 Shop cabinet build part one Well, I would work here's Paul Carlson here a small workshop guy What I'm doing is building a shop cabinet. In fact, I'm gonna build About six or seven different shop cabinets, and they're all gonna be the same technique Over on makers mob There's a builder John Peters. You probably know him. He's a very well-known YouTube creator And a very talented guy and so most of this build is from a series of videos I watched him do but I'm gonna add my flavor to it for beginners The first one that I'm building is actually gonna be for a router table I'm gonna have a total of 16 drawers in this one cabinet I've designed it so that it will fit out my regular door and Into the carport when I need to get it out of my way and that's the way you have to work in a small workshop Everything has got to be movable and capable of moving it out of your way when you're working on something else So part one just gonna be talking about the carcass And I'm gonna do this a little differently I'm gonna kind of show you step-by-step different stages in sketch up so you can kind of get a good visual and this is not intended to be a Short video. I have another whole series of videos called what the heck is and those are intended to be Well under five minutes most of time and they're designed for raw rookie beginner woodworkers And they're just talking about a lot of very short things This is a longer build. This is for the new beginning woodworker Who wants to maybe build some cabinets first for their workshop where it's not the most critical result in the world What were the steps in order to get to where I am and again as I go through these steps? I will then go to Sketch up model and show you the progress up to that step an initial step Was to actually do this face frame So I did the exterior of the face frame For this set of cabinets, I'm using one and a half inch a wide poplar three-quarter inch thick poplars a good wood to use because it's It's nice to work with really nice for face frames. It's it's a three-quarter inch stock and One and a half inches wide. So I have obviously the rail the top rail the bottom rail and then two styles they're called Things that are go horizontal are rails and things that go vertical are called styles So I have the top and bottom rail and then two end styles and then two middle styles The end styles are one and a half inches wide The middle styles are three-quarters of an inch to line up with the three-quarter inch Panel that's going to go on the inside which is a Baltic birch or Russian birch plywood When you want to do a really nice Project you probably want to use Russian birch or Baltic birch because it doesn't have any voids. It's got lots of layers Sometimes the top and bottom layer a little thicker so you can do a little more sanding But you do have to be careful with that because you could sand Right through the layer and then it looks like crap all right the way in which the Face frame was constructed you would think you would build the carcass and then put the face frame on it to dress it up But actually the face frame first is a way So that you can get things lined up properly and I'm going to do some cabinets that are only going to be One drawer wide and I'm going to do some cabinets that are going to be two drawers wide But the process is exactly the same. It's just that if I have one drawer wide then I wouldn't have the two middle styles I just have the ends and if I can do two drawers wide I do would just have one middle style Not necessarily in the middle because maybe I want some drawers of different sizes. So anyway rails and styles face frame One and a half inch poplar by three-quarter inch wide. Did I say that already? I think I said already several times put pocket hole screws lay on the back side of the styles and no pocket holes in the rails and then I can lay that all down on my workbench and Connect it with those pocket hole screws Don't cut all your materials at once Particularly don't work on the drawers or cut the drawers when you're doing your initial preparation or dimensioning of wood Because you might do what I did I did a set of sketch up plans that called for one thing and Then when I got the carcass built I had made a mistake on the placement of these middle styles and the result was I was more narrow over here and wider in the middle and There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's just not the way I did the plans So I've altered the plans, but if I had cut all of my drawer parts Everything well most everything would be scrapped because I would have drawers parts that are too wide For the two ends and too narrow for the middle so it would be one great big old cluster You know what? All right, so don't do your drawers till you've done your carcass. That's my first piece of advice Because you may not have done the carcass perfectly and you want your drawers to fit your imperfect carcass All right, so step one was just do the face frame Step two is to have your sides your very outsides But on this three-quarter inch plywood. I have put a half inch A rabbit on the back edge Facing in so I have a half inch rabbit back there and that's going to eventually receive a half inch plywood back So I get that rectangular Side piece cut with nothing more than the half inch rabbit on the back the rabbit So this is three eighths deep and a half inch wide And that will receive the plywood perfectly So what I want to get those attached you can use squeeze clamps to pull this plywood piece against the style and then drill in the front and then Screw them screw them together and I also put a layer of glue Where this plywood piece is going to meet the style now I did the outsides first that gave me some nice frame Rigidity if you will these are not in there yet. The next thing I want to do was get the bottom on so to get the bottom on I put a Poplar three-quarter inch poplar along the front edge and along the two sides underneath they're basically at the bottom of the sides and at the and at the bottom of this Rail so with that Attached and on the inside they gave me something to put the plywood bottom onto And so I put that on there Screwed you know drilled and countersunk and screwed This plywood base three-quarter inch plywood to those cleats. I guess you could call them. I put some Rectangles in the four outside corners, and I put a support beam Underneath where these two internal panels are going to go so I built up that base down there, and then I put a Face frame or a piece of poplar And that could well be plywood because it's going to be hidden But poplar again is not that expensive. It's nice to work with so I put that so now I had That underneath layer completely built So with the face frame built the sides attached to that face frame Some cleats put along the bottom the bottom inserted on top of those cleats and then build up The areas down below that are going to hold the wheels because it's going to be a mobile cart and support these I was then ready to put on a back brace And a top Brace on the back So those are inserted right at the edge of the rabbit With screws going through the sides and they're glued And that provides even more stability to my outside edges I believe it was next but then I put pocket hole screws in the bottom of my internal panels Not in the top just in the bottom and then I Attach those middle partitions to the base using those pocket holes And pocket hole screws and also I drilled through The middle face frame styles and attached it there So now and all the time checking with a big square To make sure that that things were staying square And and that's something you do throughout the whole process the time to catch something Leaning or out of alignment is as you put it together Not trying to come back and fix it later Particularly when you're gluing things So I've got glue involved between the face frame And the middle partition panels And so screwed and glued All right that at that point I've got All of the framing here And then the next thing I worked on Was to create some pleats for shop cabinets You know it depends on how much money you want to spend but Where I've got 16 drawers 16 sets of nice slides Would be you know, let's just call them $20 a set maybe they're $15 a set but 16 times $20 a set is $320 so $250 you know $350 for drawer slides is not something I want to do Because I'm going to do six or seven cabinets And they're not this is going to be the biggest one with the most drawers But I just don't want that expense And I have tried these before and they work perfectly well if you do them the right way So these are all of them are three quarters of an inch wide and again, I'm using poplar Because you can't wear off a layer of poplar you can wear off a layer of plywood maybe Not in my lifetime not the lifetime I got left But my plan here is for my whole garage And everything in it to be inherited by one of my two sons Who has an inclination toward this kind of stuff So I want this stuff to be built really really well And to last for a long long time All right, so on the cleat design In these two middle panels, I have a one inch wide three quarter inch thick pleats in order to place them I went on my plans and decided what size everything should be And then once I did that mathematically on my plans I double checked my plans with what's called a story stick So I just got a piece of plywood and I laid out Everything according to what my plan said the measurement was and then I Checked that against the carcass that I built to see if my mathematics worked out all right And uh, I want to do that before I started installing pleats After I was satisfied that you know my top drawers would fit in over here They I wouldn't run into these backing frames or the face frame Then I went according to my designs and I created two spacers one for the bottom Drawers and I'm going to have this drawer be the same height as these two drawers here So I have one for the bottom drawers and it doesn't matter what size because it depends on what cabinet you're building And I just placed that in there and then Had pre-drilled My cleats if you have a drill press you probably want to do them that way But you know have them countersunk so that your screws get out of the way Plus it just looks better and then I put some glue on the back of that cleat And then I went ahead where I had pre-drilled it and I drilled again so that I'd have a starting point Or a little bit of drill into the plywood And then I went ahead and drilled in my screws in this case This was one inch and I did a one and a quarter inch screw and again it's glued The screw almost sort of holds it in place while the glue is drying But man that is rock solid so I've got in those bottom cleats and the idea is for the drawer to fit in here And then because the next cleat is designed To hold the next drawer up it also acts as something to keep your drawer from tipping and my design is to Have this be one sixteenth of an inch taller Than the tallness of my second drawer So then I create another spacer that is one sixteenth taller than my desired drawer height And then that can go in there to put in this cleat this cleat and this cleat and over here on the sides I've even got You know some more going up because I'm going to have more drawers there The reason I'm going to not going to have as many drawers here and this will probably be the last drawer This cleat is just to keep it from tipping is I'm going to have a router coming down here The design of this cabinet is going to be such That I'm going to have a lift top And so my top and it's only going to be part of the top It will lift up and expose my router for me so that I can change bits easily and do Change routers or do whatever I want to do So I I'm tired of Getting down and looking underneath my router table And this is just an alternative to buying a you know 400 1300 dollar Fancy router lift on the exterior side because I have a face frame That is three quarters of an inch beyond the edge of this Now there was this side panel is lined up with the outside edge of that face frame So it looks decent on the outside of the cabinet So the design over here on this side panel is for The one that's going to hold the drawer That is one and three quarters inch wide Because I have the three quarters inch behind the face frame and then I want the one inch out kind of matching this one inch and then So those are all put at the right height using that spacer again Again, the bottom one is done By using the tall spacer and then this one is done by using the short spacer The After I get those all the way up, then I come back and I put just a three quarter inch wide which is behind the face frame And that's just intended so that the drawer won't rack left and right And so the drawer will pretty much have a one sixteenth inch clearance on the sides and this Will keep it from racking So I just put those in each one For that purpose All right, so that is The carcass I'll attach the top at the very end because That would depend on what kind of cabinet you're building It could just be a simple plywood top And so there's different ways to fasten that you could just sort of fasten them up through the face frame or through this back frame as well Either straight or through an angle But like I say mine can build a special design for this one cabinet all the other cabinets will just Have a top for my tools So that's the carcass John peters had a really neat way of doing it a lot of the work i'm going to do on the drawers Is using a method that I learned from next level carpentry Matt Jackson, so Nothing I do is invented by me. Well, that's not necessarily true I kind of feel like I at least invented the name the saw stallions for my saw horses my trestle style saw horses I don't know why I always whistle when I try to say trestle search So that's part one the carcass of a uh mobile workshop cart Of whatever size you decide to make it construction method is all the same and rock solid small workshop guy Hoping you'll be safe in your workshop And always remember you can't stop the waves But you can learn to surf