 to do this we're gonnaset our blade to seven and a half degrees away from 45 and that's becauseseven and a half is half of 15 now we can cut all the bevels on all of ourpieces that make up the bottom two joints just like any ordinary cross cuton the table saw for the top joints though we need to do something differentas you can see here the angle that we
need and the angle of the blade don'tmatch up and in fact we can't even tilt our blade far enough to make that cut soinstead we're gonna flip our piece of vertical use a jig and make the cut thatway now in the real world the order of operations gonna be a little bitdifferent so let's work through that now basically instead of starting with ourhorizontal cuts we're gonna start with our vertical cuts and the reason forthis is you have almost no control in determining the length of the piece whenyou're making your vertical cuts but with the horizontal cuts you can setyour fence to dial things in just where you want them in the endnow the big question that i always get
whenever i show this is how do idetermine the exact size of my side panels and more important the bottompanel and the real answer is i don't kinda really what i do is shoot roughlyfor whatever size i want when i'm cutting my top and side panels no mathrequired just whatever's in the neighborhood of what i had in mindthen i let all of that determine the size of my bottom panel again with nomouth instead i just use some tape to do a quick dry assembly of my top and sidepanels make a first cut on my bottom panel hold it up to my other pieces marka line and then take a few passes on the table saw just sneaking up on the lineuntil it fits just right so i'm not
shooting for a number rather justcutting it to fit a gap okay the next thing we want to do is get some thinhardwood strips on the front's of the pieces that'll eventually become thevertical partitions and the shelves already had some thin pieces of walnutlaying around but if you didn't you're just gonna cut 1/8 to quarter inch thickpiece that's just slightly wider than your plywood then you're gonna glue iton and you can use some tape or some fancy clamps once that's had time to dryyou can trim off the excess any number of ways personally i like using my tablesaw with a jig that holds the surface of the plywood perfectly in line with theblade so just the overhanging material
gets cut free and i know it's kind ofhard to see what's going on in this shot so here's a quick little drug thathopefully explains it a little bit more ok now back to the case pieces before weglue them up we're gonna need to cut some dados and rabbets into them nowconventional wisdom would tell you that you need to cut datas into the top andbottom pieces to accept the vertical partitions but you'll notice that i'monly cutting them into the bottom pieces and you're gonna see why in just aminute but in any case you're gonna cut two of those and then rabbits along thebacks of all four pieces once that was done the last thing wewanted to do before calling it a night
was get the exterior pieces glued up andhere we're just gonna use the tape method sometimes i'll use domino's andthese joints to reinforce them but honestly the biggest benefit to that forme is just that it helps make the glue up go more smoothly when you just haveone set of hands unfortunately i couldn't do that here because i broke mysmallest domino bit but fortunately i've got extra sets of hands but the nextmorning the case was nice and dry and we could start fitting our verticalpartitions so we started by cutting one edge of each piece nice and square thenwe fit that end into the dado did our best to hold the piece perpendicular tothe bottom and mark the line so that we
can make the cuts on the other ends soat this point the vertical partitions are sized just right but before weinstall them we're gonna cut another set of datas into these pieces which aregonna eventually hold the shelves now at this point we're gonna go aheadand cut those two they're finished depths and we're also going to cut ourshelf pieces to they're finished steps since they're gonna be exactly the sameokay now you'll remember we didn't cut dedos into the top of the case and isaid we'd come back to that decision and well now we're back so this whole pieceis gonna get a face frame on it eventually and that's gonna cover up thedata's and really the most important
thing is that these vertical pieces benice and square and parallel to one another and that's because drawers aregoing to go in between them and fitting drawers into a square opening is a loteasier than something that's out of square and honestly because this box isa trapezoid the likelihood of you cutting datas that end up beingperfectly placed top and bottom just isn't that high at least not for memaybe you're better than me and you can nail it but i know that i won't so i'msaving myself the headache instead i'm just gonna install the partitions anduse these squares to get them just perfect and that's gonna hold prettytight then to make sure that they don't
move i'm gonna cut these little scrappieces of walnut out and glue them to the underside of the top and this issomething that nobody's ever gonna see unless they're really obsessed with thispiece and are willing to get down on their hands and knees or if they i don'tknow watch this video all right next we're going to set our blade to 15degrees so that we can start fitting our shelf pieces so we'll start bycross-cutting one edge of each shelf and this is gonna leave an edge that matchesthe angle of the cabinet side piece next we can put our blade back to 90 degreeshold that piece up to the cabinet and mark out a line where we need to cut itso that it fits just right then we'll
take a few passes airing on the side oftoo long until it fits just right now on the england side we didn't cut adado so we're gonna do something similar to what we did on the top only here i'mcutting a much beefier longer strip of hardwood with a 15 degree angle on oneside then i'm gonna install these on the underside of the shelf for extra supportand honestly you could skip this step if you wanted all right now let's make theface ring so here i want to use slightly chunkier pieces to give the cabinet amore substantial look and that will be to sort of match the visual weight ofthe base otherwise things might start to look out of balance so here i'm rippinga few pieces of walnut to about one and
a quarter inches wide then it's reallyjust a matter of working your way around the perimeter matching the angles andcutting your pieces to length one regret that i have is i should have spent moretime milling the walnut to size for this use the pieces we used had a little bitmore curve in them than i would have liked and we ended up having to nailthem in to get them to hold flat either way while gluing them on i want them tobe proud mostly on the inside edge of the cabinet but with the outside i'malso gonna leave them ever so slightly proud and that's so that we can get areally clean and flush look after they dry by using a flush trim bit on therouter now let's set the cabinet aside
for a bit and start making our base westarted off by making a few templates of our leg shapes and you could do thiswith the c&c if you have one i used my x carve but i've also shown how to do thisby hand in another video so i'm gonna link to that below and actually sean hasa whole video about this on his channel so i'm also gonna link to that fromthere we could cut the pieces free using a table saw and then roughed out thegeneral shape on the bandsaw after that we use some templating bitson the router to mimic the shapes and you'll notice in these shots that we'releaving some parts namely the end grain and the parts where the connections willbe made and we'll get to those in a
minute on the table saw using a sled so here we're gonna make a quick sledjig for cutting the end grains and the connecting phases so we start by settingthe fence and taking one pass to establish a cut line and what'simportant here is that we don't touch the fence again after we've done thisnext we use the template that we are made to line up exactly where we need tocut our connecting face and i should say this is a non crucial cut you just wantto be close and consistent then we could put our actual work pieces in and makethe cuts to clear away the material next we're gonna do the same thing for theface of our short legs and actually
before we do that let's look at how thewhole base comes together so that you have a better reference point so it'spretty much just a pair of these two pieces that form a cross these two willget dominoed together and these will get dominoed into the existing piece butbefore they get connected we'll also attach these support piecesthat the cabinet can rest on top of to support the ends and i'm not an engineerbut in my head the thing that this base has going for it is that there's sort ofequal but opposite forces being applied so while weight here would be pushingthis down forcing the joint apart weight here is also pushing down and forcingthe joint together at least that's how
it works in my head all right back tothe sled here we're using the template and making some stops that hold itexactly where the edge is flush with the sled finally we're gonna do the samething to the connecting face on this short piece like we did on the longerpiece before the animation sequence and again here closing consistent is what'simportant not exact so at this point we can go ahead and doan initial glue up and that's gonna consist of gluing the two shorter piecestogether and all of the little support blocks that go on the connecting facesand right now we're just very crudely cutting those out and we're gonna attachthem as some oversized blocks and the
reason for that's going to becomeobvious in this next shot where you see me using the template of the entire legshape to trace on to the assembly so far and once that was done we're gonna gothrough the exact same process again of roughing out the shape on the bandsawtemplate routing the bulk of it and then using a sled to make some final cuts onthe end grain now right here you're probably thinkingthat i should have just made this out of one piece because of the seam butremember that you won't see that because the other two pieces still need to getglued on and actually the grain direction would look worse and it wouldbe weaker if i tried to make this out of
one piece all rightlet's get back to the cabinet the next step was to make some drawer boxes andwe decided to class it up with some bloom drawer slides blum blum rhymeswith plum plum i don't know anyway shawn walked methrough how he goes about this and it's kind of confusing at first but he has anentire video that covers all this on his channel so i'm gonna link to that one aswell and while he builds the drawer boxes i'll use this as an opportunity tothank squarespace for sponsoring this video as you guys know i personally usesquarespace and have been using them for my website for some time now in factshawn does too and the reason that he i
and countless others do is because itmakes our lives so much easier building your site with squarespace is insanelyeasy you don't need to be a designer to make it look great and that's becausethey're the designers they have tons of modern templates to choose from all ofwhich employ the latest html css and javascript techniques and every templatethat they offer is optimized to work with mobile browsers so no matter how aperson navigates to your site desktop phone tablet it doesn't matter yoursite's gonna look great beyond that they offer 24/7 email support which is reallyhelpful i've used it a couple times when i've needed help and they've always beenreally quick to get me on the right path
and like i said the biggest benefit forme is how easy it is to update in this clip you've been watching me update mywebsite for an auction page that i'm making to sell this piece that i'mbuilding in the video it's got an embedded form that people can use to bidall of the info a really nice carousel image gallery and absolutely zero codingwas required and it only took me a couple minutes to put it together so ifyou're thinking about starting a website for any purpose or even if you have anexisting website you want to yourself to check them out head over to squarespacecomm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go tosquarespace.com slash four-eyes and save
10% off your first purchase of a websiteor a domain all right thanks squarespace okay sosean's put together our three drawer boxes and now we can start attaching thehardware and like i said he has a full tutorial over on his channel that goesinto detail either way i don't think that i'm at a point of understanding itwell enough to explain it in a video but i'll wrap my head around it as i usethem a few more times and if you want to understand it better check out sean'svideo here i use the cat's moses dovetail jig to make a perpendicular90-degree cut in the back of my boxes and i think the hardware goes throughthis notch if i recall correctly these
holes i'm drilling here are firstsupport pins that hold the back of the drawer up again i think in any case oncethat's all done installing the hardware itself is actually really easy just apair of clips on the underside front of the drawer box and then the slider inthe cabinet and once these things are in i have to say that they're super smoothand really nice top-quality stuff works like a plumber with the drawer boxes ini could start making the drawer faces so here i'm prepping my pieces and what iusually like to do here is measure my opening factor in my gaps and that tellsme the size of that my drawer faces should be then i cut them out just everso slightly wider than they actually
need to be for the length i'm gonna goahead and finalize that right now and i just want to make sure that all threeare exactly the same before we attach them we need to cut insome handles so i made myself two templates that look like this one ofthese will be for the drawer boxes and the other ones are gonna be for thedrawer faces and this way the drawer box won't be seen or felt when you go topull the drawers open so using the templates i roughed out the materialusing a jigsaw and then use my router with a flush trim bit to clean it up at this point i could start installingand basically i'm going to start from
the bottom and work my way up and one ofthe cool things about these handles is a clamp can fit right in the opening whichmakes it really easy to hold them in position while you screw them in nowsince i cut my drawer slightly wider than they needed to be i should end upwith a last piece that needs to be trimmed just a little tiny bit sotechnically it's a smaller drawer face than the other two but it's such alittle difference that you're i can't see it but what it does do is allow meto make consistent gaps that go all the way around and that's something thatyour eyes a lot more likely to pick up on here i'm making the back panel and imade this out of four pieces so that i
could leave a gap that ran the length ofthe piece slightly above and below the shelf line and this will leave plenty ofroom for somebody to pull cables through somehow i forgot to film myselfattaching it but it's just a couple screws to attach the base to the legsi'm going to use some of these figure 8 clips and i'm not really looking forstrength here gravity is gonna be doing most of the worki really just need something to keep the base in place when i built the predecessor to thispiece at the end of the video i had this little monologue about the idea thatform follows function in it i argued
that it should but only to a certainextent in other words we shouldn't be so rigid that we always favor utility inher personality tangentially i get a lot of questionsabout designing furniture and oftentimes people ask me if i use things like thegolden rectangle or ratio in my designs and the truth is i don't i mean i thinkit's okay for somebody to start there but i wouldn't ever blindly follow it asgospel be at the golden ratio or form strictly following function if we paytoo much attention to those quote unquote rules then everything has to beevolving towards one inevitable point and that frankly sounds really boring soi say take that faith and put it into
something more important like yourselfand your ability to make something beautifully inefficient special thanksto levi wilson jake vance taylor hudson tristan morris mark armstrong heathlacey machiya galecki or macy ikuko lucky apologies for the name butcheringand the rest of my patreon members for supporting this channel you all are theengine that keeps this thing going so thank you seriouslyand if you want to find out how you can support the show too and snag one ofthese sweet four-eyes shirts click the link in the description check it out andsee if it's right for you and there's always no pressurealright see in the next one