Design Adaptation To many woodworkers, design is an opaque process that seems equal parts art and magic. John, Logan, and I try to dispell that concept in this discussion. We start with a project we're building for the Woodsmith Shop TV show. Then we look at a few other examples both current and past.
One of the key themes that emerges is that of taking an existing design and playing with a detail or two to create something different and unique. Logan built a new workbench for his shop. It's a cabinet base, Shaker-style bench. The plan pulls structural elements from timber frame barns.
He wants to make an outfeed table that feels connected, but isn't a twin.
John talks about his approach as a designer for Woodsmith & ShopNotes where he finds elements he like in past projects he's designed or from other sources. Then he remixes and reboots them into a different mold.
This shop organizer (one of the best shop projects of all time) took cues from a wall shelf. John expanded it and turned it into a two-part shop credenza. Later on he designed a clamp cart, an assembly cart, and a workbench that are all descended from this one.
Riffable Projects
Mentioned in this Episode.
The Double Porch Rocker that started it all. You'll see our take in season 20 of the Woodsmith Shop in fall 2026.
This Flat-Screen Cabinet was the starting point for John Doyle to design a Barn Door Cabinet.
Transcript
The adaptation of words into a podcast.
Phil Huber (00:02.791) Great work everybody. We made it out of January finally. It's the ShopNotes Podcast. This is episode number 261. I'm Phil Huber, your host, along with Logan Wittmer and John Doyle, a triumvirate of folk that formed the backbone of the Woodsmith Shop TV show. Here to talk about woodworking updates going on here at Woodsmith and popular woodworking and all kinds of stuff.
So let's get it started.
All right, as always, if you want to get in contact with us, you can leave us a comment on our shop notes podcast YouTube channel, where you can also subscribe. And again, just as every podcast does, we are going to ask for ratings and reviews on your podcast platform in order for other people to hear about the podcast and spread the love, share the conversation. Big group hug for all the woodworkers out there.
I thought today's episode, being close on the heels of recording another episode, so I don't have a ton of comments to share, is to...
talk about the concept of adaptation.
Logan Wittmer (01:28.782) Mm-hmm.
Phil Huber (01:29.105) which is both narrow and broad at the same time. Here's where I'm starting off with it though. Yesterday we started filming a new episode for the TV show, season 20, Clippin' Right Along. And the episode that we're filming, I'll put a link to the on Woodsmith Plans, but it's this one. It's a double porch rocker that we did a number of years ago.
It's kind of a cool project. The original one was made out of Cypress and we thought we'd stick with that. But here's where the adaptation comes in two ways. First of all, is that double porch rocker is super cool, but also a lot longer to construct on a TV show episode. So step one, what we did is instead of doing the double wide, we're doing like...
I don't know what are you calling it like a like a button a half? Yeah. Single wide. Yeah. So not quite just like a normal rocker. Little extra wide, but the comfort rocker.
Logan Wittmer (02:25.388) A big boy rocker.
John Doyle (02:25.966) single wide single wide
Logan Wittmer (02:28.461) Yeah.
John Doyle (02:39.404) Yep. Room for some throw pillows.
Phil Huber (02:43.741) There you go. Reason being that that's gonna be a little bit more manageable for us to build in a short amount of time. But then also was a way to show how relatively easy it is to adapt a plan. Like once you have all the fixed structure of it, you can riff on that relatively easily. Because I think you were the one Logan that had
Logan Wittmer (03:07.406) Mm-hmm.
Phil Huber (03:12.893) opposed doing this as the big boy.
Logan Wittmer (03:16.868) I mean, I guess I don't, yeah, I think John probably said, we building it the full size? Are we building it single wide or something like that? And I'm like, I'm just making a big boy rocker. Enough that you still get your arms on it without having to do spread eagle on it. But yeah, I don't know. I don't really have anybody I want to sit on a portion rock with.
John Doyle (03:42.014) Right. That's like when you have a love seat in your house is like is any like when you have company over is like any two people just sit next to each other on a love seat. I mean it's just kind of a little bit more room to spread out than a chair but I don't know that two people are actually going to squeeze in there.
Phil Huber (03:50.225) Right.
Phil Huber (03:54.962) Yeah. Well, mean, any, bet I'm really only chairs are fully occupied because even a sofa, three cushion sofa is never going to hold three people really. Unless it's like, unless it's like little kids.
Logan Wittmer (04:09.043) Exactly. Yep.
John Doyle (04:11.628) Yeah.
John Doyle (04:19.576) Yeah, I feel like I've kind of made my design career out of riffing on other projects because it's like design a dresser. You know what? Let's just shrink it down and make a nightstand for the next issue. Copy and paste.
Logan Wittmer (04:19.863) Yeah.
Phil Huber (04:31.441) Hahaha
Logan Wittmer (04:35.927) Yeah, which is funny, that's exactly what I'm doing with this outfeed table. It's like workbench design and outfeed table.
John Doyle (04:43.022) Yeah.
Phil Huber (04:43.621) Yeah, see, and that's exactly why I wanted to talk about it in this episode is because there are very many facets to it. It can be like, for example, like you could have taken this porch rocker. We called it a porch rocker. We made it out of Cypress because it's a nice, durable outdoor material, but you make this out of walnut, cherry, white oak, you know, and you've instantly changed the flavor of what this looks like.
you you shrink it up to just a single wide or single wide plus, you know, and now you have a totally different project with without really changing a lot in order to do that.
about the only thing that we're going to be having to pay attention to is when you start lopping off at certain dimensions, like making sure that you're keeping slat spacing equal, because you don't want to have to, like, all of a sudden redo all the math on the slats. But it's just one of those things. So like your outfeed table, Logan, like you have a design language already established in that workbench.
Logan Wittmer (06:00.909) Yeah, I mean, it's just one of those things. like, because of the way that that construction works, it's so easy just to scale it. Like you're building vents and then, you know, those vents are a certain length and height. And then you are adding rails to basically make cubbies with that, or either a drawer cubby or door cubby or, whatever. So like super easy, super simple. Yeah, it's going to work out.
really well.
Phil Huber (06:34.801) Because I think, I mean, let's trace this back, you know, in the progression of evolution. Like, I think some of the same structural DNA is in your grill stand that you did several years ago.
Logan Wittmer (06:54.498) Oh yeah, for sure. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, which is funny. And I think you can probably like distill that down to it's just a strong, simple construction method. You know, and it's it's it's it is also a design aesthetic that grill standard did man years ago. Oh God.
five, six years ago, I probably did outdoor kitchen. then the work bench when Steven bun designed that he designed it based on a
like timber frame building bent, right? So like if you were in a building that was timber frame, you'd have five or six of these bends every eight foot that would, or, you know, 10 foot that would support the structure. you know, it's, yeah, it just, it's a, it's it's a good looking design. It's easy construction. is strong. And it's very quick, very quick. So.
Phil Huber (08:02.651) Yeah. And adaptable in the sense that, you know, you change up the length of the rails and all of a sudden you're spacing between those vents or whatever dictate what you're using it for or what goes inside of
Logan Wittmer (08:11.212) Mm-hmm.
Logan Wittmer (08:18.625) Yeah, so it's kind of a shop made modular system.
Phil Huber (08:21.222) And then.
Right, which in a way is pretty familiar to some of the pre-made steel framed kind of carts that are out there. know, because your current outfeed table is based off of a Kreg table system, right? You know, which is a series of legs and then interchangeable variable length.
Logan Wittmer (08:37.632) Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (08:42.068) Yeah. Yep.
Phil Huber (08:52.593) rails that just get bolted in between them. And we're just you're just doing like a wood version of that. Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (08:54.132) Yeah? Yep.
Yep, for sure. Yeah. Or I mean, same thing if you look at like some of the like steel carports, right? Like those are literally just a triangular frame that for different lengths, they just add different sections or different widths. They just get a little bit wider. Like, I mean, yeah, the entire thing is super simple, adaptable. So.
Phil Huber (09:26.129) So have you decided materials yet? You were showing a couple of...
Logan Wittmer (09:28.862) Yeah, I actually need to, I need to go pick up lumber today after we're done podcasting. am going to, so the workbench was cherry and it was cherry. Like I glued it all that cherry up because it's two and three quarter square on the bent pieces.
rails, stiles, legs, all that stuff, or two and three quarters square. So I glued all those up at a cherry. I'm doing this at a poplar. I'm gonna do poplar. Liberty Hardwood carries 12 quarter poplar, so don't need to do anything to it other than run it through the planer, don't have to glue it up, which is honestly, that was the most time for that entire project was gluing stuff up. this will be a very much a lop it to length.
join it, playing it, and then I'm going to see about doing a fairly heavy... I guess I don't know. One of the things I like about the workbench design is that it's Big Morris and Tennon's.
And then they're they're pegged. So they have quarter inch walnut dowels in each joint. I love that aesthetics, but you know, that's cherry with the walnut peg. I do that on a lot of my shaker stuff. I just like the looks of it.
Obviously painting this, I'm not going to have that aesthetic. So either I run big tenons and mortises or I just do slot mortises, which is kind of the way I'm going with it is I'm thinking maybe I just do slot mortises and I can run all the joinery with bench pilot using Shaper Origin and Bench Pilot. So I set up one
Phil Huber (11:17.981) All right.
Logan Wittmer (11:20.32) file to do mortises, one file to do tenon, or one file just to do the slot mortises, and then I'm just changing the position on that depending where it goes. Could also do this with Panto router, which is how I did the mortise and tenons on the last one. And that works really well, especially with the new bits I have from Woodpeckers that are like a variable...
flu angle, they work really well for those deep, long mortises and, more, tenants. However, I'm going to do a lot of the work on this, I think next week when Colin is here in town. so he's going to be building a project, kind of shooting, shooting photos and stuff. So, so I'm going to be bouncing back and forth. And if I can just bounce back forth and restart a, another
tenon or slot mortise in bench pilot and just keep plugging parts out, heck yeah I think I'm gonna do that.
Phil Huber (12:20.285) All right.
Phil Huber (12:27.261) All right, John, from you had mentioned, you you built a career off of being a little bit of a magpie for design things. Why don't you, let's talk about that a little bit more. Can you, let's look at it in terms of two different semi recent projects in that you did a dresser to start with. And then shop wise, you did a shop organizer system.
that then also turned into several iterations as well.
John Doyle (13:00.204) Yes. Yeah, starting with the shop organizer, what I can think of is the clamp cart that we just did. And it's kind of a combination of the shop organizer that I designed and the clamp cart that we've had in the...
the studio for quite a while and kind of just took what we liked about both of them and combined, you know, design aspects and
put it on wheels and went from there I guess. So it's kind of like taking known quantities of the things that we like from those two different projects, combined them and made a new project.
Phil Huber (13:51.741) Yeah. Well, and think even the
Workbench from the new one wall system kind of share some some parts from that, right?
John Doyle (14:03.5) Yeah.
Yeah, so for that project we were doing a new one wall.
workshop. So it took some parts from the previous one wall workshop we had the work benches that were in there. And then I was I was building it and kind of filling out cubbies is like, well, I liked the organizers that I used in that clamp cart and the organizer. So I put those filled made two work benches, one of them had drawers and doors. And then the other one I, you know, kind of showed it a different way with different organizers. And so that kind of carried through three different projects.
there as far as shop organization.
John Doyle (14:50.872) So yeah, I feel like I don't know if it's out of laziness or just being exposed to a lot of shop notes and woodsmith projects of like kind of taking the known quantities of stuff we've done in the past. like, okay, I know this works. I, you know, we built it to this size. I liked that size. So kind of starting from those points and coming up with something new. So.
Phil Huber (15:17.615) And then you did that. So now talk a little bit about the furniture aspect of it when you, for this most recent bedroom set.
John Doyle (15:28.79) Right. I can't remember where that one started. I think with the dresser.
Phil Huber (15:33.061) Yeah, was that the like the double dresser version or was it a tall one?
John Doyle (15:37.034) Yeah, no, I think that the most recent one was kind of as was a shorter dresser had two banks of drawers built it kind of like dressed up plywood type of thing, simple construction. And then from there it to to continue with that suite to make the nightstand matching. I believe I just shrunk it down to one bank of drawers, same general construction.
I don't remember how to make it taller or shorter, but I mean was basically, is it a little shorter? is it? There you go. So just kind of following the same design aspects and whatnot there to kind of finish out the bedroom suite.
Logan Wittmer (16:11.216) It's a little shorter. Yeah, it's all it's all at my house. So I know.
John Doyle (16:28.878) So I'm also reminded of, don't know if you can see it. have the, I'll try to lift up my camera. There's a slight sliding barn door cabinet back there that I designed a while ago. That was based off of, I don't remember what season was one of the earlier seasons of the woodsmith shop. We built a, I if was like a contemporary modern credenza. It was Ash.
Logan Wittmer (16:36.028) Yeah.
Phil Huber (16:38.601) yeah yeah.
John Doyle (16:58.956) had doors on the side, very simple, like late 90s, early 2000s design. And for that sliding barn door cabinet, I kind of just took that general design and size of that. Because with the barn door cabinet, the main thing is I wanted to build my own sliding barn door hardware, just because I found it expensive and just ridiculous. So was like, I'm going to build that myself. So I had to.
Phil Huber (16:59.197) yep. Right.
John Doyle (17:26.54) design a piece of furniture to go with that theme. So I took that credenza, changed materials from ash to painted and Douglas fir top. I think I changed out like some of the areas to drawers and then added the sliding doors instead of the glass doors that were on the credenza. But it's basically the same.
size and shape and general construction but like you said kind of changing out earlier changing out wood types and finishing types and hardware it can make it a whole different furniture style and project so
So don't know, is that cheating? I don't know. Maybe, maybe, but it's like just taking stuff and I don't know if that helps the editors and people writing that the kind of, or the artists have a jumping off point of like, hey, this is how we showed it in the past. So I know it works in the woodsmith world. Now I've changed these things. These are some new techniques to talk about. So.
I
Phil Huber (18:43.057) Yeah, I don't think it's cheating. think what it does is for a lot of people kind of cracks the design code on it in the sense that
It's really easy to think of a designer as some kind of...
Phil Huber (19:02.863) almost type of personality that not everybody is. So design is, can feel intimidating, really hard for people to do. When described in the way that you guys have both just described it, it's more like building blocks. Like, hey, this is the pile of Legos that I have. I can make a ton of stuff from it. They don't all look the same, but they're related.
because of it or there's like a.
I'm a writer, so like a grammar, knowing how sentences get put together, help you put together original sentences in that same way.
John Doyle (19:47.906) Yeah. And I guess that's true with any designer or artist or writer or songwriter. They all have had their inspirations kind of before that that they've built off of. It's not like they're inventing from ground zero. So I guess there's all these inspirations that you kind of take in. when I'm looking at projects in magazines or anywhere,
Phil Huber (19:58.214) Yeah.
John Doyle (20:16.609) they might not be like my style or something that I would like, but I can always take something like a technique or something from that project and be like, I kind of like that. I could use that someplace else. And I would hope our readers would be the same way that we don't design every, like, there's no project that everyone likes. There's, know, some people really like them. Some people don't, but there's, you can always take something from that and change it to.
Something you would prefer, I guess. This is my hope.
Phil Huber (20:46.811) Yeah. I think where the skill comes and I this maybe is just a matter of either patience or practice is knowing how to combine different elements in a way that ends up working because you can just pile on a bunch of stuff together and it doesn't feel like they're all working together. It just, I'm going to compare it to the Dallas Cowboys.
John Doyle (21:14.894) you
Phil Huber (21:15.363) in the sense that there are football teams that work together as a team, and then there are other teams that are just groups of players that happen to work, that happen to be on the field at the same time.
Logan Wittmer (21:27.844) you
Logan Wittmer (21:31.736) Yeah. I mean, I, I also think that there's a large, like, you know, you're talking about.
looking at things and pulling design aspects from stuff you've designed in the past. And I don't think it's even necessarily the stuff that you've designed. It's a lot of it that I start pulling when I start putting a design, if I do put a design together from scratch, I start pulling stuff from stuff I've built in the past. like stuff, like I know how this goes together because I've built this and you know, obviously we're, we're looking at a lot of magazine stuff, but you know, anybody in their shop and they could say, Hey, I've built these projects, whether they were from plans from, you
or pop wood or find woodworking or whatever and you could say okay I see how this face frame was attached here and I see how this case was constructed so let's use those principles for this project and then stuff starts to fall into place and then at that point all you're really looking at is design choices like proportions not necessarily construction methods
Phil Huber (22:39.387) Yeah, I would agree with that because.
Phil Huber (22:44.199) you know, launching into something that you've never built before, like all of it's new. But if you launch into something, a new project, but you have a confidence level in constructing the like post and beam bent sort of thing, then like you can jump off from there riffing on that and not have to worry like
Logan Wittmer (22:51.149) Mm-hmm.
Phil Huber (23:12.954) you just have that confidence knowing like, I can do this part. So the number of new things, so to speak, in a new project can be relatively small.
Logan Wittmer (23:16.377) Mm-hmm.
Logan Wittmer (23:25.722) Which is funny, know, looking at this from the outside, I have known people that went to school for industrial design.
And they ended up in the woodworking space. And I think it's funny because, you know, the way I just presented it is like, you've figured out how you, you know, this case construction was put together, how this face frame was attached, how this face frame was put together, all that stuff. And then you're designing proportions, or that's what you are then designing is the proportions and the design choices where all those industrial designers are vice versa. They know how they want it to look, but then the construction becomes secondary.
which I think is funny. It's like, hey, I designed this really cool chair, but you can't really build it because stuff doesn't work like that. So.
Phil Huber (24:23.357) You know, speaking of recent projects and related to the TV show, and it doesn't have to be big changes either that make a difference. Like the first episode that we were working on this year is the vanity for your bathroom in the shop. And that was a shaker project from Workbench magazine that we had long ago. And even there, we ended up making changes on it. Even though if you were to show a photo of it,
Logan Wittmer (24:37.496) Yep.
Phil Huber (24:53.103) it's not super obvious what those changes were.
Logan Wittmer (24:55.01) Yeah, correct.
Phil Huber (25:00.071) you know, I think what did we end up, we made it shorter in length by what six inches or something like that or eight inches.
Logan Wittmer (25:08.02) Yeah, yep.
Yeah, something along those lines just to fit it inside of the space.
Phil Huber (25:20.251) And then taking a shaker project that was made out of cherry and then making it out of that olive ash really transformed the look of it as well.
Logan Wittmer (25:28.376) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Phil Huber (25:31.151) even though structurally wouldn't wouldn't notice hardly any difference.
John Doyle (25:41.102) Yeah, we've talked about changing wood and finishes on projects, making them look different. I'm always amazed or maybe it's readers that are amazed. They look at our projects like, how do you make them look so great? And it's always in the past. We've gotten, you know, picked, gone and picked out, picked through all the wood.
for color and grain and then like picked through those to like get all the straightest grain on like styles and rails. it looks so much different than if somebody just went to Menards and grabbed red oak, plain sawn red oak and just, you know, used whatever wild grain on throughout the project. And it can look totally different than same wood, but just being more deliberate on grain patterns, I guess.
Logan Wittmer (26:31.725) yeah, for sure. Yeah. Like if you, if you build, if you build something, if you build a credenza out of walnut and you change out, you know, standard plain sawn walnut for straight grain quarter sawn stuff, you immediately go from seventies terrible shag carpet era to fifties mid century.
Like with pretty much exactly the same construction and design. It's just changing the wood grain and your selection in the wood will change the entire stack.
Logan Wittmer (27:08.331) Just the way that as soon as you see knotty pine cabinets, you think of a cabin up in Minnesota, right? It just kind of is what it is. It gives you the feels.
Phil Huber (27:19.441) Right. Yeah.
Phil Huber (27:24.317) But if you take that same cabinet and make it out of clear pine or redwood or something like that, no knots, then all of a sudden you've transformed the look of it without, you know, functionally changing anything on it. Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (27:34.871) Mm-hmm.
Logan Wittmer (27:39.916) Yeah.
Phil Huber (27:47.015) The other thing about the double wide rocker in building it is that we changed up the order of construction on it too. In that.
Logan Wittmer (27:57.121) Mm-hmm.
Phil Huber (28:00.52) When we put together a project in the magazine, we're trying to do so in a way that makes logical sense for construction, also makes logical sense for the layout so that you're not flipping back and forth between different pages trying to figure out what part comes next and how it all relates together. But that said, that doesn't mean that that's the only way to do it. Like in this double wide
the double porch rocker when we were looking at the initial construction of it.
Phil Huber (28:40.783) We ended up going in a slightly different direction in the sense that you're the first segment on it, Logan, so you ended up building the sides or the ends of the rocker as units first.
Logan Wittmer (28:49.332) Yeah.
Yep. Yeah. Which I mean, coming from this side of the fence where on the inside of the magazine and we're putting together and crafting this article and story on how people are putting this project together. Like.
There is definitely some of the like, okay, we have to change it this way to make sure it flows right for the article or whatever. But that may not necessarily be the way that you'd build it in your shop. Like this, this rocker.
And it's a little different than standard chairs. Standard chairs you would do a seat and then an undercarriage and then do a backrest and whatever. But like this one, I think the plans have you like putting together like the seat section as like a...
an entire unit and then that comes together with like the legs and the back and like the whole thing like and I get it but the whole thing felt a little weird like I'm like especially we're trying to not we're not trying to now fit this into magazine and a plan workflow we're trying to fit this into a tv show episode with two guys you know
John Doyle (30:06.691) Yeah.
Phil Huber (30:06.897) Right.
Logan Wittmer (30:08.15) So it's like, how do you break that up without, you know, being weird about it? So it's like, okay, yeah, there's no reason you can't put these sides together then kind of sandwich the entire thing together. you know, and I think that's how a lot of us would build it. So. Yeah.
John Doyle (30:27.116) Yeah, they showed it kind of building it outside in where we're inside out where we're building it outside in and in some of those choices are made to fit it into the magazine and it's just like, this process shows well on the pages of magazine and there's no real reason for it. But then we've also found when we're building stuff like this and we go off the rails and it's like, we get halfway done. It's like, that's why they did it that way.
Logan Wittmer (30:31.7) Yes.
Yes.
Logan Wittmer (30:43.85) Yep.
Logan Wittmer (30:53.633) crap. Yeah, yeah. And there are certainly some of that where it's like, okay, this doesn't make sense to build this this way, but you have to because X, Y, Z reason, right? Well, you have to put it together like this to get this part of this thing to fit together like it should. Sometimes that's not the case, but sometimes it is.
John Doyle (31:21.646) And then there's a lot of times where we've designed something and handed it off to the artists or editors and they're like, well, why did you do it this way? It's like, I don't know, I had to do it some way. It didn't really matter. It didn't have to be that size. That's just what it was. So sometimes there's not a reason.
Logan Wittmer (31:30.868) Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (31:35.263) Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (31:38.837) Well, and I think it's funny that there is definitely...
Nobody has like across the woodworking community as a whole, there is not a standard way to do things at all. And I think everybody's perception and how they approach a build is a little different. And some of those, I was looking at the plans and it's like, I feel like I know who did all the illustrations on this because all the dimensions are in weird spots. They're not wrong.
It gives you the info. It's just not how I would lay it out, which is funny. It's like one of those like, and going back to, you know, my wood smith days or it's like, okay, I'm working with this illustrator. Like I know I'm gonna have to change these dimensions because man, that is a weird way to dimension that hole. like I, and I don't know if he does it the same or Dylan in his CAD drawings, a lot of times will dimension and holes as radius instead of diameters. So he'll do, this is a quarter inch radius hole.
Yeah, but I'm going to use a half inch diameter bit to do that.
John Doyle (32:47.558) or dimensioning from the side of a hole, the edge of a hole. It's like, I'm not gonna drill a hole that way, but yeah.
Logan Wittmer (32:52.573) Yes, instead of the center point. Yeah, it's like, come on. But I mean, is it wrong? Not necessarily. Like, the info's there. It's there and you can, yeah. Yeah. No, There is a wrong way to load a dishwasher, John.
Phil Huber (32:57.756) Yeah.
John Doyle (33:03.894) Yeah, you can figure it out. It's kind of like loading a dishwasher. Everybody's got their way of doing it and everybody else is wrong.
Logan Wittmer (33:19.476) At least my wife would tell me there's a wrong way to load the dishwasher.
Logan Wittmer (33:28.35) Does it count as loading the dishwasher if your wife comes in and rearranges it after you're done?
John Doyle (33:33.014) Yeah, you're just making more work. Just leave it all in the sink. It's easier that way.
Phil Huber (33:42.023) You either just do it or you let somebody else do it, but don't combine two styles, because that's never going to work.
Logan Wittmer (33:48.425) Yeah.
Phil Huber (33:52.508) And I think that's the point of some of what we're saying here is, like you were saying, Logan, that
There's multiple ways to do it. And the right way for you is a function of how your brain works, how your shop is set up, what tools you plan on using, and that kind of thing, rather than.
Logan Wittmer (34:17.172) Mm-hmm.
Phil Huber (34:21.393) whatever. you know, you and John could build the same shop cart in your shops and start and go through the whole process in very different ways and still come up with more or less an identical product.
Logan Wittmer (34:36.175) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
John Doyle (34:39.51) Even if we were building from the same plan. Okay, come on, totally different. Right. It's like, there's a picture. There's where I start from. This is the overall size. Go from there.
Phil Huber (34:41.861) Right.
Logan Wittmer (34:42.947) Yeah, yeah. Well, because neither one of are going to read it, we're just going to look at the pictures. Well, it's funny, like going back to the outfeed table that we just built, Shop Cart, we're using as outfeed table. We were, I don't know what we were doing. I was doing something on the case and then all of a sudden I'm like, why? Oh, it was, I think it was the...
the dados for the side panels. Somehow I just stuck them in the wrong spot. Like, I don't know, I was talking and whatever, doing stuff. So I cut them in the wrong spot. So we made it work because we just, the hardwood edging that was going on this project was like sized at like one and half by one and a half inches. So instead of doing that, we just made a half inch edging, half inch by one and a half.
John Doyle (35:12.718) For the side panels.
John Doyle (35:37.122) Right, which is probably easier and better anyways. like.
Logan Wittmer (35:39.795) Yeah, it's like, why would you ever make a, like you're putting a 2x4 on the edge as edging, you know? Like that seems silly, but is it wrong? No, just a different way to do it.
John Doyle (35:46.072) Yeah.
Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (35:54.414) And I mean, it's funny because talking to our designers and when they when they design stuff like this, a lot of the times, like there's actually a reason for some of it. Not always, but sometimes there is. It's like, well, yeah, I made it this size because then you can get everything out of one sheet of plywood. It's like, OK, yeah, that makes sense instead of buying another sheet of plywood. But there's never an excuse for using every size of plywood on a drawer.
Phil Huber (36:22.485) You
Logan Wittmer (36:27.234) every single size.
John Doyle (36:31.758) Yeah, that's true. guess that does come into thought on design. It's like, well, I don't want to get another thickness of plywood for this project. So I'll just use this or another, you know, change thickness of the hardwood. So I'll just keep going with this. And it's like, does it matter? I mean, if you want to go to the effort to plane it from half inch to three eights, yeah, that's fine. But just trying to make it easier on on the on the artists here.
Logan Wittmer (36:39.633) Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (36:48.294) Mm-hmm.
Logan Wittmer (37:01.137) Yeah, which, you know, just this is evolving into a what grants my chisel segment. always, always annoyed me when we were doing our cutting diagrams for woodsmith in one of our woodsmith plans, where it's like three quarter inch by six inch by 96 inch three eighths by.
four inch by like nobody's buying three eighths inch thick hardwood you're buying four quarter hardwood and you're planing it down like come on man like I get it at the same time like this
John Doyle (37:30.486) Yeah, yeah.
John Doyle (37:39.062) Right. Or if it called for eight quarter someplace and it's like, well, I just would have resawed that scrap piece to make these small pieces. I wouldn't have went out and you know, bought smaller. So.
Logan Wittmer (37:46.564) Exactly.
Yeah.
Phil Huber (37:52.114) Which is exactly what I was thinking of when you were talking, when we were going through this thing with the edging, because I know how that went down is that if you're calling that out, know, Chris used inch and a half material on that cart for those big like face frame pieces. And then see, keep it at inch and a half, because if you were to change it to half an
Logan Wittmer (38:10.662) Yep. Just keep it at an inch and a half. Yep.
Phil Huber (38:19.407) half inch edging, even though it's an inch and a half wide, it's not inch and a half thick to certain editors. It's half inch thick. So then you have to call it out as half inch material instead of and it's like, yeah, I know what you're saying. But if I take an inch and a half thick board and rip off half inch wide strips, boom.
Logan Wittmer (38:25.49) It's dumb.
Logan Wittmer (38:42.129) It's... man. Yeah.
Phil Huber (38:51.109) All this to say is that if you've been involved with woodworking or woodworking publishing, you have had your hackles raised multiple times. Stuff drives you crazy.
Logan Wittmer (39:00.593) Uh-huh.
Logan Wittmer (39:04.057) You know who couldn't plane that stuff down?
ShopSmith users. There's no planar attachment. We're back and we're back!
John Doyle (39:17.175) you
Phil Huber (39:21.169) yet. Not a planer. Yeah.
John Doyle (39:21.4) They just they just healed. They just healed and then you're. Send him right back to the hospital. Dang.
Logan Wittmer (39:22.55) Logan Wittmer (39:28.578) man, they could re-saw it, but man, they could not plan it down.
John Doyle (39:31.47) Cut.
John Doyle (39:35.916) the hand plane, I guess.
Phil Huber (39:40.797) All right, there you go.
Phil Huber (39:47.611) Okay, so you said Colin's coming down next week. What's he working on?
Logan Wittmer (39:51.811) He's working on a, as kind of as his flavor, a mid century, let's call it like sofa side table. It is a little, so he's done this little cantilevered design for a few of his things in the past. He did a, like a nightstand that a little kind of seven shaped.
Phil Huber (40:03.655) Okay.
Logan Wittmer (40:16.912) leg and arm on it with a little kickstand off the back. He's going to do a side table that is similar to that design. So a little kind of seven shaped leg on it. But there's a magazine rack on the bottom. So kind of kicking it back old school magazine holder next to this, the table. So yeah, that's what we're going to work on. Should be a pretty simple project. Last time we did one of these for him on that.
nightstand in particular, the joint between the leg and the arm was a half lap. And it was a half lap that he ended up cutting at the miter saw. So it was like a bunch of kerfs and then kind of slide it left and right to kerf it. And the...
tapers because they're both the arm and the leg are tapered so from the widest point at the junction of them down to you smaller feet we did that at the table saw with a taper sled or taper jig so this time we're going to kind of break this out a little bit further and do some template routing so you bandsaw and template route to get those to the appropriate size and we are going to try to anger the masses and just use a domino to do the joint
So, so he was, he was questioning the, the joint, like, should we, should we half lap it? Should we domino it? was like, let's just domino it. And, know, for all those people that are like, you're using a thousand dollar tool to do that. It's like, well, yeah, you have a, you have a general international dowling jig. You can just dowel it together. Like there's no reason you have to domino it. I mean, geez, to be honest with you, you could probably biscuit it together.
and it would probably be fine. So.
John Doyle (42:06.988) You can make your own domino. We have the plans from ShopNotes. So stop complaining. This project, Popwood's not for the pores. Is what Logan's saying.
Logan Wittmer (42:11.748) We do. Yeah. Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (42:22.16) That's what I'm saying. So yeah, I think he's going to, he's also been really liking this kind of floating top look to a lot of things. using some like brass standoffs. So he did that on a little record stand we did, I don't know, maybe six months ago. So, so yeah, that's what he's going to be working on. Do a little template routing, a little bit of
I think we're gonna have to do any resawing of anything. We'll use some thin walnut. Some non-popcorn walnut.
Logan Wittmer (43:02.168) Sometimes you have that piece of wood that just does not want to cooperate.
Phil Huber (43:06.395) Yeah, I had asked Logan for some walnut to make a birthday gift and we were out at his place filming backstory here and it is winter in Iowa, which means that the relative humidity practically anywhere is almost in negative numbers. And pulled out a piece of two inch thick walnut.
Logan Wittmer (43:28.598) Mm-hmm.
Phil Huber (43:35.25) that had been air drying long enough. And then I brought it here into this video studio and started cutting it into pieces that I needed. And in between that, I was doing some stuff here at my desk. And all of a sudden I hear this like, dink, ping. And the walnut had started end checking and like some cracks in it just, just.
Logan Wittmer (43:38.637) yeah, two years for sure.
Phil Huber (44:04.893) popped open.
Logan Wittmer (44:06.486) Like we'd be sitting in the studio yesterday after Phil had broken this down into, don't know, 18 inch pieces or so. And all of you just hear pop. And it was just, it was like, it was like ice cracking. If anybody's ever been ice fishing and you're sitting on the ice and you just hear these random pops and cracks, that's exactly what it sounded like. which was crazy. And it wasn't, it was on the higher side of moisture for air dried.
Phil Huber (44:12.828) Yeah.
Phil Huber (44:24.177) Yeah. Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (44:34.671) Usually here I get, you know, 14 to 15 percent is a good air dried walnut. This was at 1617. So not like it was like, it's not like it was soaking wet by any means.
And I just pulled up the humidity here because we talked about it. You know, it's been out in the non-climate controlled side of my shop, which should be fairly, it should be fairly dry out there. It does say our humidity today outside is 68 % the weather channel. So.
Maybe it's not as dry as I thought it was. And then going inside is dryer. I don't know. I don't know. It just was, it was bizarre. I've never seen that. And it was, it was popping apart. like that board just had a boatload of tension in it. So who knows? Maybe it had case hardened somehow. generally you don't get that with air drying a walnut. I mean, you get it with air, air dried white oak. Well, absolutely case hardened. If it sits in the sun, it will case harden. but
Phil Huber (45:32.774) Air tried? Yeah.
Phil Huber (45:41.031) Yeah.
Logan Wittmer (45:42.99) Usually Walnut does not, so I don't know. So we're gonna flex on the chunk of trunk extended warranty on that one. Love it or we'll buy it back.
Phil Huber (45:46.375) Yeah. I still have the...
John Doyle (45:53.646) Yeah.
Phil Huber (45:58.3) Yeah, the other half of that board is still here in the shop. The part that I had cut up is now in the BTU conversion program. So I have the other half here. I think I'm going to leave that till next week before I try and cut that apart into different lengths to see if that changes anything or if that one starts popping and cracking as well. So keep you posted there.
Logan Wittmer (46:07.138) Yes, yes.
Logan Wittmer (46:21.644) Mm-hmm.
Phil Huber (46:30.525) All right, John, other than TV show projects, you got another magazine project you're working on?
John Doyle (46:36.248) Probably, probably something I should be working on, we're at the end of the issue here. So we got reader's tips there coming up next week. that, and probably need to look at what I'm supposed to have to mark in the shop for next issue here soon before he asks. But yeah, I'm mainly just chugging along on TV show stuff right now.
Phil Huber (46:38.717) You
Phil Huber (46:46.854) yeah.
Phil Huber (47:04.785) Okay. All right. There you have it. That's another episode of the shop notes podcast. Love to hear your questions, comments, and smart remarks. Maybe some stories that you have about adapting furniture designs to suit your needs. Or if you've built a number of projects that all use kind of a similar design structure or language, love to hear that as well. Send us photos. You can do that to woodsmith at woodsmith.com or leave a comment on
the shop notes podcast YouTube channel and we'll read those out in a future episode. Thanks for listening everybody. Bye.
