what's going on everybody I'm Johnny Brook welcome back to another crafty workshop video today's video I'm gonna show you how to build this kind of small dresser or what we're gonna use it for a changing table so as you might know my wife and I were expecting our first child and she had our son Monday morning his name is John Alford Brook v I'm the fourth but we're calling him Johnny five which i think is just awesome everybody's happy and healthy so really excited about that and this changing table has been working out really well probably change close to 100 diapers on this thing already and it's just been great it's got tons of good storage the changing pad fits perfectly this is a pretty standard pad so this should work for just about anybody out there and it's not too challenging of a build it's pretty simple case work with rabbits and dedos and a great kind of skill builder if you're looking to up your woodworking game so I will have plans available for this project in case you're interested in building one of these for yourself I'll have a link to those down in the video description below but without further ado let's go ahead an get started with the project I started this project as I do with most of my projects breaking down rough lumber which was walnut in this case I decided to use solid wood for this project mostly just for a bit of a change of pace since I've been working with a lot of plywood here recently I started the miter saw breaking down the board's into their final links next I moved over to the jointer flattening one face in one edge of each board with one face flattened I moved to the planer and brought the other face into parallel with that flattened face and I usually do this whole process at the jointer and planer in two stages allowing the wood to rest about a day or so between millings just to make sure it doesn't want to move after that final milling finally I headed over to the table saw and ripped each board to final width if you wanted to simplify this whole process you could use plywood for the panels or by pre milled lumber after milling I arranged the boards into panels laying them out in their final orientation based on any defects I wanted to hide or how the grain patterns of the individual boards flowed together next I marked out locations for biscuits which I used for alignment here you could also use Domino's dowel splines or any number of other alignment methods but I want with biscuits on this project with the locations laid out I cut all the biscuit slots making sure the biscuit joiner was well seated on the board each time next I glued up all the panels which went pretty smoothly since I had the biscuits for alignment I still got a little bit of unevenness probably due to the biscuit joiner being a little bit skewed when I was cutting the slots I let the panel sit in the clamps for about an hour and then remove the clamps and scraped off any glue squeeze-out after letting the glue dry overnight I ripped all the panels to their final width of 18 inches at the table saw to smooth out some of that unevenness between the boards I passed all the panels through my drum sander a few times just to get everything nice and flat and at this point I was basically to the point I would have been if I had started with plywood so again if you want to simplify things use plywood next I cut each of the panel's two final links with my crosscut sled first I've got one panel to size then marked the second panel based on that first panel to ensure they matched up perfectly on cabinets like this it doesn't typically matter exactly how big the cabinet carcasses end up what's more important is that each matching piece is the exact same length so that things stay square with the pieces cut to length I swapped over to a dado stack when my table saw setting it up for the final thickness of my panels about 3/4 of an inch I set the height of the dado stack to half an inch and then set the fence so that it was just touching the blade also I use a sacrificial fence when using my dado stack like this so that I don't damage my actual table saw fence and that fence is just a piece of scrap plywood after doing a few test cuts to make sure everything was set up correctly I started cutting the rabbits on the ends of the top and bottom panels after cutting all the rabbits in the top and bottom panels I move the fence over and cut the dado for the center shelf into the side panels first setting the height of the blade to 3/8 of an inch this height wasn't really super critical though since I cut the shelf to final length after assembling the cabinet carcase later with all the data in rabbits cut I could assemble the cabinet which went pretty smoothly I used a few corner clamps to make sure everything was nice and square and then added basically all my clamps to tighten up all the rabbits well I'm assembling let's talk about one of the sponsors of this week's video Powermatic the gold standard height of the power mattock p.m. 1500 bandsaw and PM 2244 drum sander to my shop a few months ago and they have been total game changers from my woodworking the added power of the bandsaw and extra width and precision of the drum have been absolutely amazing and I just know that these tools will ask me for many many years to come to learn more about these machines and the rest of my Powermatic tools check out the link in the video description below and thanks to Powermatic for sponsoring this week's video as I mentioned earlier I didn't cut that Center shelf to length until after the glue up so next I measured that length and then cut the shelf to length with the crosscut sled the fit was a little tight on the thickness of the shelf so I sanded both ends off-camera a little bit just to shave off a tiny bit of thickness and then once the fit was right I glued the Shelf into place with a little bit of glue and a few clamps when cutting the rabbits into the top and bottom panels I made sure to cut them a little wider than they needed to be just to make sure the panels were fully seated in the rabbits so next I needed to flush up the ends of the top and bottom panels with the sides I used my low angle block plane for this and it really was the perfect tool for the job I made sure to work from each end going towards the center of each panel and stopping in the middle if I went all the way across the panel the other end would have the tendency to chip out and once the ends were flush I added a slight champer to all the outside edges again using my block plane and there's just something extremely satisfying about this process it's so much more enjoyable than using a router and this is just a cheap stanley block plane nothing fancy and I actually haven't even sharpened it and it's worked flawlessly out of the box ah the link in the video description below in case you're interested I wanted to add a little bit of reinforcement to the rabbits in the form of eighth inch brass pins mostly just for looks really I decided to create a little jig to make this process a little simpler I measured the distance from the top corner to where I wanted to Center the pins about 3/8 of an inch and Mark the measurement on a scrap piece of plywood I also marked the center of the piece of the plywood both where I was drilling the hole as well as on the end of the piece next I drilled an eighth inch hole through the plywood over the drill press just to make sure the hole was perfectly square to complete the jig I added another piece of plywood with some CA glue and added a few Brad nails to use the jig I just hooked it over the corner of the cabinet and lined it up with the front edge of the cabinet I then drilled a hole using the jig to ensure the hole was nice and square and I drilled the hole about an inch and a quarter deep next I marked the center of the side panel aligned the center mark on the bottom edge of the jig with that Center Point and drilled another hole finally I repeated the process on the back edge of the cabinet and then repeated all those steps on all four corners of the cabinet I bought this brass rod at my local home center and cut it into pieces using some pliers although a hacksaw might have been a little bit easier brass is pretty soft but it still took some force to make these cuts but my pliers might have just been a little bit dull next I roughed up the brass pieces using some 80 grit sandpaper so the epoxy I used would have something to hold on to and then I glued the pins in place with some five-minute epoxy I used acetone to clean up the excess epoxy and then let the epoxy dry for about 20 minutes while the epoxy was drying I worked on adding the back panel to the cabinet first I sanded the back edge to remove any glue squeeze-out and then set up a half-inch rabbeting bit in my router I set the depth to match the half-inch plywood I used for the back panel and I only used half inch plywood because I had a scrap piece that was the perfect size for this but quarter-inch plywood would have been just fine here next I went about the messy process of routing in the rabbet and make sure to wear some kind of dusk mask if you're going to create rabbits in this way because dust gets everywhere and I mean everywhere I had walnut dust in my ears after this after vacuuming up the ridiculous amount of dust I cut the back panel the size over the table saw and then cut the corners to fit the rounded corners left by the rabbeting bit I cut the excess off with the jigsaw and then used the random orbit sander to smooth out the corners and this process only takes a few minutes and there's a whole lot faster than trying to chisel out the corners of the rabbit with the back panel cut to size I attach it to the inside of the rabbet using wood glue and 1-inch Brad nails the epoxy was dry at this point so I cut the brass pins flush with my flush trim saw which cut right through the brass and then sanded it smooth with my random orbit sander and the final look was really subtle but I think it adds a lot to the final piece both in the strength and the look finally I filled any cracks or knots with wood filler and then sanded the whole cabinet up to 180 grit with the cabinet down I started working on the drawers and I've had this two foot by 4 foot piece of half-inch thick walnut plywood hanging around for a while and it turned out that it was the exact size I needed for the two on this piece and when I say exact I mean there was literally nothing left over but dust it just worked out perfectly I cut the drawer box pieces to size over the table saw and then swapped over to the crosscut sled to cut the rabbits into the ends of the drawer sides and I've actually never assembled drawers using rabbits like this but I really liked how easy it made the whole assembly process later the rabbits were 1/4 inch deep by 1/2 inch wide and I probably should have switched back to my dado stack but I was feeling a little bit lazy next I cut quarter inch by quarter inch rabbits into the bottom edges of the drawer pieces to house the drawer bottom after cutting all the rabbits I dry fit the drawer box and measured the exact size for the drawer bottoms and then cut the pieces to size that the table saw out of quarter-inch plywood with all the pieces cut to size I assembled the drawers using glue and three-quarter inch Brad nails I used 14 inch full extension drawer slides for this build which were actually left over for my assembly table project and to install them I used the Rockler drawer slide jig since I was using inset drawer fronts I needed to offset the slides in the jig and I used an off cut of the drawer fronts themselves to set this offset to install the drawer slide onto the cabinet I clamped the slide and jig to the side of the cabinet pre drilled a few holes using a self centering drill bit and then drove in a few screws to install the other half of the slide under the drawer I marked out a few layout lines using a combination square lined up the drawer slide pre-drilled holes and then added screws after the hardware was installed the drawer slid right into place and were spaced perfectly although there was one thing I didn't account for when designing this project since the drawer pulls or the handles are kind of cut out of this right corner here that's gonna force you to kind of pull the drawer from that side and as you can see since this drawer is wider than it is deep that causes the drawer to rack a little bit now it's not a huge deal it's still gonna work but what would work better is if I had two drawers on each side so for total drawers that way they would be essentially just as wide as they were deep or the other option would be just to add to pull to either the center of the drawer or add two poles kind of again evenly spaced across the front of the drawer but I think it's gonna be just fine it's just something to consider if you want to build something like this for yourself alright let's get back to it with the drawers installed I could make the drawer fronts and I used rough poplar for this but I'd probably use plywood or MDF if I were to do this again the drawer fronts were eight and a half inches wide which is just wider than my jointer and this poplar was a little bit twisted which ended up causing some issues anyway i milled the rough lumber to size cutting it to rough length to the miter saw skip planing it at the planer jointing one edge of the jointer and then ripping into final width at the table saw next I marked out where the handle cutouts would be and in case you're wondering all of the exact measurements on all of this are in the plans which I'll link to in the video description below I cut the handle cutouts over the bandsaw first ripping the long edge of the handle and if you don't have a bandsaw a jig saw would work just fine here before cutting the handle cut out two lengths I've remembered that ahead and cut the drawer fronts themselves to final length so I did that over the miter saw I cross cut the handle cut out two lengths to the bandsaw and then cleaned up the cutouts with a chisel for the inside corners and a card scraper for the flat areas over the bench and if you don't have a card scraper I highly recommend getting one and learning how to use one properly they make really quick work of tasks like this and are dirt cheap finally I prepped the drawer front for paint sanding it up to 180 grit and breaking all the edges and while I'm sanding let's talk about one of the sponsors of this week's video arrow fastener arrow makes a wide variety of fasting tools including staple guns nailers glue guns riveters and more I used the arrow PT 18 G brad nailer and arrow Brad nails in this build and I have a ton of projects featuring arrow tools coming up including some exclusive projects going up on the arrow site so stay tuned for that if you'd like to learn more about arrow and their full line of fastening tools and fasteners check out the link in the video description below after sanding I sprayed on a few coats of flat white spray paint onto the drawer fronts and also you guys have any recommendations on spray paint I'm all ears I usually use this stuff available at the Home Center and I've never been particularly satisfied with it I don't like to use my HVLP system for paint since the cleanup is kind of a pain and I really don't paint that much so I'd really rather find a better rattle-can option so let me know if you have any recommendations in the comments for the finish on the cabinet in drawers I used a wipe-on poly wiping on three coats with the cotton rag and I just love the way those brass pins popped once I got the first coat of finish on there the final bit of finishing to do was spray-painting the hairpin legs I used for this project and I went with gold on the legs which I think played off the brass pins and matched it up really nicely with the walnut once all the finishes dried I could get the drawer fronts installed I used the playing card trick to space them evenly clamp them in place and then added a few one inch screws through the inside of the drawer making sure to pre-drill and countersink the holes first finally I could install the hairpin legs I marked in one inch from each side of the cabinet using a speed square pre-drilled the holes and then added the screws with the legs added the changing table was done alright hopefully you guys enjoyed this one I'm really happy with the way this one came together I think all the design elements just really came together perfectly the white drawer fronts the brass pins the gold hairpin legs totally in that mid-century modern aesthetic and I just love it it's also functioning great as a changing table as I mentioned at the beginning of the video we've changed a bunch of diapers on this thing already and it works great so again I do have plans available for this in case you're interested in building one of these for yourself I've links to those down in the video description below also have links to all the materials and tools I use on this project as well as a link to my patreon page which I'm revamping when we put now monthly kind of behind the scenes vlog style videos I just kind of showin some of the day-to-day work that I do that doesn't make it into these project videos so thanks again for all of your continued support and until next week happy building