[♪] This time, on the Woodsmith Shop , we're building a craftsman style classic.

It's called the bride's chest, but it's a perfect storage piece that's easy to build in your shop.

There's a lot of great woodworking here, so it's time to start building.

ANNOUNCER 1: Major funding for the Woodsmith Shop has been provided by: ANNOUNCER 2: Old Masters.

Craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

ANNOUNCER 1: Additional funding provided by-- ANNOUNCER 2: Titebond wo od glues, the pro's advantage.

ANNOUNCER 1: And by-- ANNOUNCER 2: Kreg.

From the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

ANNOUNCER 1: And by... [♪] The basis of construction for the bride's chest is frame and panel assemblies.

Now frame and panel construction is a tried and true method that produces from the simple to the very complex, flat, strong, true panels that aren't subject to the whims of humidity and that weigh a lot less than solid wood.

The bride's chest has no less than six frame panel assemblies.

Two ends, a front, back, a top, and a bottom.

Our first step in constructing the bride's chest and all these different frame and panel assemblies is, I went ahead and planed all of my lumber to exactly one inch thick.

Afterwards, I've cut it to width and I've cut it to length.

The first step in our joinery work is going to be to cut a centered groove down the appropriate parts.

The first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to take a small adjustable square, and then I'm going to set my blade height to half of an inch high.

So that's going to set the depth of my cut.

Create a centered groove.

I'm going to move my fence in and I'm going to place it approximately centered but a little offset.

So I'll make one cut, reverse my piece, and make the second cut.

And by doing so, I'm going to always keep my cuts centered and I'll move my fence out incrementally, and each time I'll check the fit with my panel.

The fit that we want from these panels is that it should slide in easily, but not rattle.

So with that I'm going to turn this on and we'll get started.

[♪] [whirring] The front, back, and two sides of a bride's chest come together with a 45-degree bevel cut for 90-degree corners.

So we need to cut 45-degree bevel cuts on the edges of all of our outside stiles.

To get good results, two things we need to do.

One, when we have our blade, tilted over to 45-degrees, get some scrap, do a couple rips, and make sure that it is a true 45-degree angle that your blade is set at.

The last thing we want to happen is-- when we go to glue things up, to find that our corners are either open or too closed.

Second thing, for a long rip, do hardwood.

I really recommend that you don't use a thin kerf blade.

Use a good sharp full-thickness rip blade.

To add a little extra strength, and aid in assembly, our beveled edges of our end stiles are going to receive a spline.

So our next step is to go ahead and cut a groove into the end of this beveled edge.

I have a dado stack on my table saw, a quarter inch, and I have it set approximately center on this face.

So this spline is going to help when it comes time for glue-up to keep things in alignment.

[♪] The last step in our joinery puzzle is going to be to cut the tenons on the ends of our intermediate stiles, and on the ends of the upper and lower rails.

To do that, I've put a dado stack on my table saw, I have it buried in a sacrificial fence and I've put a fresh fence on my miter gauge, and that will prevent blow outs as we pass each part through the dado stack.

Well, now I'm ready to glue-up this panel and I'm ready because I took the time to do a rehearsal first, and dry assemble everything.

So before I start, let me talk about one more thing.

One of the things that we have to do to assemble this panel is that we need to apply clamping pressure along its length.

And to do that, I'm going to end up crushing this delicate mitered edge on our end stiles.

So what I've done is to create another part which mates against the spline and now I've got a nice smooth flat edge to apply clamping pressure to, while at the same time, protecting this delicate mitered edge.

So with that, I think we're ready to glue.

I'm going to start by applying glue to these two center stiles, apply the center panel and then place the two rails.

Now, I think it's important to apply glue to both mating surfaces when doing a glue-up.

So I'm going to put a little bit of glue... in my groove as well as on the tenon.

I've put pencil marks on both rails so that I know where to position the stiles.

I also have pencil marks on my two in-stiles so I know how high to place my lower rail.

[♪] With that, I'm ready to apply glue to our in-stiles and our in-rails.

I'm going to go ahead and place clamps across these intermediate stiles and begin to pull that together.

So to check for square, I'm going to temporarily just remove one of my clamps, because with these additional pieces I can't really square off the exterior of my part; and that seems to have done it.

We only get one chance to make things square, so spend the time to check and recheck.

And there we go.

All that's required now is a little bit of patience to let the glue dry.

It should be ready to sand, prep, and start assembling the casework of our cabinet.

Well, I'm all ready to glue-up the bride's chest.

I'm going to start by gluing the bottom panel into the back, and then going to add one side, the other, then I'll add the front.

With that done, I'll add a band clamp, flip it up at another band clamp, check things for square, and we'll be all ready.

[♪] Okay.

Clamp's in place.

I now need to check my corners and make sure they're tight.

In order to draw them that final little way, I'm simply going to use a bar clamp and give things a little bit of a squeeze.

So last, and very importantly, I want to make sure that everything is square and true.

So I'm going to use a framing square.

And that corner looks pretty good.

Never hurts to check things from a lot of different places.

Having that bottom panel in place really helps pull things together square, but still check, be sure.

It'll make your assembly go a lot easier on down the way.

I love adding details to a project.

These corbels you see here, turn a basic box into something really special.

The corbel itself is simply glued onto the panel.

Now, if we were using solid wood, I would want to glue just the edge of the corbel to the edge of the stile, but since these are plywood and it's stable, I can glue directly to the face.

Because these parts are a little difficult to clamp, I'm going to use a special high-tech trim glue.

All I need to do is just press them firmly in place.

[♪] While, Chris has the construction of the bride's chest well in hand, I thought I'd take a little time out here and talk about some options that you have for the panels on this project.

Now of course, for the project that we're building, we're using Quarter Sawn White Oak.

It makes sense as it matches the rest of the materials in there.

Now the original plans for the project called for using solid wood panels in the frames.

Now there is a cost to doing that though.

You'll end up having to do a lot more planing, gluing up, and smoothing, to get those panels to fit.

So what we did instead to simplify the process is to use Quarter Sawn White Oak plywood.

What's really nice is, that over at the table saw, you can just cut the pieces to their size and they're going to fit right in and the effect is the same as if you do solid wood.

Now when you do that though, you want to take some time here in cutting out the panels so that they look good.

You don't want to be frugal here.

Instead you want to go for appearance.

So you could see that I've found the joint line for the plywood veneer and centered that on my panel.

It gives it the best look.

Now, Quarter Sawn White Oak makes sense for an arts and craft style piece, but one of my goals for this season of the show, is to talk about ways that you can take the plans in a different direction and personalize the project.

One easy option is to swap out what you're using for the panel, and go with something different.

For starters, you could keep with a plywood theme and instead use a contrasting material.

Here is some Mahogany veneer that I thought would look really nice.

Now the Quarter Sawn White Oak for the frame pieces has that distinctive ray fleck and figure, so I didn't want the panel here to compete with it too much, so I'm using a real straight grain mahogany veneer and you can see that with the mahogany being a little bit darker, it complements the frame pieces in oak really well.

But you could go with a lighter theme and try a lighter look to it and get a totally different effect.

For this one, I'm using maple, and I went with a curly maple veneer on this one, because I thought that the curl in the figure on the maple played really well with the ray fleck in the Quarter Sawn White Oak.

It lightens up the whole project.

So if you could imagine this whole piece with the maple on there, adds a whole new look to it.

Now the light dark theme we can continue on, but instead of using veneer or plywood pieces, we can go with a different finish option altogether.

One of those is to use paint.

Now on a different project that's very similar to this that appeared in Woodsmith magazine, I built a blanket chest that was made from Quarter Sawn White Oak, but instead of using White Oak panels, I use birch plywood and painted it a dark blue color like you see here.

I think it grounds the piece overall and gives it a sense of weight and solidity.

And I like the overall effect of that contrast between the natural finish and the figure on the oak and the dull matte finish of the milk paint that I used on the panels.

It ends up creating a nice contrast.

But going along with our light and dark theme, another option that we can do, is to swap that out for a lighter color paint.

And here this one, I'm giving a nod to my sisters-in-law, who really like the contemporary gray colors that you see.

So going with the White Oak, now I have a light gray color, and again, it freshens up the look of the entire bride's chest, and gives it a little bit more of a contemporary look.

So while the plans for the magazine and that you can download, have all kinds of instructions to 'em, you don't have to follow them religiously.

In fact, by making a few simple changes, you can come up with something that is remarkably different and totally personalize it for yourself.

You know, there's oftentimes that hardware really makes or breaks a project, and our bride's chest is no different.

Now there's not a whole lot of hardware on it.

There's set of hinges to open the lid, and we have opportunity to add these decorative corner brackets.

Now whenever we have a metalworking task come up, I kind of roll my eyes.

Metal's not the easiest material to work with.

It's hard to cut.

It can cut you.

But, with a few simple tools, it's really not that bad.

And when I'm all done, usually I think, "Hey, that was kind of fun."

So let me show you how we make these corner brackets.

I'm gonna start off with a piece of metal and these are available at most hardware stores.

The first thing I'm gonna do is lay out my shape.

And to do this, I'm gonna use some layout fluid.

This layout fluid's just going to allow me to describe the shape and see the line.

It'll show up a lot better than if I try to scrub it on the bare metal and it's more accurate than if I try to make it with like a permanent marker or Sharpie.

All right.

Once that layout fluid's dry, we can go and mark out our bracket shape, and because I already have one that's cut out, I'm just gonna trace this.

So, position it on there, and I'm gonna use a scribe and etch into that layout fluid.

And let's go and mark these hole locations as well.

All right, and you can see that the layout fluid makes those lines show up nice and bright.

So now we can cut this out.

So let's clamp it down to the bench.

[♪] All right.

Now, once that's got the shape, we can go ahead and refine the shape with a file.

And as you're filing it's important to remember that files only cut in one direction.

They cut on the push stroke, so make sure you lift your file every time, or you're going to load it up with filings really quickly.

[♪] All right, so now that those holes are done, we have to score the back of these brackets.

And we wanna do that because we're going to bend these to 90-degrees.

The scoring gives a little bit of room for the metal to make a nice clean 90-degree angle.

So, how do you make the score?

Use this-- is simply holds an angle grinder and then I can lower it and make a cut.

I'm not gonna cut all the way through, but I'm gonna remove about half the thickness of the metal.

All right, so after the groove's cut, I'm gonna let that cool down a little bit, and clear off this bench.

And then we'll go ahead and bend these and add a finish to 'em.

So after we're done scoring our brackets, we go ahead and bend them, but we're gonna do one thing first.

To add a little bit of color, the plans call for using a chemical aging solution.

Now I'm gonna deviate a little bit here.

Instead of chemically aging them, I'm gonna use a process that I've used before.

So you see I have a hot plate set up with a pot on it.

We're going to fill that up with hydrogen peroxide, and we want to make sure that it's gonna cover the brackets fully.

And we are now gonna add some regular table salt and we'll just add that to taste and the amount of the salt doesn't really matter.

We just want to get that hydrogen peroxide saturated with the salt.

And we'll go on and let that heat up to boiling.

But for now, let's turn back over to these brackets.

What we want to do here is we want to sand them, we want to get the finish on these nice and even, and then we'll go ahead and bend them and degrease them.

Now I'm going to give it a good bend to 90-degrees.

All right, perfect.

So let's go ahead and degrease these with a little bit of denatured alcohol.

Really here, we just want to get any residual oils off.

So now we're ready to stick them in the hydrogen peroxide.

Alright, so we're going to let the brackets rest in that simmering hydrogen peroxide for a few minutes.

And you'll see it starts the bubble really quickly.

What this is going to do is it's going to cause the surface to rust.

What we're looking for here, is a even, thin layer of rust on the entire thing.

Once that's done, we'll pull it out and we'll switch this out for some distilled water.

All right, so now that we've pulled our bracket out of the hydrogen peroxide, I switched that over.

Now this is a pot of plain distilled water.

Now it's important that it's distilled.

Now going back to this bracket, I went ahead and brushed it a little bit with a toothbrush just to even out that rust color and you can hit the hydrogen peroxide multiple times, so long as you get a nice even coverage of rust.

And now, we're just gonna grab this bracket and we're going to put it in the distilled water that's starting to simmer.

This is going to sit in there for a couple minutes, five or six probably, and you'll notice that, that rust that's red starts to turn blue, and that's when we'll pull it out and take a look at it.

And this is going to dry pretty quickly.

I'm going to use a rag.

Grab some of that water that's rolling off there and now I'm going to hit it with a block of wax.

That's really going to seal down that color and it's going to give it a good luster.

And because this metal is hot you don't really want to grab it, but it works perfect for melting that wax on.

Let's turn that around.

And once that wax is cool, we can go ahead and buff that up and it's going to look great.

And these are going to get applied with these little decorative nails and they'll be simply nailed on through the holes that we drilled in the brackets earlier.

So I'll go and get the rest of these finished up and we'll get these on the chest.

Okay, Chris, when we're talking about reproducing a piece, as a designer, what are you thinking about?

Well, I don't think we need to be slaves to the original piece itself.

I mean, take this.

This is a Gustav Stickley bride's chest.

It was built and designed for a particular style, a particular way of thinking, a particular way of living in that day.

We can change those things and make it suit our way of living, our techniques, the way we like to build, the way we like to live.

So you're taking more of an inspiration from a piece rather than trying to reproduce it.

Absolutely.

Now from the original Gustav Stickley piece, we've taken a couple of elements.

First off, White Oak, these lovely corbels, some iron work.

All this comes together to give us that flavor, that influence, that we want.

But from there you can start playing around with some things like changing up the sizes.

Because when I think craftsman style pieces, they feel and look pretty massive.

Yeah.

And they can be, but like you said, this is, you know, we're taking inspiration from the piece.

So we can change stuff.

And in here we've changed a few items we changed out the panels a little bit, changed the size, but we've stayed true to the craftsman style.

I think us as woodworkers, really enjoy that.

I think you're right.

You know, we have to design pieces of furniture to fit our lives and the way we live, and that was what this was about.

And that's part of the whole craftsman ethos, is being able to build something on your own with honest joinery.

After the construction wraps up, it's time to start thinking about the stain and finish.

On our version we chose a brown stain that's just a little lighter than your typical craftsman look.

And we protected it with a few coats of spray lacquer.

Of course you can use any stain and finish combination that you choose.

And I'd love to see what you come up with.

To build this project, plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

So once the finish is dry, you can add the brackets; and then attach it-- plans are at our web-- And here we chose a special type of hinge that stays open and is guaranteed not to slam shut.

What you end up with is a great looking project that's sure to turn into a family heirloom.

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Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild edition, with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild edition, and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of the Woodsmith Shop are available on DVD, or you can watch them online, from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

ANNOUNCER 1: Major funding for the Woodsmith Shop has been provided by: ANNOUNCER 2: Old Masters.

Craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

ANNOUNCER 1: Additional funding provided by: ANNOUNCER 2: Titebond wo od glues, the pros advantage.

ANNOUNCER 1: And by... ANNOUNCER 2: Kreg.

From the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

ANNOUNCER 1: And by... [♪]