My favorite piece of furniture I've designed and made myself so far is this spice cabinet in cherry. There are of course some things I would change if I were to make it again, but overall I like the look and it works well.

Details

Some things of note about the piece:

• Cherry was locally sourced from a neighborhood tree service company
• Hand-forged hinges, pulls, and nails
  • Hinges and pulls by Horton Brasses
  • Nails are by Clouterie Rivierre (usually available at Lee Valley)
• Hung on french cleat
• Door slats are held together by clinched nails

The second major project I attempted was building myself a workbench. By this point I had started down the rabbit hole of hand tool woodworking and saw how nice it would be to have a workbench with a vise, holdfast, planing stop and so on.

I chose to build Will Myers's "Moravian Workbench" because:

1. The video is easy to follow and well made
2. Building it requires most of the basic hand tool skills
3. The bench itself is incredibly strong and stout
4. It's easy to modify the bench with e.g. a tail vise, dog holes, etc.
5. The bench is meant to be broken down and reassembled
6. The bench looks nice

I didn't know about Lost Art Press yet, otherwise I would have probably picked up The Anarchist's Workbench (it's offered as a free PDF now as well). I still think my choice was a good one if nothing else because of the transportability due to its knock-down-ability.

One thing to note about this design is that it's a pretty narrow working space (though you can certainly modify it to your liking), with the tool tray taking up half the top. I've seen people modify the tool tray either by filling it with some laminated plywood to increase the depth of the top or by having two bench tops rather than a tool tray.

Joinery

As I said above one reason I liked this as a first project is that it made me practice hand tool skills. The undercarriage on this bench requires the following joints:

1. a bridle joint at the top of the legs
2. a mortise and tenon for the short stretchers on the legs
3. a half-blind dovetail (just one) stretcher on the bottom of the legs
4. a wedged through-tenon connecting the long stretchers (tusk tenon)
5. dovetails to connect the sides of the tool tray
6. frame and panel for the bottom of the tool tray

Additionally there are a lot of angles to practice sighting with the bevel gauge when creating the mortises. You can also drawbore the leg joints together, but I did not do this at the time.

Snags

No workbench to build workbench

Not having a workbench yet (a position most viewers of the video are likely in) I set the bench top on some saw horses and attached a Sjoberg vise in order to work on the undercarriage joinery. Myers mentions this in the video, and it works surprisingly well, just a bit wobbly.

By this time I had found a nice hardwood dealer who also milled lumber to specification, and so had them ( B&B Heartwoods ) mill me the correct width/height pieces. I went with a maple top, and poplar for the undercarriage/tool tray. Custom milling is expensive, and you can certainly build this bench for much less using yellow pine like Will Myers and gluing up components yourself. This is the route I would go down now, but again this is much easier with a workbench at the ready.

I had the Sjoberg vise on hand and so decided to just use it rather than buy/make the wooden vise in the video. The vise works fine, but having used it for three years and tried other vises I would like to add the traditional vise at some point.

Big mortises

There are eight big through mortises in this bench: the middle short stretchers and the long stretchers. There are also through mortises in the long stretcher for the wedges, but this can be done without pre-drilling the holes and using a mortise chisel.

Mortising with a mortise chisel is straightforward and automatically clears out the side walls due to the bulk of the chisel. This is not the case if you follow Will Myers and drill holes to clear out most of the material and then go back with chisels. I recently did this again on a different project and it's about as difficult as I remember. This time around I figured a few things out:

1. Chop the corner end grain first

   End grain is easier to chop straight than long grain in mortises. This is because the long grain tends to grab the chisel which causes the chisel to dive down. This is the main challenge here. It's not really possible to chop end grain near the holes that were drilled, but by starting at the ends you can get a pretty straight mortise by chopping out the end grain at the corners.

2. Work back to the knife line

   It's very easy to overshoot your knife lines on the long grain of the mortise, so work back to it carefully and leave enough of a knife line to set the chisel in for the final chop.

3. Reference the chisel off of the edges to clear out the inside

   My biggest tendency was to undercut the inside of the mortise too much. It's probably a good idea to undercut the smallest amount so that the joint goes together without too much effort, but I tend to overdo it on these mortises due to the "grabbiness" of the sides. Reference your chisel across both sides of the mortise to determine if any bumps need to be removed, and use the known flat sections to set your chisel against to "plane" off the bumps.

Lots of panel saw work

This project made me love my big panel saw. I got a 26" long 4 1/2" TPI rip saw which is maybe a bit long for my short body (I frequently hit the floor when using a saw bench) but it feels nice to use. The biggest tip here: keep it sharp. Get a saw set (lots of antique ones that work perfectly) and a triangular file and a way to clamp the blade for sharpening (doesn't need to be fancy, you can use some plywood to rig something up in a pinch). If it feels like a cut is taking too long then it probably is.

As Will Myers says in the video, it's sort of amazing how accurate you can be with such a big aggressive rip saw. Once you make your cuts, you'll smooth them out often times with a shoulder plane or (my favorite) a router plane. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to cut on your line, not near it for fear of overshooting. If you never cut on the line you'll never get good at it. If you don't think you'll be accurate enough then draw the line so that you give yourself some wiggle room to plane off later, but sawing away from the line will just stunt your skills and make things take longer.

The first piece of furniture I ever made was a built-in murphy table made of red oak, and I had very little idea what I was doing.

I made the table because my wife and I bought a small (less than 800 sq. ft.) house in Ann Arbor without a dining room, and so she suggested the idea of the table. After a few designs we settled on a drop-down version with lock-out leg hardware. We decided on top-down due to the length of table we wanted (~35" or so) and the height of typical tables (30" tall), so down-folding would hit the floor without some fancy mechanism to accordion the top. I had also fooled around with using all-wood mechanisms for folding down the legs, but in the interest of time and simplicity I went with metal hardware. The wall support is screwed into the wall studs with construction screws, and the table top is hinged to the support with four brass butt hinges. The top railing holds the table to the wall with a flip-down latch and has a slot on top for putting cards or other decorations. Finally, everything was finished with a water-based polyurethane.

It works great, has held up well and looks good if you don’t look too hard, but in hindsight there are a few things I’d change:

1. Orient the grain direction so it spans the length of the table top :

   First of all, why did I orient the grain perpendicular to what you would normally see?

   At the time I knew a bit about seasonal wood movement, and knew that the hinges would likely split the wood if they were screwed in along the direction of grain movement. To account for this I oriented the grain parallel to the hinges (see picture). This made the table less strong but at the time I didn’t know how to make breadboard ends or even really how to use hand tools. To compensate for the reduced strength I screwed battens across the planks with some widened holes to account for grain movement. I’m not sure the battens do much, but they made me feel better at the time in any case. Despite three years of use the table has yet to collapse.

   One benefit of this grain direction is that I didn’t have to do anything special to account for wood movement on the legs, I could just screw the hardware in.

   The most obvious way to change this design would be to simply use breadboard ends. It’s not too hard with my current skills, keeps the tabletop stable and looks good. The most obvious drawback is that the tabletop and the breadboard ends won’t match exactly throughout the year, but I can live with this. Currently the tabletop grows and shrinks by about 3/8" over the course of the seasons (Ann Arbor is pretty moist), and so it almost shrinks too much to be held up by the current latch.

   Changing the grain direction would also remove the need for the battens.

2. Make a flatter top :

   

   At the time I didn’t know where or how to source lumber, how to dimension rough-cut lumber, or how to flatten the tabletop. I only knew how to (sort of) joint pre-milled boards using my contractor table saw and glue them together into a panel. So I bought some s4s red oak at a local place that mainly does cabinets and flooring and did just that.

   To joint the boards I made a jig that slots into the table saw and clamps the board to the jig. This way the boards are cut parallel to the slots rather than parallel at each point on the potentially curved board.

   To glue the panel I used a couple pipe clamps and several f-clamps and cauls to hold it (kinda) flat. This worked ok, and in retrospect worked better than it had any right to. At most there was about 1/16" sticking up on the seams. I then sanded and sanded and sanded until it was mostly flush. This was the most sanding I would ever do. In the end the tabletop curved probably 1/4" from bottom to top across 34", so all in all not terrible but not great.

   If I were to do this today I would buy rough lumber, maybe resaw if needed, and mill it either by hand or with machines if I had a shop nearby with a jointer/planer. Also, with change #1 above the glue up would most likely be a bit easier due to fewer boards. I also know to check the bend across the clamping direction. Finally, I would simply plane the top down after glue-up rather than sanding all day.

3. Mold the edges, improve leg joinery :

   I didn’t have any planing skills at the time, nor did I have any fancy router bits, and so everything is simply square or in the case of the support is beveled on the bottom. At the very least now I’d bevel the tabletop edges and more likely use some molding planes.

   The legs are held together with two dowels on each side which feels sturdy enough, but for a more appealing look and a bit more strength I’d probably use some mortise and tenon joinery.

Things I like about the design:

1. It's easy to put up/down

   The hardware on the legs is very easy to use to unlock/lock the legs as you raise/lower the table, and the latch at the top is similarly handy to do everything in one motion.

2. The top railing is nice for small decorations

3. The attachment using butt hinges to a support screwed into studs works well

4. The adjustable feet make leveling the end of the table easy