Until then, people making furniture from solid wood used big slabs of wood and joined those boards together with pegs, bands of metal or leather. But none of those techniques could deal with the dynamic quality of solid wood — the fact that it expands and contracts in reaction to seasonal humidity changes. That expansion and shrinkage is as unstoppable as the tides, and it doomed primitive furniture pieces without mercy. But when the frame and panel was developed — joined at the corners with mortise-and-tenons, the solid panel floating inside that frame — wood movement had been put into a box it could not escape.

Now, hundreds of years later, when we talk about solid wood construction, the frame and panel is still the ultimate building block of woodworking. In fact, even though we now have manmade materials that do not expand and contract with the seasons, builders often machine them to look like a frame and panel, for the simple reason that people find the appearance of them to be attractive. They’ve become inculcated into our cultural environment. Function has become the form which we crave.

A Frame and Panel Bookcase

While developing the content for The Way to Woodwork DVDs, it was clear that we would need to teach frame and panel construction, and that it would be most practical to do that in the context of building a casework project. Solid wood casework projects are successfully made of frame and panels for the reasons described above.

This elegant little bookcase combines three frame and panel subassemblies with a top, bottom and a base. Two adjustable shelves sitting on shelf pins complete it. As woodworking projects go, it is not overly challenging in its joinery. Its proportions allow that, if attractive lumber is selected and care is taken in its construction, you will have an elegant and practical piece of furniture for your efforts. In designing it, I tried to exemplify the three major tenets of the British Arts and Crafts Movement:

• The design of the piece should fulfill its function and be visually simple.
• The materials shall be “of the best.”
• The work shall be rightfully constructed using rightful workmanship.

And in addition to all that, this little piece teaches you the essence of frame and panel and casework construction. Try it — I’m sure you’re going to like it.

Harvesting Your Parts

Because the design, the Drawings and the Material List are provided here, the first step of consequence is harvesting the parts. If you are unfamiliar with that term, it refers to carefully going through the wood you have collected for your project and determining which piece of wood will go where on the project. For example, in this project, the infill pieces on the side panels were each made from one piece of wood with a very attractive figure running from the top to bottom. Because they are so large and so prominent, putting a plain-looking piece of wood in the side frames would leave the bookcase looking bland. In the same fashion, the top will be highly visible and needs to be composed of stock selected for its beauty. Taking the time here to select these pieces in advance can take your project from soso to something special. Identify the parts with chalk markings so you won’t lose track of them. This is also the time to butt join the pieces that will become the top, the shelves and the bottom. They are too wide to be made from a single width of stock.

Prepare the Stock, Mark and Cut the Joints

It’s time to start making some sawdust. Using the information found in the Material List, prepare the pieces for the sides and back by machining them to thickness, width and length. Use the table saw to plow a groove 1/4″ wide x 3/8″ deep into the rails and stiles of the side frames and the rails of the back frame. This is easily done using a 1/4″ dado head and registering the cut with the fence. Unlike the sides, the stiles used to form the frame on the back have a 1/8″ spline slot cut into them in virtually the same manner as the groove. See the Drawings for details.

With those parts prepared, the next step is to mark out and then cut the slot-mortises for the loose tenons. Festool’s Domino system is an extremely accurate and easy way to make strong corner joints. In practice, almost any type of mortise-and-tenon would do well at the corners of the frame (although you would have to adjust the Material List accordingly), but few would be faster. With the mortises cut and the stiles and rails test fitted together with their loose tenons, you can move on to making the side infill panels and the back slats.

The side panels are sized so that they have room to expand and contract within the frame’s groove. To fit into the groove and to cosmetically detail the pieces, the side panels need to be rabbeted around their perimeter. All the shaping of these two panels is done on the table saw. A series of rabbets (called rebates on the other side of the pond) step down from the face until the final rabbet creates a thickness on the edge of the panel that is just a bit thinner than 1/4″. See the photo above for the details of these rabbets. Combined, they create a pleasing design accented by the shadows they cast. The photo sequence demonstrates the method and the order for cutting the rabbets.

The slats that make up the infill of the back frame are also composed in regard to their color and grain pattern. The slats have tongues raised on their ends so as to be captured by the grooves in the rails. In addition, floating splines (not glued) are used to align the edges of the slats and to visually fill the gap between the slats. The slats are not glued into the frame — they must be able to expand and contract. Once again, all this machining is done on the table saw.

The Subassemblies

One of the points I make in The Way to Woodwork DVDs is that gluing up is a process that strongly benefits from a second person’s set of hands. Gluing and clamping is essentially an irreversible step, so avoiding mistakes is critical. To glue and clamp the back and sides, I asked LiLi Jackson to assist me. Each step was discussed and we walked through them so that the assembly was well understood and done accurately. Once the sides and back have been glued and clamped, the dovetailed rails can be made and joined into the side.

The dovetailed rails perform a couple of important tasks. First, they connect the sides together at the open front of the bookcase, adding strength and rigidity. Second, they provide a means to attach the top and bottom to the carcass. The joint is a single-lap dovetail let into the top and bottom edges of the sides. The length between the shoulders is the same as the width of the back panel subassembly. Because white oak is hard and strong, the dovetails only need to be 1/4″ thick. Form rabbets on the ends of the rails, leaving the 1/4″ thickness, and locating the shoulders at the same time. (See the Drawings for all these details.) Mark and cut the dovetailed shape onto the ends of the rails. Then transfer the shape onto the ends of the sides, marking the outline with a knife. Complete the marking-out with a marking gauge to locate the bottom line of the dovetail pocket. Chop out the dovetail pockets with a combination of a handsaw and sharp chisels, test fitting the rails into their pockets as you go. With that done, you are almost ready to assemble the carcass.

Before that next glue-up step, there are a couple of tasks to be completed. Bore holes for the shelf pins as shown in the Drawings. It is much easier to do it now rather than later. Next, mark out and cut a series of biscuit slots in the back and sides. The biscuits make the gluing and clamping step easier by aligning the parts. It is my practice to pre-glue the biscuits into one panel, in this case the back, to prepare for the glue-up. Once again, it is a step that will keep the glue-up process more manageable. After a test fit and dry clamp, glue and clamp the sides to the back and the dovetailed rails to the sides.

Good work; with that step you have completed the lion’s share of this project.

There is one point to be made here. In my construction process, I plane the faces and the edges that can’t be planed after assembly smooth as I complete them. This brings their surfaces to the point where they are ready to accept a finish. That allows me to apply a finish before I glue up a subassembly — once again, those areas which would be hard to get to after assembly. If you proceed differently, you will need to sand these surfaces smooth at an appropriate point in your process.

Remove the carcass from its clamps, and take a few moments to make and glue the two ledgers (see the Drawings) to the carcass back. They’re for attaching the top and bottom later.

With that completed, the top is the next logical component to make. You already selected material and butt joined the stock for the top. Now cut it to size and get ready to form the bevel on its underside. Once again, a plane is my tool of choice for this task. Alternatively, you could shape the bevel on your table saw or with a large-diameter router bit. With the bevel in place, shape a gentle radius on the same three edges of the top. Then, clamp the top in place and mark and drill holes through the top ledger and top dovetailed rail for your screws. Secure the top to the carcass, then remove it and set it aside for now.

The Last Details

The base is designed to be held together with screws and glue. In this instance, the mitered corners don’t go to a feather edge; instead the miter stops short, leaving 1/4″ flat on the end grain. See the Drawings for details. The corner blocks get correctly positioned and are glued and screwed onto the inside faces of the front and back first. This makes clamping up the whole base manageable. Following that, a ledger is glued onto the back of the base to facilitate attaching it to the carcass.

To attach the base, drive screws down into the front piece of the base through the dovetailed rail. In the same way, drive screws down though the ledger at the back of the carcass subassembly into the ledger on the back of the base. The bottom panel will cover these screws.

The two shelves and the bottom were also butt joined and prepared earlier. The front edges of these parts were finished square with the smallest of chamfers — a bare 1/16″ of an inch shaped across the flat. Fit the bottom panel into the carcass and secure it up through the dovetailed rail with screws. The shelves also need to be fitted into the carcass. Plane or sand them smooth, and you are done with the joinery aspect of building this bookcase.

Salad Bowl Oil was our finish of choice for this piece. It dries hard and enriches the color of the wood, and it builds well with only a few applications. Flow the oil onto the wood liberally with a sponge brush, allow it to stand for 10 to 15 minutes, and then wipe it off. Leave the surface alone to cure and then repeat the process until you have the surface that you want. De-nib between coats with worn fine sandpaper if required. Now all you have to do is reattach the top, position the shelves, put the books in their proper place and light up your pipe!

As stated earlier, I conceived and designed this piece for our DVD series, The Way to Woodwork. While there is more than sufficient information here to build this bookcase, in the DVD series, significant background information is delivered regarding preparing stock in general (not just for this piece), harvesting the stock and all of the steps in my woodworking methodology.

Click Here to Download the Drawings and Materials List.

The post PROJECT: White Oak Bookcase appeared first on Woodworking | Blog | Videos | Plans | How To.

My solution for putting nature’s artistry to best effect is the little foyer bench you see here. It’s actually the fifth adaptation of a bench I’ve made before, and I think it accomplishes my goals quite well. For one, you aren’t bombarded with a lot of straight edges on this piece. The back edge of the top is, for the most part, flat, so the bench can be pushed up against a wall. And, while the inner edges of the leg pairs that support the top are flat, the shadow line they form is what really catches the eye. Their outer natural edges and creamy-colored sapwood flow nicely into the sapwood on top to continue those wonderful meandering lines all around the front. I like the fact that the leg pairs, when viewed as a whole, still look like the much wider, waney-edged boards from which they came with sapwood on both edges. I also tried to harmonize the intersection of the legs and top by incorporating some open-ended through tenons into the piece; they rest against square notches in the seat board, but their outer edges retain that natural shape — almost like stubs of branches coming up through. As you can see, these tenons stand proud of the seat — 5/16″ to be exact — to really bring home a sense of visual strength and substance.

Other Design Considerations

Despite my goal of making this little bench as “green” as possible and capitalizing on its natural beauty, form still has to follow function for me. A bench doesn’t have much purpose if you can’t sit on it. So, I had to keep ergonomics in mind as well as aesthetics when laying out the parts. The top is 42″ long to fit one person well, and the four leg components are 16″ tall to raise that top to a comfortable seating height. I decided I would set the final position of the legs and the overhang of the top later, but I did chalk their positions out preliminarily before commencing with building to make sure the top would be long enough to suit its purpose — as well as to avoid defects like open knotholes.

The top of my bench ranges in width from about 12 to 13-1/2″ because, of course, both edges aren’t flat. You may need to make modifications to your bench dimensions if you build one like this, based on the waney stock you have on hand. That’s how it goes when you let nature participate in the design process.

Preparing Stock from the Rough

Well, enough said about visualizing my bench; it was time to get down to work. The first order of business was to strip the bark — I knew I should remove what would probably just fall off later anyway. It also made the boards narrow enough to pass through my 15″ planer. I knew already that this tree was felled in the spring, so the bark was easy to peel away with a mallet and chisel. That would have been more difficult with lumber harvested in the fall when the tree was going dormant and the bark was set.

As the bark fell to the floor, I could see there was some discoloration on the underlying edges that would need to go in order to reveal that pretty sapwood, so out came the rasp and finally a curved scraper to clean things up. You never know what you’ll find under a bark-covered edge.

Next up, I flattened one face of each wide board by hand, then brought the stock down to final thickness at the planer — I left the top a full 5/4 but continued planing the leg material down to 1″.

You can’t rip a flat edge at the table saw when both edges are “live.” So, in order to flatten the back edge of the benchtop, I drew a straight reference line along the sapwood’s edge, then made the cut with my jigsaw. That gave me enough flat bearing surface to clean away the saw’s evidence at the jointer — but remember that portions of that edge are still natural … I was going for “generally flat” and not arrow straight. I split the leg stock in similar fashion by ripping four pieces from wider boards. I settled on an average width of about 8-1/2″ for these, based on a gut reaction. I wanted each leg to appear to support about two-thirds of the seat width so they would look stable and sure.

After creating these reference edges, I could head to the table saw to crosscut the parts to length. Those were square cuts for the four legs, but I treated the ends of the top a little differently. Here, I tilted my saw blade to about 30° and positioned the top facedown on the saw table before making the cuts. This was my reasoning: I wanted these end bevels to mimic the natural line where the sapwood was wrapping around the heartwood. Call me a sucker for nuance and aesthetics, I guess. The bevels would face up toward the seating surface and not hide underneath it, to keep that hefty appearance of the seat board’s thickness.

Positioning the Parts

With the five principal parts of this bench now ready, it was time to bring them together with some sturdy joinery. I’m a real stickler when it comes to assembly, so I wanted a dead-flat reference surface at floor level to help arrange the parts. A thick piece of corrugated board serves me well for tasks like this; it acts like a torsion box and cancels out any inaccuracies in my concrete shop floor. After setting up the parts on it and adjusting the spread between the leg sets until they looked right, that left a 5-3/4″ overhang on both ends of the top. I drew four pairs of short reference lines from the legs up around the front and back edges of the top to mark their positions. An engineer’s square made this easy.

Preparing Open-ended Tenons

If you study the Drawings, you’ll see that each leg’s tenon has a flat back cheek and then what really amounts to a long shoulder extending all the way across the top of the leg to the back edge. These shoulders rest in four shallow dadoes (call them stopped mortises if you like) in the underside of the seat, and the tenon cheeks set into notches I cut into the front and back seat edges.

I don’t typically integrate a horizontal stretcher between bench legs unless I have to, and I didn’t want to do it here. So, that meant this joinery system would have to fit together as tight as a drum in order to keep the legs from potentially racking. I decided that I’d start by milling the tenons, fit the seat notches to those and then complete the joinery work by cutting the long dadoes.

You can see the process I followed for creating those tenon shoulders at the table saw. The first step was taken mainly to prevent tearout: I used a cutting gauge to score layout lines 1-5/16″ in from the top edges of the legs; this ensured that the saw blade would cut cleanly through as it exited the legs with each pass. I set the tenon width to 1″ and marked this as well. A crosscut sled provided the backup support I wanted for milling the leg blanks on-end, and a sharp combo blade gave me the “reach” I needed to hit the shoulder knife lines.

While you might think that removing all of that waste in a bunch of side-by-side passes would take all day without a dado set, it really wasn’t bad, but notice that I left a tab of waste remaining at the edge opposite the tenon — you can’t remove the whole works or the leg would tip down on the sled and ruin the cut. Once I machined the four tenons and shoulders, all it took was a few strokes with a Japanese saw to clip off these thin support tabs.

A Fitting Set of Notches

It was time to pull out my corrugated “floor” again and bring my bench parts one step closer to rock-solid connections by cutting the tenon notches in the seat.

At this stage, I sandwiched a piece of 1/2″-thick MDF between the leg pairs and held that assembly together with spring clamps (tenons facing outward as they do in the final bench).

Sliding the legs into place under the seat and squaring them up to both the seat and the corrugated board, I could verify the exact positions of the legs as well as the depth of the notches I’d cut for the tenons.

When it came to those notches, I decided I’d recess the tenons up to the point where their natural curved edges began. I also wanted to make sure the tenon sapwood wouldn’t extend past the seat board’s sapwood.

This meant the tenons would need notches about 1/2″ deep. I transferred their depth dimensions from each tenon with a fine-lead mechanical pencil for accuracy — the interface of every contact surface of these joints needs to be tight, for strength.

Cutting those notches is a job for sharp hand tools, not machines. I first sawed the sides of each notch with a Japanese saw, keeping my kerf just inside the layout lines.

The waste in between was chopped out “dovetail” style — working down and in from both top and bottom faces of the board.

The goal is to remove that waste a little at a time until you meet in the middle; that approach prevents chipping the top and bottom edges so they stay crisp. Don’t rush the process.

Dadoes and Dowels

Finally, it was time to give the tenon shoulders a home in some shallow dadoes under the seat. Sliding each tenon into its notch, I could mark the dado positions and lengths accurately to suit each leg. Milling those started with a router and ended with some more handwork. About that: I could have clamped a straightedge jig across the seat and run my router against it to hog out the 1/4″-deep waste, but that was more bother than needed. I just routed it freehand, stopping my straight bit shy of my layout lines, then chiseled away the rest of it. Easily done; the legs and tenons seated perfectly.

But, that’s not quite it … these joints won’t benefit from much glue strength since the connections are mostly crossgrain, so I reinforced them with 2-1/4″-long dowel pegs. To zero-in their locations — 1-3/8″ in from the stopped ends of the dadoes — I shot a short brad into the center of each dado with a nail gun, then clipped all but a little stub off with a wire cutter to create a chiseled point. Dropping the legs back into place pricked a neat centerpoint to mark exactly where I’d need to drill those dowel locations. After pulling the brads out carefully, a 7/8″-diameter Forstner bit at the drill press took care of the dowel holes. Lowering my drill press table way down the column enabled me to bore 1-1/2″-deep holes right into the end grain of the legs — but be sure to brace them against a squared-up support for accuracy if you do it like I did.

Hey, you might be wondering … where did he get 7/8″-diameter dowels? Well, good question, and here’s the answer: I took a 1″ oak dowel rod and shaved it down at my table saw by spinning it slowly against the miter gauge. It’s not difficult and, working carefully, I reached a snug fit for those loose-tenon joints. Once I cut four dowels to length, I gave the seat board and legs a final scraping and sanding while the surfaces were still easy to reach. I could see the homestretch of this project coming into view!

Final Assembly and Finishing

I’ve already mentioned that there’s not much glue holding these joints together, so what little adhesive there is has to do the job well. I used my two-part epoxy and a bottle of PVA (polyvinyl acetate) “yellow” wood glue. I like epoxy because it buys me some more open time to get things assembled without a panic. It’s also a good gap filler and plenty strong. I spread epoxy on the dowels, into their holes and onto about an inch or so of the tenon shoulder area next to them. The rest of the shoulder stays dry so the board can expand and contract across the grain.

I brushed some PVA on the back flat long-grain surface of the tenon cheeks as well as the long-grain surface of the notches. I chose yellow glue instead of epoxy here because it seems to interact better with long-grain fibers.

A short assembly table in my shop brought the foyer bench components up to a comfortable working height for me to bring the joints together. I used a pair of long cauls with cambered edges to distribute clamping pressure evenly across the seat board, and four long bar clamps pulled the assembly down tightly to my table top. It was a good solution.

Once the glue cured, I applied a coat of Natural Watco Oil first, to let the warmth and color of this two-tone walnut really shine through. After a rubdown with steel wool, I followed with wipe-on poly and several more rubdowns in between. Wax topped it all off. I think this little bench is a fitting end to show off what nature already started so well.

Click Here to Download the Drawings.

– Greg Wood

The post PROJECT: Foyer Bench appeared first on Woodworking | Blog | Videos | Plans | How To.

That this cart is truly effective is not an accident. Working with the staff at Woodworker’s Journal, we tried many different approaches and gadgets in mock-ups and prototypes before we got to this simple configuration. (Contributing Editor Sandor Nagyszalanczy’s expert advice was especially useful in this effort.) It’s designed to be connected to a standard 4″ dust collector hose. The end wings and back (which, when lowered down, becomes the top) tip up to create barriers that block the dust as it is literally thrown from the sander. Curiously, we found 1/4-sheet sanders to be some of the dustiest. The downdraft table panels — four steel plates with holes and rubber non-slip grommets preinstalled — allow the dust to be sucked down into the vacuum chamber. If you team up this table with a random-orbit sander that has its own dust collection system, your overall dust collection will be remarkably effective (although not 100% dust-free).

The other features that make this little cart even more useful include an aluminum-covered top that, when folded down, can be used for any number of shop tasks; storage in a drawer and on an open lower shelf; a handy little jig for tearing sandpaper into perfect quarters to fit jitterbug sanders; and two casters that allow you to move the unit around with ease. I think it will make a great addition to nearly any woodworking shop.

Starting Out

I used standard 3/4″ birch plywood to make the majority of the components of this cart. There is some 1/4″ plywood that forms the bottom of the vacuum chamber and a bit of solid hardwood on some of the edges (I used cherry) — but any type of veneer core plywood will do, and the hardwood is your choice as well. It’s a shop project … but, hey, it can still look nice!

Use the Material List to cut out the front, back and ends (pieces 1, 2 and 3) of what I call the vacuum chamber — the top section that will eventually slide down onto the base. These pieces are butt-joined using biscuits and glue.

I put the sides up against the locked fence on my table saw to give me a 90° secure setup for slicing the biscuit mortises. When the pieces are prepared, go ahead and glue and clamp them together, checking for square as you do. Note that the front is 1/4″ taller than the back. Next, cut the chamber’s end and front and back cleats and bottom pieces (pieces 4, 5 and 6).

I used a circle cutting bit in my drill press to form the opening for the dust port into one of the bottom pieces. Check the Drawings for the location. Plow grooves into the chamber’s end cleats at a 7° angle, using a 1/4″ dado head.

I found the best way to assemble and install the angled bottom into the vacuum chamber was to use a really strong tape (duct tape or its equivalent). Adhere a strip to the underside of the bottom pieces, apply glue to the seam, and then flex the bottom into a slight V.

Get ready for assembling the bottom and installing it into the chamber by flipping the subassembly upside down and setting it on three 1/4″ spacers. These spacers accommodate for the front’s extra height. In addition, place 1″ scrap blocks inside the chamber subassembly positioned against each end. The reason will become clear in a moment.

Install the chamber end cleats so their grooves fit over the ends of the thin bottom subassembly, and push the whole thing down until it stops on the 1″ scrap blocks you just placed. Then drill pilot holes and drive screws through the chamber end cleats. The four front and back cleats that support the chamber bottom are added next. I installed these using a simple “rub joint,” moving them gently back and forth until the glue tacked and grabbed.

Once the glue has cured, turn the chamber over and install the glue blocks and center support (pieces 7 and 8). The metal downdraft table panels rest on the center support and the chamber end cleats when you are using the cart. The last pieces to make and install on the vacuum chamber are the end wings and the top. Cut them to size from 3/4″ birch plywood. Trim the edges of the top with cherry hardwood and sand it flush (pieces 9 through 11). Now take a few moments to drill and secure the magnets (pieces 12) to the back panel (see Drawings) using epoxy. Fasten the piano hinge to the top edge of the chamber back (piece 2), then attach it to the underside of the top so the panel will stand up at 90° to the chamber when open. Transfer the positions of the magnets to the underside of the top, and mount the magnet washers. When that’s done, install the end wings to the chamber with more lengths of piano hinge (piece 13), positioning them so they are tight against the top when in the upright position.

Attach the barrel latches (pieces 14 — available at your local hardware store) to the wings and then mark and drill holes into the underside of the top to accept their barrels. You are almost done with the vacuum chamber. Position one of the dust ports (pieces 15) over the opening you made on the angled bottom, mark and drill its mounting holes and use short hex-head bolts, washers and nuts to install it. Put the vacuum chamber aside for now and move on to building the base.

Constructing the Base

Construction techniques used in making the rolling base are stone simple, but still sturdy and practical. Start by cutting out the tall and short ends, front and back panels, lower shelf, handle and the divider (pieces 16 through 21).

Grab the base front and back and get ready to shape their ends. I made a template from MDF to the exact shape of the end (see the Drawings for details). By forming the shape on a template, I could fair it up and get it just right. If I made a mistake, I could just start over on another piece of MDF — I wouldn’t have wasted a good piece of stock. Once the template was accurate, I transfered the shape onto the handle panels, stepped to the band saw and rough cut the shape just outside of the pencil line.

Then I chucked a pattern-routing bit into my router table. Attaching the template to the pieces with double-sided tape, I could carefully rout the shape. It left a nice smooth edge. Repeat the process on the other panel. Next, I selected one of the pieces to be the front and receive the drawer opening. I marked out and rough cut the opening with a jigsaw. I made another template to exactly the drawer opening size and template-routed that opening as well. Routing leaves the edges smoother than the jigsaw can. The pieces still need a pair of stopped holes drilled on their inside faces for the handle, plus some cherry trim along their lower edges. You also need to cut the bottom curve on the tall end piece and use the circle cutting bit to bore a dust port hole through it. Do that final prep work now, and you’ll be ready for assembly.

Get out your pencil and marking tools, because it is time to warm up your biscuit cutter. Mark out and locate the biscuit slots. When they are cut, dry-fit the base subassembly together so you can verify the fit and practice your clamping procedure. At this point, I would recommend finding a friend to help with the gluing and clamping, and it might be very helpful to pre-glue the biscuits into the panels so you don’t have to handle them during glueup. (While it’s not required, if you have a nail gun handy, well…you will find it very handy!)

While the subassembly is drying, make the lower stretchers (pieces 22). I started by cutting blanks and milling a 3/4″-wide x 3/8″-deep groove along the lengths of their inside faces. I stepped to the band saw to cut the stretchers’ bottom profiles to shape. Align these cuts so they turn the groove into a rabbet where the curved edge straightens out (see Drawings), and sand these cuts smooth. Add some hardwood trim to their top flat edges before fitting the stretchers against the bottom shelf and gluing them in place with biscuits. When the glue dries, attach the two casters (pieces 23) to the bottom shelf with short lag screws and washers.

Adding the Sandpaper Cutting Jig and Drawer

Build the sandpaper cutting jig next. Cut pieces 24 to 27 to size and assemble them with glue, as shown in the Drawings. Secure the hacksaw blade (piece 28) with #4 screws, and mount the jig to the cart with screws driven from the inside.

The last major bit of work is making and mounting the drawer. Cut the drawer parts (pieces 29 to 32) to size. The drawer box sides and ends have 1/4″ grooves formed on their inside faces for the bottom, while the front and back have rabbets cut as shown in the Drawings. Glue and clamp the drawer parts together. While it dries, secure the drawer spacer (piece 33) in place as shown on the Drawings. (The spacer is needed to help mount the left drawer slide.) Mount the slide hardware (piece 34) to the drawer box and carcass, and slide it together to hang the box. The drawer face requires a routed recess to accept the drawer pull (piece 35), which you can install now. Center the drawer face on the box and attach it with two screws driven through from inside the drawer. Way to go, you’re almost done!

Grab two more dust ports and mount them “back to back” on both faces of the tall end panel with bolts, nuts and washers. Drill some countersunk pilot holes on the inside faces of the cart ends to prepare for attaching the vacuum chamber. Grab the vacuum chamber and slide it down into position on the cart. Lift the cart up onto a bench, and drive screws through the pilot holes to attach the vacuum chamber to the cart. Now cut a length of flexible dust collector hose to fit between the dust port on the bottom of the vacuum chamber and the one on the inside face of the cart’s tall end. Secure it with tubing clamps.

Two things remain to be done. First, glue a thin sheet of aluminum to the cart’s top using contact adhesive. (Most big box stores sell sheet aluminum.) Trim it to fit with a carbide chamfering bit in a router — it works surprisingly well. Sand off any sharp edges of the aluminum when you are done and your cart is ready for the last step — finishing. I used Watco® oil. It is really easy to apply, dries hard and can be touched up in a snap. It’s the perfect shop project finish.

Click Here to download a PDF of the related drawings.

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