>> TOM: This week on Classic Woodworking, we're making this hanging tool cabinet.

It's one of the best organizing and visually inspiring projects you can build for your shop.

It keeps your hand tools close by.

You always know where to find them and where to put them away.

Our project cabinet is made of solid cherry sides and cherry plywood panels, and is modeled after my own.

It features rabbeted and dado joinery construction.

And to spice it up, we've added dark wenge-lined inlay in the doors, and decorative wenge plugs.

It's all coming up next, right here on Classic Woodworking.

♪ ♪ >> Funding is provided by: >> Woodworking is a passion.

Woodcraft understands that.

We offer name brands and tools for fine woodworking.

Woodcraft, proud sponsors of Classic Woodworking.

And by Felder.

>> It's not only about work.

It's about fun and success.

We are with you.

Felder Group is your partner for your woodworking projects.

>> And by SCM-- a rich heritage of woodworking technology since 1952.

>> TOM: When building a tool cabinet, it's a personal choice.

You want to make it work for you.

You might want it big or small, have lots of tools, or just a few special ones.

You might want doors, or just an open cabinet on the wall.

When I built mine, I wanted to have doors, and I wanted to have it of average size.

And I didn't want it stuffed with tools.

I wanted just my favorites-- my everyday or starting lineup of tools.

Now, I also like fixtures that hold the tools in a way that they're easy to grab and easy to put away.

So I've got my planes on this slope.

I can just grab and go, and easily return.

I've got my chisels vertical with little magnets that hold them in place.

I like having the card scrapers and the hand saws resting in slots.

And then we've got these little cubbies for odds and ends.

Now, today's project is modeled after mine, and it's made out of solid cherry sides with plywood panels for the door and cherry plywood for the back.

Now, it all starts by sizing our parts.

I've got the solid cherry parts already cut to width.

Now I'm going to head to the table saw and cut them to length.

(table saw whirring) So all we have left of our outer cabinet are these horizontal rails on the top and bottom of my door.

Now I'm going to set the stop so that I cut them to length and the door lands halfway over my cabinet.

(table saw whirring) With our pieces all cut to length, we're ready to talk about our joinery.

Now, you could get fancy and show off a little bit by joining your whole cabinet with dovetails.

But I want to show you a fast, strong, and simpler method for cutting your joinery right on the table saw.

This is one of the sides of our cabinet, and we're going to cut rabbets at the top and bottom and dados for the mid shelf.

And on our midpieces, we're going to cut dadoes for our vertical partitions.

Now, we'll also have rabbets on the corners of our doors.

And to make all this joinery, we'll head to the table saw.

When getting ready to cut joinery, it's always a good idea to make sure your pieces are marked out well.

I've already marked the base and the sides of my cabinet, and now I want to make some general indications of where my joinery will be.

So I know I want a rabbet on the top and bottom inside of my sides, and I'm going to have that mid-shelf dado right about here.

So when I'm cutting the joinery, I want to always see that chalk line facing the cutter.

I'll go ahead and mark out all my pieces, and then I'll cut my rabbets, reset the saw, and then cut the dados.

(table saw buzzing) Now with all our dados and rabbets cut, we're ready to reset the saw to a quarter-inch dado cutter to cut our grooves for our panels.

Now, once again, I want to be careful to mark out all of the locations of the grooves.

So here's one of my cabinet sides.

I'll have my cabinet back set back here.

And then with my doors, the panel is oriented to the front.

So I want to put my chalk mark right in here.

This way I'll be sure to make all my groove cuts in the right location.

(table saw whirring) Whew!

With all our joinery cut, we're ready to cut our quarter-inch holes at the rabbeted ends for our attachment screws and plugs.

Now, before I do that, I want to mark them out well here.

And I've set up this little square to a half an inch.

And I'll just make a little line indicating from each edge.

I just need to do this on the rabbited ends.

And then I'll have to mark out on my door frame as well using the same marking gauge setup.

Now I just need to mark out those center two screw locations.

For that I made a little template.

(drill press running) So I've dry fit my cabinet.

And I took a measurement for these vertical dividers and went ahead and cut them to size, just like we did the side pieces earlier.

Now I can check the fit.

And that's working nicely.

I'll go ahead and place those in.

That's great.

Now with all our joinery done on our cabinet and our doors, it's time to size our panels.

So our panels on the doors will fit with a tongue, a quarter-inch tongue, going into the groove, and will be flush with the face of our doors.

so I've got my cherry plywood.

I'll head to the saw and cut them to shape.

(table saw whirring) So to cut the tongue on my panel, I've set the saw with a quarter-inch dado blade and raised it up high enough to leave a tongue that will fit into my quarter-inch groove.

Now I can run my panels just flat on the table to create that rabbet all around, creating the tongue.

Okay, we're all marked out.

We're ready to run the rabbets.

(table saw running) All right, it's the moment of truth-- the glue-up.

I've gone ahead and rehearsed my moves, because there's a lot of parts here.

So I've got the glue ready, I've got all my pieces organized, and I'm going to start spreading the glue.

♪ ♪ Now I'm ready to spread glue into the sides.

♪ ♪ Get it set.

Now we're ready to stand up our piece.

♪ ♪ So with those clamps in position, I'll run in some screws, and then I can flip and hit the back.

(drill running) So gluing up the doors is a lot simpler than gluing up that case.

We've just got four pieces in our panel.

I'll lay everything in position.

I've got the bottom, the top rail, and then the sides, right and left.

So I'll go ahead and get some glue into the rabbet area.

And then we'll get the glue again into the groove.

So with that set in place, I'm going to get the panel in.

That's a nice fit.

And I can bring in the bottom.

I'm just going to put on my top piece, set it right in the groove.

And now the right side... ties it all together.

That's great.

And once again, I'll put on temporary clamps to hold it before we run in our screws.

(drill running) Nice.

Now that we have all our screws in, we can take off the clamps, and once again, check for square.

I'll measure again from the diagonal.

31 and three-quarters.

31 and three-quarters.

Once again, a square panel makes all the difference.

So we'll set that aside.

And we'll glue up our last door.

♪ ♪ So the quarter-inch holes with the screws already set in give us an opportunity to do something special-- add a little detail.

I just used a little quarter-inch plug cutter and cut these wenge plugs out.

And we'll glue those in, and that will add a nice, appealing contrast to the cherry.

So all I need to do is set a little drop of glue into each of the holes.

Then I'm going to take a stick and just smear it around up on the side walls.

Nothing fancy.

You don't need any on the peg.

And we just tap it right in.

You can hear it seat.

So now I'm going to trim them off, flush, with a flush cutting saw.

If they're really close, you can hand plane them.

That's nice.

So now that they are close, I'll just skim them with a hand plane.

Beautiful.

Makes quick work of it.

Gets them so close to flush.

Okay, so with all those, I can just give it a little card scrape... for that final bit.

And then we would just sand those.

Beautiful.

That's all there is to it.

So we're going to go all around our cabinet, and then around all the edges of our doors, and we'll be ready to work on our line inlay.

So now we get a chance to add a little decorative detail to our cabinet.

We're going to put an eighth-inch wenge line in around the perimeter of each door.

That will complement nicely the wenge plugs we just put in the corners.

Now, the wenge, it not only adds the decorative look, but it covers any imperfection in the seam, which is pretty common when you're gluing up a panel like this.

So we're going to plunge rout right into the seam, and then lay in the lines.

Now, to get your lines, we took a piece of wenge and sanded it to an eighth-inch thick, and then ripped it into little eighth-inch squares at the band saw that we'll be able to handle and press into our grooves.

So I've set up the router with an eighth-inch router bit.

And we'll be plunging just into the line here and coming right down.

I'll make a pencil line showing me where to stop.

We'll clean up the corners, and lay in our lines.

(router whirring) (blowing sawdust) Now I'll just clean up the corners with a sharp chisel where the bit didn't quite get all the way in there.

So with all the grooves cleaned and crisp corners, I'm ready to start cutting my lines to fit.

So to do that, I've already squared up one end, and I'll set it in the groove, push it up, until it hits the end.

So I'll come down to this end.

And with a sharp knife.

I'll mark right point to the end of the groove.

So with that line marked I'll take it over to the chopping board, which is just a piece of wood I've clamped to the bench with a nice straight edge.

So first I'll chop it just a little heavy to the line.

And now I'll bring up the square.

We're going to set the chisel right in the knife line, just bring up the square to it and get a nice, clean cut.

And then we'll check the fit.

That fits the end nicely.

Looks great.

We'll go ahead and cut the next one, and work our way right around.

I'll just butt right up to it, and knife the end point.

Onto my chopping block.

Set it right in there.

Just bring up the square to ensure a nice accurate cut.

And there you go.

Beautiful.

All right, so I'll go ahead and continue fitting right around.

Then we'll glue our lines in, we'll clean them flush with a plane and a card scraper.

We'll go ahead and get the other door, and then we'll be ready to set our hinges.

♪ ♪ We'll just clean up the glue, and then we'll plane them flush.

So with our cabinet and doors made, we're ready to attach our hinges.

Now, you can use a variety of hinges.

You want something heavy duty, though, because you may have some good weight on these doors.

I like to just use a piano hinge.

It's super strong, and they're pretty affordable.

Now, the key to getting your doors to hang right is to clamp them together when you set these hinges.

I want to clamp them together so they're flush on the top, and they're flush all the way down the seam.

So then once I get that, I went ahead and marked out some of the holes.

And I pre-drilled.

I'm going to go ahead and run those in.

Then I'll use a self-centering bit to go ahead and quickly drill the rest of them.

♪ ♪ (drill whirring, grinding) All right, that's a lot of screws.

But we're done, and we're going to see how it works.

All right, let's get off that last clamp.

Let's see how it fits.

Beautiful.

It's really satisfying to get it to this point.

But it's time to personalize the interior.

Let me show you a few options for ways to store your tools.

So to hang our cabinet on the wall, we left a half-inch recess in the back, and we cut a piece of plywood with a 40-degree angle on it and attached it to the back with glue and screws.

Now, we have another piece which has the same 40-degree angle on it.

And this cleat will get fastened to the wall horizontally, and then it will be set up on this cleat, and cinch it tight to the wall.

So for the interior of our cabinet, there's a few fixtures that I really like.

I like this plane till, having them at a sloping angle.

We cut out these little filler pieces to the shape of the bottom edge of the plane so they fit in just like that.

For the saws and the card scrapers, it's so simple-- it's just a block of wood, and then I cut these angular kerf cuts on the band saw so they'll fit in easily and be held at that angle.

And for the chisels, I made this little template, and then drilled out the holes for the handles to fit in, and at the top, made these little slot cuts that agreed with the holes.

And in the back, drilled a little Forstner hole and put in some rare earth magnets so that they're held in just like that.

Well, there you have it-- a cherry hanging tool cabinet.

♪ ♪ Join me next time for more great projects right here on Classic Woodworking.

♪ ♪ >> Closed captioning is provided by AWFS, the Association of Woodworking and Furnishings Suppliers.

Funding is provided by... >> Woodworking is a passion.

Woodcraft understands that.

We offer name brands and tools for fine woodworking.

Woodcraft, proud sponsors of Classic Woodworking.

And by Felder.

>> It's not only about work.

It's about fun and success.

We are with you.

Felder Group is your partner for your woodworking projects.

♪ ♪ >> And by SCM-- a rich heritage of woodworking technology since 1952.

Master your craft by joining Fine Woodworking Unlimited.

For $99 a year, or $9.99 a month, you'll get unlimited access to over 40 years of woodworking articles and tips, over 700 projects and plans, including projects from this season of Classic Woodworking in association with Fine Woodworking, and videos from renowned masters of the craft, plus the online archive of every issue ever published.

To get started on your 14-day free trial, go to finewoodworking.com/pbsoffer or call 1-866-452-5141.

Visit finewoodworking.tv to get complete details on this episode, download the full plan and materials list, watch behind-the-scenes clips, and find more instruction for making today's project.

♪ ♪