2x4 Half Lap Blanket Chest - 089

I've built several blanket chests before, but they've all been pocket hole construction, and just for the sake of changing things up a bit, I decided to change up the design, but try to maintain most of the same appearance. I used Google Sketchup to design the blanket chest first. Sketchup is a great tool for you to visually see the project before you even start cutting any wood. My completed design is a half lap blanket chest. I chose half laps because they are incredibly strong and relatively easy to make. With the design completed, I took all of my material and cut it down to rough length for the lid and final length for the frame members first. With all my pieces cut to length, I needed to rip them down to their final width. I went with a two and a half inch width. That's pretty much what I go with on all my chests, just to keep things nice and easy. And by doing so, I created a lot of lattice-like scraps that I have absolutely no clue what to do with. Alright, here's the lid laid out. This is going to be massive, but that's okay. I've encountered a little bit of a problem though. My pieces have warped on me slightly overnight since I cut them, but I think I can get around this by after gluing all the pieces up, I can clamp some coals on either end and also in the middle. After the coals, I can just clamp it together as you would any other glue up. And I believe this is going to be alright. I don't think it's twisted enough to where it's going to really affect the outcome, but in the meantime, it's going to make things just a little bit more difficult for me. I've got my planer set here with the dust collection hose hooked up to it. And I've also got an extra piece of the stock that I'm working with. And this piece is going to go with me throughout the entire build. That way I have something that is the exact size that I'm working with to experiment with. Here's all my pieces and I've got them arranged so that the bad side is up. This way I can run them all through the planer and just remove all the little small amount of junk. And it'll also bring everything to the exact same thickness because these are all two by fours, but that doesn't mean that they are all the same exact thickness. So that'll keep everything on the same playing field. If you've been watching any of my recent videos, you've probably noticed that I've become fond of the half lap joint. It's very strong, very quick, very easy. And as the title describes, this blanket chest or hope chest, whichever you want to call it, is going to be primarily half lap joints as well. There's a few dados here and there, but primarily it's going to be half lap joints. And what I've done is I've taken my test piece that I've also ran through the thickness planer with the rest of the material so that it's all on the same thickness. And I've set my fence so that my thickness of my width of my material, which is two and a half inches, is perfectly lined up with the outside of the dado blade. That's going to give me perfectly spaced half lap joints. But also what this does is it creates a kerf maker style stop block that I'll use in just a little bit. And I've set my height so that I'm getting a very even surface when two pieces line up against each other. So now I'm ready to start running all my pieces. Now on my leg pieces, I need to make sure that I run them with good side facing up and everything else needs to be ran with the good side facing down. Now if you look at my miter gauge, you can see that I have two pieces of two by material screwed to it. One obviously to push the material through and another one in the back that runs in the same direction as the saw blade and is lined up with the middle of the saw blade. That serves two functions. Number one, it's a little bit of a safety reassurance. When I push through, the blade is completely enclosed inside that block of wood so I can't accidentally bump into it as I push the material through. And number two, this also acts as a dust shroud. I'm using a dado blade so I'm removing a lot of material and that's going to stir up a lot of dust. So that helps in making sure that most of the dust goes into the cabinet itself. With all of the half laps cut on the end of the material, now I can focus my attention on the inside of all the horizontal pieces. They need half laps as well. Because we're cutting on the inside of our pieces, spacing is absolutely critical. How far we move the piece determines the width of the half lap itself and it has to be two and a half inches. And this is where the kerf maker style stop block comes in handy. What it is is two and a half inches minus the thickness of the dado blade that I'm using. And this allows the perfect spacing for the material to allow a half or two and a half inch dado to be cut. Here's what all the pieces look like right before assembly. As you can see there's a lot of joints here. There's 64 cuts for each end and center sections so that makes 32 half lap joints total. A lot of work on the front end but it'll be really worth it in the long run. This is going to be a very strong frame. The glue up is going to be done in three different parts. My first step is to get the inside sections done and let that sit. I don't really have that many clamps so I've got to do it in different phases. Once the inside pieces are done I will come back and put the legs on on all four sides. And then I can cut the dado into the front and back pieces. That way I can assemble the whole unit. But for right now I just need to put the inside pieces together and then work on putting the legs on. With all the panels glued together starting on the inside I can start to just fine-tune these joints and make sure they're all just nice and perfect. I've got just a little bit on a couple spots that are uneven. No big deal. But I'm going to start sanding all these joints nice and smooth and then I can run them over my router table to create a rabbet on the inside of every single one of these panel areas. I've taken all the frames and cut a rabbet on the inside of all the panel areas for the panel to sit into. Now I need to just come back and square off all 48 of these corners. Now that the structural skeletons are done I can attach the panels on the inside. I'm just using 3-8 inch pieces of plywood making sure that the grain is going the same direction as the panel is vertically. I will just glue them and pin them in place with some headless pin nails. The purpose of the pin nails is nothing more than to just hold the panel in place while the glue sets up. The glue is what's actually going to hold the panel in place. I need to not only clean up the top surfaces of all four sides because there's a half lap joint sticking out, but I also need to make sure that all four sides are the exact same distance off of the ground. So to do this I've set up a box beam level clamped to the bottom side of my side pieces and I can just run them through the table saw referencing up against the fence. This allows me to basically joint the top edge of all four sides. I've switched back to the dado blade to make the next couple cuts. Each piece needs a groove down near the bottom to accept the bottom panel and it's just going to float in place. I also need to make a rabbet on the insides of the front and back to accept both side pieces. All right I've got the entire assembly all put together. There is a three-quarter inch plywood panel and the bottom is hardwood plywood and it is just floating. It's not glued in at all. I recorded the entire glue-up but my camera died on me, but that's okay because gluing stuff together is boring anyway. Here's my progress so far and once all this is cured I've got to come back and cut out the little accents on the legs. But it's taking shape and it's looking pretty good. To start it on the top I'm first using a paint scraper to remove most of the larger chunks of glue squeeze out. After the paint scraper I'm using one of my small hand planes just to smoothen up the joints just a little bit. I made the mistake on the opposite side and trying to finish with my smoothing plane. However I'm using cheap construction grade pine here and a couple of the pieces have the grain direction alternating throughout the piece so I was getting some rather large chip out or peel out or whatever you want to call it where the plane was just gouging into the wood. On this side I'm not going to use my smoothing plane I'm just going to use my 4 by 24 10 amp belt sander. As you can see here this thing stirs up a lot of dust so I'm wearing my respirator. I have a fan in the window exhausting air and I also have the dust collector running with the miter saw station port open. This gets a fair amount of the dust moving out of the shop. I've got a window open in the other side that allows a nice breeze to blow through but as you can see from my right arm and the cabinets behind me this got quite messy. I was able to get a rather smooth surface just by maintaining a figure 8 pattern throughout the entire workpiece. This is a belt sander obviously and it is very aggressive so you don't want to you don't want to move and stay in one spot. It's time to work on the legs and what I've done is I've made a little template here that I could use with my flush trim router bit and I'm going to go ahead and mark all the legs and rough this out with a jigsaw. After it's roughed out with the jigsaw I can come back with a flush trim bit in my router to get everything all nice and uniform. I've got the cabinet pretty much done and now I need to cut the top so I've got about one inch overhang on all sides and to do so I've just got it sitting on top where I want it with the back side referenced with the back side of the cabinet and I'll score a line all the way around the bottom of the pencil flip it upside down and outline by one inch and cut it all with my circular saw. All right I'm set up here on the table saw to make this cove cut. The resulting cove that I have it set for it will resemble the legs on the chest itself quite well so I'm happy with that. The blades that I'm using are the outside blades on my dado blade set. I find that using the smaller diameter blades and also being thicker and two sandwiched side-by-side really reduce the vibration and like I said because they are smaller the motor has no problem powering through the cut. Now to make this cut I'm going to set the blade real well starting out at about an eighth of an inch and run three sides of the lids through. Every time I'm done running the three sides I'll raise the blade about one crank on the table saw whatever that may be until I get to a height that closely resembles the profile of feet. Modeling the hinges is pretty straightforward I use a square to space off from the sides just so that both hinges are evenly spaced and symmetrical and the first thing I do is trace the hinge with a razor blade. After that I can deepen the razor blade grooves with a chisel and then use a router to very carefully remove most of the material on the inside making sure not to touch the not to touch the chiseled line. After I have most of the material removed I can clean everything up with a chisel. With the mortise completely cleaned out and the hinge fitting securely I can use a number two Phillips bit to create a countersink and then follow that with a brad nail to make some perfectly centered holes. I'll repeat the entire process on both sides of the chest itself and on the lid. For a protective finish I brushed two coats of lacquer on the entire project before I mounted the hinges. After the hinges were mounted I went back and brushed one more coat on the entire project and then two more coats on the top of the lid. Now here's the completed blanket chest. It's quite big. You could you could probably fit somebody inside it. Not to say that that would be a good thing but you know you can. And real quick go over a couple things. The feet detail turned out pretty well. I like that little added extra added extra little touch there. The lid detail matches it quite nicely. That turned out well. The lid itself turned out a lot better than I thought it would. I like the knots in there and of course if I open it up all of the exposed joinery turned out nice as well. But anyway this is the completed chest. It took me longer than I expected to get it done due to some outside the shop circumstances but there it is. It was a very fun build. I probably won't do another one like this. It was a little bit more tedious than I had anticipated but good learning experience. So this was a fun little project to do. Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you like what you see like and subscribe and thanks for watching.