hey I'm Bob but I like to make stuff today I'm gonna make a modern dresser this video is sponsored by Squarespace if you need a domain website or online store make it with Squarespace we're back up here in the room where my three boys stay and we worked up here a lot we renovated the room we made some bunk beds we made a climbing wall but now we've got something more practical to do we're gonna combine three separate dressers into a single dresser to save some floor space and we're gonna put it right here below the window we're gonna make it really wide and have three separate columns of drawers one for each of them and I think we're gonna cover it with a really nice hardwood on the front let's do it this piece was going in a really specific spot so I measured out the area making sure to account for the trim that was on the floor I wanted it to sit on the inside of that baseboard but still take up as much space as possible after that I started cutting down some plywood I ripped it down into some big pieces and for the cuts I made with the circular saw I put down some blue tape first this helps keep the top layer of veneer intact and so it doesn't splinter when you run the blade through it the carcass for this dresser is pretty much like every cabinet ever made there's a top and a bottom piece and two side pieces there's also two dividers in the middle of a piece that are a little bit more shallow because the drawer fronts are gonna sit in front of them as I often do I use pocket holes to put this carcass together you can go the route of doing it in a more complicated way with specialized joinery but you're not actually gonna see the outside of this you're only gonna see the front face of this piece so it doesn't matter how it's put together I often get some complaints about using pocket holes but honestly it doesn't matter they're fast they're easy and they do the job just fine to start assembling this I screw down a cleat to my work table and then push the pieces up against that he gave me a hard stop for the bottom and the side piece this lets me glue them hold them in place up to my speed square to keep them at 90 degrees and then put in the screws after getting the outside box put together it was time to put in the two dividers in the middle I measured in an equal distance from the outside and then used a big t-square to draw some lines after I got both of these drawn I flipped the whole piece over and did it again so that I have those matching lines on the top and the bottom of the inside this will make it a lot easier when putting in the pieces and getting them aligned up but before I put those pieces in I marked out a place on the top back of each one of them so that I could cut out an area to put in a brace this brace is gonna go edge to edge across the entire piece and make it a lot more rigid this is going to help it from being able to collapse if you pushed on one corner now the lines I drew are actually just to show me where to put the glue so I put some glue down in between those and then they used a scrap of wood as a spacer against the outside edge to actually sit the divider by using this one spacer it's consistent in every position so I put it in every time before I put it in a screw making sure to push against it so that everything ended up in the right place of course on the top I had to clamp it to the piece so that it didn't fall down but this is a great way to space things really evenly across several different openings at this point it was pretty strong but if he pushed on the top corner you probably could collapse it I had some glue in the notches that I'd cut out and along the top of this one by four before pushing it in place after I got it in place I counter sunk some holes from the outside and drove in some screws just to hold it in there really good and solid they used some wood filler to cover these up this entire thing is gonna get painted so when it's all said and done you won't see that at all I also drove in a couple of screws through the middle spacers just to be safe after that it was time to add some edge banding to the plywood this is a great way to make plywood look a lot more like solid wood but I said before that this is going to be painted so that doesn't really matter what matters here is that the end grain of plywood all those different little plies soak up paint differently and you have to use several coats of paint to get it to look uniform by putting down some edge banding here you're painting one solid surface and it makes it way easier to get a nice clean look so I down all the edge banding and then trimmed it with a knife and sanded it to be nice and flush before painting this entire thing white with the sprayer then it was time to make twelve drawers the top nine were exactly the same the bottom three were the same size but a little bit taller so I set up a stop block to cut all the pieces for all of the drawers at one time before assembling anything I finally got all these pieces cut down to length and so now I need to add a dado so we can slot in the bottom and I'm gonna put a rabbet on the end of each one of these pieces that's a whole lot of rabbet cuts I put on my dado stack so that I could cut a slot that was 3/16 that's the same size as the material I wanted to use for the bottom of each of the drawers after I've got that in place and set to the right position with the fence I cut a dado into each one of these pieces this data has cut into all four sides so that the bottom panel of the drawer can fit in and be locked in from every direction after those were done I put on a sacrificial piece of wood next to the fence so that I can move it all the way up to the blade this makes it so you can cut all the way to the edge of the piece of wood without the blade touching your fence and messing it up so I made a rabbet cut on both ends of each one of these pieces half the thickness of the material this makes the corner of the drawers a little bit stronger because there's more surface area for the glue after that was done I cut down several sheets of 3/16 plywood to be the bottoms for the drawers get all the panels cut and all the drawer pieces cut so now we're going to assemble them everything is going to be glued together and I'm going to use these really short Brad nails to hold all the rabbits in place while the glue dries the glue is definitely going to do all of the work in keeping these things strong got the drawer boxes already but we can't install them yet because I'm waiting for the drawer slides to show up they'll be here in a couple of days so we're gonna move on to putting some legs on the bottom of this originally I was going to turn some tapered wooden legs on the lathe I decided against that and then we moved on to getting some of the steel pipe this is the same stuff that we used for the bunk beds up in my boys room where this piece is going to go so we got this to use but now that I see it in place it actually doesn't really have the look that I want so we're gonna use some 3d printing to make some covers that will go over these and then we can make the legs look like anything that we want the first important step here is to make an accurate model of the piece of pipe and the flange together I used some calipers measured it out and recreated that as a 3d model from there you can draw any profile shaped leg that you like and rotate it around the same center point the shape doesn't matter you just have to make sure that the section in between the floor and the bottom of the pipe is printed solid not hollow while those are on the 3d printer we're gonna move on to milling up some of the wood that we got for the drawer faces we got these big pieces of cherry and they're gonna run all the way across the piece on every row of drawers so first we have to run these through the jointer and clean up the edge and then plane them down to the right thickness actually before that I cut them down to basically the rough length a little bit extra so that I didn't have to play in any more than necessary this video is sponsored by Squarespace if you've got work that you want to show off or maybe you have an online store that you want to open or a podcast you want to launch Squarespace is a fantastic way to get a website up and running very quickly you start with one of their beautiful templates and then customize it to show off the work that you want to put out into the world it's a really great way to do it without having any programming knowledge whatsoever also there's never anything to install or upgrade everything just works you can go sign up for a free trial by going to Squarespace calm / Isle TMS and get your website up and running and when you're ready to launch use the code Isle TMS to get 10% off your first purchase if you need a website or if somebody else you know needs one be sure to go check them out at squarespace.com / IL TMS thanks Squarespace the widest of the board was actually too wide to go through the planer this gave me one clean edge so that I could cut it down to roughly the right length before ripping it to the right width and running it through the planer I planned all these boards down to three quarters of an inch which is what I had planned for when building the carcass and the drawers then I ripped the widest piece the one for the bottom drawers down to its final width this made it so it just barely fit through the planer to get it down to its final thickness the 3d prints were done at that point so I tested one of them out and it worked pretty well all of the cherry was playing down to its correct thickness so I ripped all of the pieces down before cutting them to length I gotta admit I'm a little bit nervous to cut these down to length because they're beautiful boards and they cost a fair amount and if I screw it up it's gonna be wrong can't undo it but we've gone over the number several times I think we'll be good these were measured out so that they would fit on the inside of the carcass frame with an eighth of an inch space between the frame itself and between each one of the drawers and if that gap was different from place to place it would just totally look wrong so it was really important to make sure to cut on the correct side of the line and get all of the cuts exactly in the right place then it was time to put in all the drawer slides for all of the drawers this took a long time to mark out but taking your time to get everything marked in the right place makes it a lot easier to get them installed correctly I got these templates that clamp on to hold the drawer slide level while you screw it in place that was a big help we also made a little template for the side of the drawers so the rails always got put in the same place even after getting these installed I had to do a little adjustment to get the Front's of the drawers all flush that was really important because the next step was to put on the new drawer fronts made out of cherry and to get those drawer fronts installed the first step was to add some double-sided tape to the Front's of all of these boxes I put some eighth inch spacers around the outside before setting each one of these pieces in place this forced the gap to be the same between the outside and in between each one of the drawer sets I wanted these to be permanently locked in place before I cut them down into individual drawer fronts we pulled out an entire row of drawers at the same time and use some clamps to hold the cherry against the drawer boxes with that held in the correct place I countersunk some holes from the inside of each drawer and drove in some screws the holes and the screws give me a place that I can reposition each one of these drawer fronts after they're cut into individual pieces after that we move down to the next drawer and then did the exact same thing for the other rows and I actually really liked how it looked to have one solid piece running across an entire row at a time I considered leaving it like this but then decided against it in the end next I needed to draw the line so I knew where to cut I did this while everything was still in place I laid it on its back and drew one line from top to bottom from there I took out all the screws and then peeled off the tape for each row then using the crosscut sled on the table saw I cut each one of these pieces down into the individual drawer fronts rather than adding Hardware I wanted to make a cutout for you to open and close each one of the drawers but I also wanted them to be all exactly the same so I made a template of a piece of scrap I drew it out marking where the center point of the opening was and then cut it out on the bandsaw then I marked the center of each one of these pieces and lined up those lines I traced the shape on to each one of the drawer fronts and then cut it out with a jigsaw I could I use the bandsaw as well but I actually had better luck with the jigsaw in this case finally got all the drawer fronts done and they turned out great I'm really happy with how they're looking and the shape that they're in now it's time to finally put the finish on them I did some tests with finish and tried several different things I tried Danish Oil I tried polyurethane shellac and some tung oil finish and they all looked pretty good but I ended up deciding on Danish oil because it kind of adds a protective finish once it hardens and so we're going to use this and do probably one coat maybe a light sanding and then a second coat on all of these first step is to do a tack cloth to get rid of all the dust on the surface and then we'll lay down some finish the drawer boxes were just slightly shorter than the drawer fronts so because of these cutouts I also had to make a cutout on the boxes I marked where those needed to be on each one of the drawers and then cut it out with the jigsaw these shapes were much bigger than the ones on the drawer fronts so that you wouldn't see any of this plywood when he looked through after cleaning up those cutouts it was time to put on the drawer fronts for good I drove the screws back into the box with the tips just barely sticking out the front edge these gave me registration points so that I could drop the drawer faces down and get them right back in the right position holding those down and drove in the screws and it pulled everything together I finally got the piece put into place and it was supposed to have legs but I've decided not to put them on the original idea was to make the leg out of this flange and steel pipe and then cover it with this 3d printed tapered leg this would actually work out really well and I want to use this in the future but on this particular project it actually just doesn't make any sense it looks fine as it is sitting on the floor plus if we lift it up we just have to clean underneath it so for now we're gonna leave it as it is go ahead and put the drawers in and call this one done but in the future if we ever decide to move this anywhere else we can always add the legs to it later and another cool thing about this leg idea is that you could sculpt any shape that you want and 3d print it and just make it to fit over this [Applause] and here it is it's all finished and I absolutely love the way it turned out but I got to be honest it was a long road to get here there were a lot of problems that we had building this that I didn't put into the video because they're not really relevant but I'll let you know now we had to completely replace the outside plywood box because the first batch of plywood we got had a lot of warp in it and the gap all the way around these drawer faces looked awful we went back and forth on drawer slides and had to end up getting the more expensive ones overall this project cost way more than I thought it was going to in fact the cherry on the front of this was actually the cheapest part of the project because we got that from a local sawmill but given that I needed to build a dresser to fit a specific space and a specific set of needs this turned out great I'll also be very happy if I don't have to make any drawers for a very long time I'd love to know what you think about this one let me know down in the comments and I've got lots of other types of projects furniture and 3d printing and all sorts of other stuff be sure to check that over there and don't forget to subscribe that's it for this one guys thanks for watching I'll see you next time pipe like I used on the bit yeah that's it for this one guys thanks for watching see you next time test yeah but all that said if you need a big dresser something that fits how how do I say it