wood plans end table

(rock music) marc: welcome to part twoof our end table series. last time we were pretty much at the point where we needed to makea decision on how the stretchers were goingto join up to our legs. some of the options that we had were, of course a mortise and tenon joint. wouldn't be too difficult, a lot of ways you could make a mortisein a piece like this,

with either a router, orusing a mortising chisel and bit set on a hollow chisel mortiser. the tenon of course, iwould probably just use a miter gauge and a dadoblade on the table saw. i would say the only tricky thing about that is the fact thatsince these are coming up at probably about a 10 degree angle, you're going to have to makean angled tenon on this piece. that's the only tricky business there,

but even still that's nottoo bad on a table saw. far and away the mostpopular option that everyone seems to want to see isthe sliding dovetail. for anyone who's not familiar,we pretty much know what dovetail joints are, they'remost commonly used in drawers, but there's a sliding versionwhere it's a very long joint, like this, and another piecewhich would be the male of the dovetail slides intothe female slot, like so. very strong joint, extremely resistant

to pulling apart in this direction, and if you notice onthis samplee that i made, that goes all the way through. that's exactly what we don'twant to do in the final piece, this was just a sample soi wasn't worried about it. if it goes all the way through, the glue is going to holdit in place but technically this could slide all theway through and come right out the bottom, there'snothing supporting it.

when we make our final cuts we absolutely want to leave a littlebit of material here and make what would be a stopped groove. we want to make sure thatthere's wood there so that we resist thatdownward motion as well. between that, the dovetailitself and some glue, that's going to be a very strong jointfor this little end table. it's going to be cool,it's going to be awesome, and it's going to be a heck of a lot of

fun getting that joint to fit perfectly. (bouncy synth music) here's one of my leg blanks,and here's our template. if you put it onto theleg blank you could see in this region here iswhere we're going to need to create a stopped sliding dovetail, and the question is howare we doing to do it. i know i want to usemy handheld router with an edge guide to actuallycreate that groove,

but we've got solid material here. even if we mark it out with apencil that this is the area that that dovetail groove isgoing to go, how do you get the bit through the materialand then start going in? i've got a couple tricks up my sleeve on how we're going to deal with that. should be interestingso let's check it out. put our template on, lineit up with my fingers. and trace around with a pencil.

the important thing hereis this area right there, right where the otherpiece is going to join. we want to transfer thosepencil marks to the edge. extend those lines allthe way across the edge. now remember, the leg issitting like this, we want to have it stop at a certainpoint, our dovetail groove. i'm going to put a line at about three quarters of an inch up from here. i think that's enough material to give us

the support that we're looking for here. draw another line, and then i want to indicate that this is not to be touched. i might even use some chalk here so that there's no question,literally fill that in. i only want my dovetail slot togo that far, and then it stops. now here's our challenge. we basically need to driveour bit in above this line somewhere, because this isall waste material up here,

if you look at the final shapewe'll be cutting this away. but i still want to get accesswhile this is here so that my router base can rest on thisfull surface and be really safe. you can't just plunge thatdovetail bit down and go. i mean you can, but it gets a little bit messy and it's a little bit scary. i'm going to make my lifea little bit easier by drilling a hole here aheadof time with a forstner bit. i'm going to go downabout a half of an inch,

since my dovetail groove isonly going to be about 7/16ths. it will be a little bit higher than that. i'll be able to set my router down, plunge down into thatopen hole, and then start pulling through the materialand stop at this point. that's the procedurethat i'm going to use. check this out. we'vegot our router set up, i've got my dovetail bit in here, it's protruding about 7/16th of an inch,

and i've got my edge guide in place. it's not set yet, that's whatwe're going to focus on right now. if you look closely, i don'tknow if you could even see it on there, we've got theblack on black situation here. what i've done is i've set my adjustable square here and i didit in a practice area just to make sure i got the right number. what i want is a channel in the middle that is about a half of an inch wide.

i do a line from each sideand i have a perfectly centered half-inch line zone in here. that is going to be wheremy bit is going to travel, i want to clear all that material out. in order to do that wehave to go in two passes. we'll put the edge guideon this side first, travel from our holeall the way to our line. then we'll come back,switch the router around, put the edge guide on this side,

and do the same pass that willestablish the far line here. you have to do it in two passes, i don't even know thatthere's, i'm sure there are dovetail bits that canhandle that in one shot. that would have been nice,but the advantage here is i will guarantee thati have a dead-centered slot by doing it once on each end and removing a little bit ofmaterial on both sides. if you have a really,really deep and really

wide dovetail slot that you're creating, it may not be a bad ideato chuck up a straight bit that fits well within these borders, and run that straightbit through there first. that will clear out thebulk of the material, then you come back withthe dovetail bit afterwards and shape it to the propershape that you want. that puts a lot lessstress on your router bit, and your router, and onyou, because it doesn't

want to pull you in anyparticular direction. (grinding) notice here, i did stay alittle bit short of my line, we've got a little bitof extra material here, but i'm going to relieve that material with a chisel and clean it up that way, so that i can be sure thateach one is in the same spot. with the dust collection and the router bit going and everything,

it's very hard to stop atexactly the right location. a chisel and traditional hand tools are the best way to clean that up. the female dovetail slot iscut into all four of our legs. they all look pretty good, came out nice. we can probably, at thispoint, turn our attention to milling the maleportion on the stretcher, but just for a secondi think we should turn our attention to the center of this table,

we haven't really talked about that yet. my concern here is wherethese joints all come together in the middle,there's going to be four pieces that we have to beconcerned with, and how do you get four pieces all comingin at a 10 degree angle to meet in the middle and be secureand be a nice tight joint. there's a lot of ways that youcan do it, with a big half-lap, you could use some sort ofcomplicated crossover of dowels. i've been tossing these ideas around,

i still don't 100 percentknow what i'm going to do. i think that's going to beour challenge for next time, and any suggestions youguys have would be welcome, but one thing i am consideringis the dovetail slot. the reason we have tothink about it at this stage is we could saveourselves a lot of trouble if that's the routethat we're going to go. i'm actually going to millthis stuff now, and even if i don't use it at least i knowit's there and ready to go.

while i was milling my stock,i've told you guys in the past, always make sure you mill extra material just so that you have it on hand. you just never know, forpractice cuts, things like that. you're going to find a lot of times where that's going to save you a lot of trouble. when i milled this up i milledup a few other pieces of scrap, so i took one of thesepieces and milled it, turned it the other way andmilled it to the same thickness.

now this is a perfect square representing the thickness of our stock material here. technically, if i wantedto, if this were one of the stretchers comingin at a 10 degree angle, and let's say insteadof a round center piece, i wanted to make mine square. well, it's already the perfect thickness, so that if i were able to mill the dovetail slots in here on all four sides,

i could potentially have away of connecting everything in the middle, andusing the same material. that's why we need to think about it now, because if this is the same thickness, then i technically shouldbe able to go over, put this in the bench, do the same exact routing procedure on all four sides, one pass on each side, and make the same exact size slot that we have on our legs.

if i could do that now and just have this material ready to go, it may just be a no-brainerwhen it's all said and done. i've got to cut the male sideon one of the stretchers here, all i have to do is cut thesame male on the other side, and technically, it should fit perfectly. i've got something reallycool here to show you. i just started routing theslots for the center post, the female dovetail slot, and i gotthrough my second one and it

didn't take more than a coupleinches before i was like, "uh, this is going to be a problem." they're too deep, so fora piece of this dimension, watch what happens, thosepieces, wah-wah-wah-wah. they get awfully close to each other, leaving very little material here. all the strength that we'retrying to gain from using a dovetail is completely outthe window if we do this. what i was hoping to do wasto avoid having different

sized dovetails in thecenter than the outside, but it's unavoidable at this point. again, this is all partof designing on the fly. that's something that i probablywouldn't have even thought of, really, until i got tothat point, but the reason, i actually had just said thatthat this will save your butt. when you make extra materialand you've got it on hand, it will definitely save yousome trouble in the future. perfect example of how that works.

i basically brought it upabout an eighth of an inch, moved it in just a littlebit so it's not as wide, and this is what i wound up with. that's reasonable, and i don't see any reason why that isn'tgoing to work for us. now it's time to startcutting some test pieces to see if we could get this fit right. the problem is even if i dohave a test piece, let's say something like this, there'sno way to get that in there.

what i'm going to do ismake a rough cut on the bandsaw and remove thistop corner of material, just as if we were cuttingit out for the final product. i'm just going to leavea little bit of extra material, maybe about a16th, and remove that. this is one of those timeswhen the bandsaw blade is just too wide for thecurve that we want to cut. i simply do two straight cuts that will essentially break thecurve into smaller chunks,

and my blade can handlethat with no problem. i finish the cut from the other direction. now i use a piece ofscrap to set up the tools. i mark two lines on theend of the test piece that correspond to the bottomof the dovetail groove. i then extend those lines allthe way across the end grain. next i want to remove the excess material in order to reducestrain on the router bit. i set the blade height sothat it's well under the line.

using my miter gauge at the proper angle, i make a few passes to removethe majority of the waste wood. remember that the apronpieces are cut at a 10 degree angle so we need to adjustthe gauge accordingly. next i head to the router table where my dovetail bit is already installed. i make a few passes and makea little adjustment here and there to the bit heightand the fence as i go. once the sample fits themachines are all set up.

i go through the same process with my actual work pieces, with one addition. i start by scribing a line around the perimeter using a marking gauge. this is going to reduceany chances of tearout. now we're making some serious progress. my stretchers both havethe dovetails on them, and of course like we haddiscussed, the one that goes into the legs is alittle bit wider and more

substantial than the one thatgoes into the center piece. you can see the center piece has now been trimmed down to the appropriate size. at this point the onlymajor thing left to do with these parts is to trimoff part of the dovetail, because remember, this hasto come all the way down and then sit right on top ofthis stopped groove here. in order to do that we need toremove some of this material. hand tools is the best waythat i know to get that done.

(sawing) i take it down as far as ican without actually touching the base in this area here,because we don't want to show any marks on the outside,that will really screw it up. get down nice and close. just like price is right,closest without going over. then i get the flush trimsaw and i utilize this reference surface here tosaw away that material. i'm putting a lot of pressuredown with my fingers here.

take your time here, no rush,you just want to make sure this edge is nice and crisp,and even straight across. once i have a clean cutacross i can be a little bit more free with my motion here now, because that was the critical part. as i'm cutting acrosshere in this position, i'm actually going toput my finger here and bend the flexible saw up a little bit. i don't want to harm theintegrity of that edge,

so by pushing up a littlebit i can guarantee that i'm scooping out thatlittle bit of material. take it all the way down. let's see what we're left with here. not bad, huh. it's pretty flush. any left over material there, easy enough, just grab a chisel and pare it away. now with all of the dovetails trimmed down, everything is pretty close.

the thing is, there's anatural variance because we used a router to dothis, and there's a lot of variables that can causesomething to fit perfectly in one of these slots but alittle tight in the other. it's best to go around to each and every one and find where the best fit is. then once you have that, label them. you want them to correspondto a specific socket. that way you can fine tune themto fit perfectly, individually.

for instance, this onei labelled number one, it slid in really nice tothis particular groove here, but it didn't go down far enough. at that point i grabbed mychisel and i did a little bit of work to round over thispart here, because straight from the saw over thereit's not round, it's square. to really get it to seat nice and perfect, and get everyone to sitin the proper position, go back to the chiseland round over the end of

this piece here, and havethem all fit individually. same thing goes for thebigger dovetail on the legs. i'm going to match themup to each individual leg, number them, and then finetune them individually. fine tuning consists of alittle bit of chisel work. be extra careful here not tochange the angle of the dovetail. a quick test fit and we'reready for the glue up. that is, if i can get this piece back out. (bright blues music)