A Christmas Gift They’ll Fight Over
Today, I'm gonna show you how I batched out this year's family Christmas presents. A couple of months ago, I made this kitchen tool holder from David Picciuto's book called Make Your Own Kitchen Tools. And, and ever since I've done that, I've had nothing but compliments and hints and requests from family members that have seen this thing. And so I've made a slight adjustment to the design and the wood choices, and now everyone is getting one for Christmas this year.
Oh, hun, it's perfect. It's just what I asked for. Thank you. Oh, wow. A kitchen tool holder.
The first thing I'm going to do is look at these cherry boards and decide how I want to rough cut them into more manageable pieces. So here I'm marking them out slightly oversized, just trying to make sure that I've got some space in between them that I'm fitting everything that I need into these cherry boards, and now I'm gonna quickly use my circular saw to get them into the right ballpark of where I need to be. I found it really helpful with the circular saw to mark some straight lines to follow, but overall, I was really impressed with how quickly this went-- Not going to the miter saw, but just chopping them up in the shed. Now that I've got these boards cut down to the rough sizes, I need to mill these boards by jointing a face and an edge each. And if you wanna know about my process for doing that, you can go ahead and watch an earlier video that I did on the topic. I'll put it up in the card right here. After that, I'm gonna be resawing them down to just a hair over half an inch thick, and then I'll be finishing them off on the thickness planer. So let's get to it.
Well, I was hoping that that wouldn't happen. That's actually the first time I've used this band saw with the riser block in place, cutting something this deep. And it just, it seems like the thing is bogging down too much. I was getting burning and smoking, as you may have seen on the camera. So I'm gonna go to plan B. I'm still gonna use the band saw, but I'm gonna start my cuts with table saw. The downside of doing this is that I'm just plain, not going to get this, this nice almost veneer like thing off of here. You're gonna end up with a, a little bit less material left over on the other side of things. So I, I also, I've haven't jointed this other part here, so I think I'm gonna have to run all that through the table saw now. But, you know, you do what you gotta do and I guess at some point I'm gonna need a bigger motor on my band saw or something.
So
Really quickly, let's talk mistakes because I made a couple of mistakes here. the first is I knew that I needed to cut down the original boards a fair bit in order to facilitate in milling them down, making that a little bit faster, wasting a little bit less material, and working within the confines of the space that I had. the mistake that I made on that is I cut it down to just like an inch over my final dimensions, which honestly created a lot of extra movements that I needed to be doing if I were to do it again. Or if, if you're doing it, my suggestion would be leave it about three times the lengths plus say three inches or so, which is about what this would be. And that way you can send essentially the equivalent of three at a time through the planer.
you can send the equivalent of three at a time through the band saw, all of that talking about band saws. You saw the footage there where the band saw started smoking and stalling out and all of that. So I went to the table, saw which worked fine. I made one mistake on the table saw, which was I didn't change out my general purpose blade for my ripping blade. So that ended up costing me some binding. I actually blew a breaker and had to go inside the house and turn that back on, which was a bit of a pain. But let's talk about when I went back to the band saw. After doing that, I did a test cut and realized that I was still bogging down, and that seemed weird to me. And so on a whim I was looking at the blade and I went, you know, what that blade is is wider than my thin blade, but I don't know, I don't think that that's my half inch ripping blade.
And so I went to the box with my pretty much brand new half inch ripping blade, and sure enough, it was in there. This blade here is absolute garbage. It is the blade that came with the grizzly riser block system. Throw this thing away. it is absolute garbage. It was so much faster. As you saw there once, I had a proper ripping blade on that was actually sharp. that's the, the Olsen MVP bi-metal. I think it's a two or three tooth skip tooth half inch blade. And so much better. So much better. I, I've definitely got some tuning up I need to do on my band saw, but it was phenomenal. So if I'd known those two things, honestly, it would've saved me a boatload of time. But hey, it's too late for any of that now.
So let's just let's just move on. here I'm using my cross-cut sled to clean up one end of each board before cutting my stock down to its final length of nine inches. Being careful to keep my jointed edge against the sled fence. This is a really repetitive operation, so you need to make sure that you're paying a lot of attention for safety's sake. Here I'm switching out my normal blade for a flat tooth ripping blade, making sure everything's level. I use a setup block to set the blade height to about a quarter of an inch. And now I'm gonna cut some dados for my bottom piece. And for the two decorative strips that will be inlaid into the top of the utensil holder. This seems like the perfect time to ask, Hey, if you're enjoying this video, will you make sure to like, comment,
and most importantly, subscribe? It really helps me out. here I'm gonna be putting in some maple strips with some ca glue and activator. I, I cut these earlier on the table saw, I just didn't get any footage of it. This was quite the process, and I need to find a better way of doing this. If you have ways of cutting really accurate thin strips on the table saw or the band saw, I would love to hear about it in the comments. So go ahead and run in there and tell me what you would've done differently here. I'm sanding them flush, but I only did this for a few before I realized that I had a better solution. I made a custom base plate for my trim router and then just set the bit depth so that it would be just above the surface of the main part of the sides, and I just trimmed away all of that access saved me a boat load of time. All right, now according to my calculations, I need 10 strips for 10 holders, which makes 100 pieces. I don't think anybody wants to see me cut that many pieces. I know I don't even want to be cutting that many pieces. So, tell you what, here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna skip it all. All right, are you, are you ready for this? Here we go. I'm gonna pick up the stack here. And
So now we wanna make kind of a circle-ish thing out of these kinda, you know, like, like this. Yeah. So what that means is it's math time again. Now a circle has 360 degrees and we're taking 10 pieces with two sides a piece. So that equals 20 sides for one of these utensil holders. so what we'll do is we'll take 360 degrees, which is a whole circle, and we will divide that by 20, which gives us an angle of 18 degrees. Then to get what it is on the table saw, we'll subtract 18 degrees from 90 degrees, which gives us 72 degrees. That's what we're gonna dial in on the table saw. I'm gonna use my little bevel gauge thing. but whatever you have to figure it out. Just the, the more accurate that you can, the better. And now I am gonna cut each of these hundred pieces
On both sides. I'm using a digital leveling gauge to dial in my exact angle before putting a few strips of masking tape over the insert plate to create a zero clearance insert. I've popped on an audiobook of my favorite book of the Bible. Leave your guesses for which one it is in the comments. And then I'm getting to work. Obviously need to be careful when cutting small pieces like this at an angle. From a technical perspective, I think the most important thing to pay attention to here is which side of the board you're cutting the angles into. The last thing that you need is to have your outside grooves on the inside and your inside grooves on the outside. That would be weird. Here's a neat trick that I picked up from the book. Just lay the pieces for one of the kitchen tool holders, edge to edge with the outer face up, and then run a couple strips of blue masking tape across them and it's gonna hold them all together and I can bundle them up
Instead of trying to manually align these while taping them up. I, I'm doing this on my table saw. Anyways, we know that we cut them all to the same dimensions. Instead, if we use our table saw fence and we just push everything against the table saw, all of a sudden everything's aligned because it is very important that we try to keep the inlays in line. You'll really notice that if you don't do it right. But man, this is gonna save me a ton of time. Now I'm able to pick them up like this, wrap them into their final shape, and then I'll use that shape to trace out the bottom on my piece of plywood here, and then set an offset of about quarter inch so that it can fit into the grooves that we created. I'll cut those out on the band saw really, really quickly.
This is my template piece. From here. I'm going to use the ca glue and blue tape trick to stick a bunch of these together. And then I'll set up the L fence, which I do have of another video that I did earlier about how to make one of these. I'll put the template down, set everything to the right height, the blade to the right place, and then I'll be able to cut these out really, really quickly here. And it, it's actually amazing how well this works and how clean all the edges end up. I highly recommend making one of these L fences.
All right, right here I'm gonna be using a one quarter inch forstner bit. It's just gonna allow for any moisture that might find its way in here to dissipate and hopefully drain out the bottom. You know, you throw a, a wet spatula or something like that in there, needs somewhere to go. But we wanna keep it fairly small because we also don't want any of the ends of our utensils that this utensil holder is gonna be holding to end up falling through the hole. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna give a light sanding and a quick spray finish to this stuff and just these bases here that'll get everything ready for our next step.
So we'll apply a little bit of lacquer and once that's dried it's time for my favorite part. I just got this branding iron. It is an electric one but it doesn't work. So I heated that up with the torch and now we'll apply it and just watch the satisfying plumes of smoke lift as I lift. Oh yeah, that's nice. And now I'm gonna sand and sand and sand the insides of these containers before applying my favorite finish, which I'll talk about a little bit more later on in this video. I'm applying it to the inside cuz it's gonna be hard to apply later and it'll keep the glue from sticking quite as excessively here. And don't go too heavy on the glue because you definitely don't want to get stuck cleaning everything up. But once the glue's in, we'll stick in our bottom piece, roll it all up and we'll come back tomorrow. I decided the first thing that I really needed to be sure of is that every single one of these has a flat bottom. So I'm just taking this piece of sandpaper and spending a ton of time cleaning up the bottoms of all of these things. Once I was done with that, I took a look at the massive pile of sanding I had to do and got right to work, sanding and sanding and vacuuming and sanding and sanding a whole lot and getting bored, but still sanding and sanding
And then some hand sanding. Wow.... Sure did look nice afterwards though.
I went over to the router table. Yes, I did get a new router insert for the table. I was tired of climbing underneath and I'm putting a small chamfer on the outside, bottom and top edges hours of sanding is done. So I am super excited to finally get to apply some finish here. So what I'm gonna do, I like to use these scotch bright pads. When I am using this stuff today, I'm using some PolyX oil clear. You'll see that there. And so I'm just gonna take a little bit of finish on there and I'll rub that in all over. Eh, why don't we put it there too? We'll see if it bonds at all to the lacquer underneath. If not, oh well <laugh>, this is just great cuz you get to watch everything come to life here. Let's throw some closeups in of one of these as well.
So you can just see everything. Just start to pop. This here is my favorite finish. it's fast to apply. It's quite durable. I think it's beautiful and it's repairable. So if something goes wrong with this thing down the line, instead of having to refinish the whole project, I can just sand that, that one place that I have a problem and come back in with a little bit more of this stuff and it will just blend right into it itself. You'll barely be able to tell that anything has changed. And to me that's a really valuable thing to know that I can get in here and repair things. It's just awesome to see all those hours of work actually start to take shape into something where you're like, oh man, this is totally worth it.
Well, there you have it. I'm ready for Christmas now. maybe I've given you an idea or two for your own Christmas projects this year. Don't be afraid to find a project that you've done in the past or to find something simple that you want to do over the next couple of weeks here and just batch it out. Have fun with it. make sure that you check out David Picciuto's awesome book. seriously, it's got some great things in there, some great ideas. That's where I got the idea for this project. and I'll definitely see you on the next one. Hey, if you like the kind of stuff that you've been seeing, make sure that you subscribe and that you check out one of these videos here. I think that you're really gonna like them.