 Doing an autopsy on a carcass. Well, it may not be a human being and it may not be somebody who's passed away, but this is my carcass, the carcass for a workshop cabinet. And when you're done building something, you should probably stop and do an autopsy and make some notes about all of the mistakes that you made so that you can look at those notes before your next big build and then try to avoid some of those things. I am accumulating quite an encyclopedia of notes of mistakes that I've made and that's called experience. Hola woodworkers, Paul Carson here, a small workshop guy. So I've got this cabinet pretty well done. I'm putting on some finish. That's a mistake we'll talk about. But I just wanted to talk about this carcass for a workshop cabinet. It's a 16 drawer cabinet that does not use drawer slides but rather uses some runners. And it's a face frames first build. I have another video that talks about the face frame first method in more detail and gives little sketch up illustrations all the way along. I'll put a card up here and I'll put a link down below in the description if I can remember. If you want more detail on that, you can go there. My face frame first, what I mean is I built with some poplar this frame, this exterior frame and that's all I did first. I put some pocket hole screws back here in the styles and then the bottom and top, bottom and top on the far right hand side. I didn't do these and then I pocket hold them together into the rails. And then so that's all we had. Now right there, you better make sure that that puppy is absolutely square 90 degrees because if that's all everything else will be off for guaranteed certain. Fact is I think the biggest lesson that I'm learning after several years of doing this is A, try to get much, much more precise at the very beginning of the project. You can't make up for it later. So when you're getting a face frame put together as your first step, make sure you are exactly 90 degrees at all four corners. In doing that, it helps to have a really nice square and an accurate one. This one's been tested and a large one because that'll help give you more indication whether you're truly square over quite a number of inches rather than just using some little six inch T square. All right, so make sure that's square. First mistake as I was putting some of these plugs in, I realized that I had not gone deep enough with my countersink and so the screw head was just barely inside there so it didn't leave me any room to put in the plugs. And so I had to take out a few of the screws countersink further and make room for the plugs. You can see these plugs. What's the mistake? The mistake was being in a hurry, just grabbing a piece of poplar, going to my drill press and drilling out the plugs without getting any consideration saying, hey, poplar is poplar. Well, apparently this color of poplar is different than this color of poplar. So I should have looked at my face frame and decided what kind of poplar as far as the grain and the color and so forth I should grab to do those plugs. I could find some poplar that's got this in it. In fact, there's very little of my poplar is this clear, but apparently all of my plugs came out of a very clear piece. So there's another mistake. When you're creating plugs, take a little time and find the wood you're going to pull them out of that matches the wood that they're going to go into. What am I going to do about that? Is there a solution? I think the answer is yes. I can't tell you for sure yet. Matt Jackson of Next Level Carpenter is one that taught me about these. These are a set of wax tints that you can take to finish up a project. And if you've got a little color mismatch, then you can find the right color here and apply the wax. I haven't done it yet because the instructions say do it after you've got all of your finishes on. So we'll see how that comes out as far as a method to fix it. This is from Fast Cat. It's called the Soft Wax Kit. I'll try to remember to put a link down below, although maybe it's not available through Amazon. But you can certainly go to the Fast Cat website and get it. Now, one big mistake that I have is because I'm not using drawer slides, I'm just using these runners. I wanted to have a little bit of room in the width of my drawer so that it wouldn't be too tight because already I'm running based on friction. Now I've waxed all of this with some hard furniture wax so that it's nice and slippery. And I waxed all the inside. I didn't bother to lacquer or use any finish on the inside. All wood wax. But here's what I did wrong. I built my drawer widths of the boxes with just a little bit too much wiggle room. It turns out that with that little bit of wiggle room, then when I put in a drawer, let me grab one here, the drawers are done using the quarter, quarter, quarter method. When I put in a drawer then, it has some room back and forth. Although maybe I tried to do a sixteenth of an inch on each side, I wasn't precise enough and so I think I got a little bit more than that. Well, that's no problem. It goes in here, it goes up nicely against the face frame and you think that would be alright. But when you're trying to build the face and get them all lined up properly, the fact that you have drawer that move back and forth, then it's very, very difficult to do all of your alignment. And so, I wish what I had done was built my drawers so that they were tighter in the opening just by making the front and the back a little wider and then they wouldn't move around as much. So then when I'm trying to put on the fronts, it would be easier to get a nice alignment. Again, it is a shop cabinet so that's not the end of the world. It's not like a chest of drawers up in a bedroom and that's why you do your shop furniture first to teach you what to do when you get to the real furniture. I got one more mistake that I'm discovering during autopsy. Had all this beautiful Baltic birch plywood with Baltic birch edge banding that I did almost everywhere. But my whole cabinet looked this color or this color and I took some boards, similar same material and I tested a lot of different finishes to decide what would look good. But the mistake I made was I think my sample pieces where I put down different kinds of material. For instance, the Watco Danish oil that I put on one piece of that wood. It looked like kind of like what I wanted. It didn't look like it changed the color hardly at all. But I think what happened was I have too small of a sample and so I put these samples there side by side and they didn't look that much different so I picked the one that I thought looked the best and so I just decided when it was time to put that Watco finish on here. I just poured it on the top and got going. I said, the minute I did that I said, uh oh, that's a mistake. I like it the way it's bringing out some of the grain and so forth but I don't like it that amber, that color. I should have, even after I had tested on different sample pieces I really probably should have tested it, oh I don't know, on the inside or on the back somewhere. I could have just tested it anywhere other than the whole top and it would have probably told me that I should go back to the drawing board and change to a different finish. Sanded it all off and then I put on some shellac and then it really came out cool. It was kind of an artistic model, how do they say that? So anyway, it's like those fancy walls you see in the fancy homes so kind of like the way that turned out. That's my autopsy of my carcass. I'm going to write those mistakes down and make sure I don't repeat them on any future projects. Small workshop guy, hoping you'll like, comment and subscribe. Have a nice day and be safe in your workshop.