Shop Storage Session 4: French Cleat Tower

I love this project! If you have storage issues, and who doesn't in their shop, in their garage, in their basement, wherever you are, this thing is pretty cool. This is my French cleat tower. So let's talk tower first, and then we'll come back and revisit the French cleat. Got a 16-by-16-inch, four-foot high tower here on casters, so you can move that around. And as I was crafting this thing in my head, my first idea was, well, I'm gonna build this tower, and I'm thinking, well, there's a bunch of air inside there. What a waste of space. So if we start by looking at the back, instead of making it French cleated, four sides, I put a door on one side. So as a result, mucho storage on the inside of this thing. So that's really cool. Now, French cleats, what's the deal with that? First off, there's a bunch of stuff, not on this side so I can show you the French cleats. With a French cleat, the system is that we have a strip here that's got a 45-degree angle on the top of it. We put a mating strip exactly like this on the back of a thing, and then we can hang it on here. Now, whether you wanna make this French cleat tower or not, getting this French cleat system in your head is very valuable in a shop because it gives you a huge amount of versatility to change your mind, move stuff around, keep things portable. I'll show you the portable aspect in just a second. So let's come back to this side, and I'll show you what I'm talking about with the versatility of these French cleats. So I lay out my tools. Here they sit. Yeah, I don't, the jigsaw is not really working there for me anymore. So I take it off. I grab its shelf, which is French cleated onto the French cleat. I move it up here, and then I put that back on. So I can jig-jag with these shelves, boxes, whatever it is it's hanging on here as much as I need to in order to get this the way I need it to be. And again, I could have these Z strips, these French cleats screwed to a wall, to the back of a door, to the inside of a cabinet. There's lots and lots and lots of stuff you can do with these French cleats. Now on this side, here's another thing that I think is cool. Glue bottles, probably not gonna use them here at the tower and probably gonna use them at the bench. So another benefit to this whole French cleat idea is I store this, but when I need it, I grab it. I take it to the bench, when I'm done, I come back, and I put it away. That could be glue bottles. It could be glue brushes. So lots and lots of cool ways that you can use the French cleat system in addition to what I'm about to show you about building it into this particular tower. So here's what we're gonna do: We're gonna build this project. I'm gonna take you through this step-by-step. You've got a cut list. You've got a drawing so you can work along in your own shop. We're gonna build this one. Then we're gonna build some of these storage devices just so you can see, once you've got French cleats, how do we capitalize on that? How do we make this kind of thing so that it works for the French cleat system? So let's get started by heading to the table saw and cutting up some of these larger pieces that we need in order to make the tower. For this project, I'm working with 3/4-inch BC plywood. Works great for the tower. What I really wanna look at here is kind of an efficiency of movement, an economy of movement when it comes to cutting. So let me talk you through how I got this far. This is half a sheet, which lends itself to the pieces that we need, the three pieces that we need for the tower. Check your cut list. What I did before this was from my full sheet, I used a circular saw and a track saw, and I made one good cut, nice and square to the edge. Now here's what's gonna happen. Economy of movement, first thing I'm gonna do is cut the sheet to length of its 47 inches. Once I've got that length established, then I'm gonna turn it 90 degrees. I'm gonna turn the piece 90 degrees, then I'm gonna put the factory edge that I've got up against the rip fence. Now at that stage of the game, we're not ready to cut to final width yet because we wanna eliminate the factory edge. So with the factory edge against the fence, I'm gonna cut a little bit oversize. I'm gonna add about a 1/4-inch to my rip, make one cut. Once that one cut is done, and I've established new freshly cut edges, those edges will go against the fence, and I can rip to my final width. What's really cool about this approach is that when I do that 47-inch cut first, I've cut three pieces to exactly the same length. Even if they're a little bit over or a little bit under, they're all exactly the same, which is critical for the three pieces we need for the tower. Here we go. That takes care of those three cabinet components that we need. Now we're ready to glue and screw and staple those together. This process of length cutting before ripping, great thing to keep in mind anytime you're working with sheet goods. A little bit of assembly here at the bench. And the process I'm gonna use here is the way that all of these plywood components are gonna come together. We're gonna glue them. We're gonna staple them, and we're gonna screw them. And these components I'm using on the bench to help hold the pieces vertical have those sourced for you so that you can get a set if you want to. They're really handy when we're doing this kind of stuff. So here's the deal. These are the two sides. This is the back. I'm not gonna lay it up here until I have glue in place, and we're gonna glue an edge, like I said, staple it, screw it. That's really gonna bind everything together. I have built 80 million shop cabinets. Well, maybe not 80 million, but I have built a lot of shop cabinets using this same approach that makes for very sound cabinets. Don't feel like you got to cut dados and rabbits to put this stuff together. I'm really double and triple checking here for flush. If we start good, we'll end good. So take your time there. Staples pin it, screws draw everything in. And this side is gonna look exactly like that. That takes care of that, easy peasy assembly and rock solid. While you were away, I put the top in the cabinet, cut that to fit, stapled it, glued it, screwed it. That's all set. Next we're ready for the bottom, and that's easiest if the tower's on the floor. This piece that I have in here is temporary. It's a spreader. It's cut to the exact length here, has inside to inside back here to make sure that this distance is exactly right so that the sides remain parallel to each other. It's really, really important that you do that. Cut your bottom to size, and that's gonna go on like this. So what I did is I set the bottom on here, and then I measured the overhang on each side, made sure the number wasn't the same, 'cause we want it to be centered, and marked it. The bottom goes flush with the open side. This is where our door ends up. I've got marks on here then, indicating where the edge of the plywood side is. The X shows me where the plywood goes, same thing on the other side. So then we're ready to glue it, staple it, screw it. Now I wanna kind of set write down on my pencil line. So I don't smear glue all over this 'cause that's a show face. The other side of this is a show face. And once that's in its happy place, I'm gonna get one staple here Check this one, flush with that front edge. Now it'd be a shame to blow staples through my plywood side or screws later, so working off of where that staple is located, I'm just right, there's my staple, there's my square, and then somewhere back here, we have a stopping point. And that stopping point is this far from the back edge. I just marked out the center of the back. All right, now we can go to town. That takes care of the tower itself, the cabinet components being put together. It's downside up. Let's have a look here. Next thing, face frame. Here's what you need to do leading up to this. Machine the pieces according to the cut list for the face frame and for the banding that's gonna surround the base of the cabinet. Get them ready, leave them too long. Don't cut them to length yet. That's what we're gonna work on right now. Now let me give you an overview of how this is gonna happen. This face frame is just a little different 'cause of what we're doing here on these stiles the vertical pieces, they're gonna project into the cabinet, and they're gonna project over the side of the cabinet like this 'cause what I want this to do is when we've made up our French cleats and we put them on the side, I want this stile to cover the end of that plywood, so instead of looking like that, it's gonna look like that. It's a little more finished looking. So as a result, these are extra wide. We also need to take that into account when we cut the rail. We're gonna do that in just a second. So here's what I'm gonna do. I've got one end of all of my pieces cut square, and I know that because there's a mark on there. So I cut one end on the miter saw, mark it so I know that's my good end. That end, on my stiles, is gonna go up against the base and then just mark the other end. In other words, the stiles are exactly the same length as your case sides, and transferring that measurement is a really easy way to make sure you do that accurately. When you go to the miter saw, stack these two parts together. Make sure the good ends are flush. Cut this, that way they'll both be identical. That's gonna establish the length on the stiles. This is a great, my approach to this is transferring measurement instead of taking measurements. So you notice here, I'm not using a tape measure at all, and I think that gives us a lot more accuracy. I know it does 'cause I built lots of cabinets like this. Now going the other way for our rail, what's gonna happen is we're gonna have a stile, and we're gonna have a stile, in my case, a lot of style. Get it? Then the rail it has to be cut. So it fits exactly in between, with a little overhang on that side of the stile and a little overhang on this side with the stile. So here's the easiest way to make this happen. Get two pieces of the plywood that we've been working with, and we're going to clamp them to the cabinet. And I wanna them to be, want the edge of these two pieces to be pretty close to being even with the top of the case there. Then take a stile and make it even with that plywood edge. Take another stile, butt it up against the first stile, and that's still even with the edge. Good example of feeling is better than looking. All right there, we have flush. Our two stiles are butted against each other. Now is the really cool and easy part, my cut end of the rail, that's the end that's already been squared off, goes against the stile. And then I simply trace the other end from the cabinet. And that gives me my cut point. So instead of trying to do math, the width of the cabinet plus the two pieces of French cleat minus the width of the stiles, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, this transfer of measurement approach to getting this to happen is way, way, way easier. And it's gonna also be more accurate. All right, I'm headed for the miter saw. I'm gonna cut my stiles to length. I'm gonna cut my rail to length. Then we're gonna come back and look at a little bit differently that we have to do down here at the bottom. You go do the same thing. I'll be back in a sec. Before we come and work on the bottom, couple of things, my stiles and my top rail are cut to perfect length. I've also cut to length this piece of banding that's gonna go end to end here on the bottom of the cabinet. That has to be the right length now. What we're gonna do is we know that this rail is the right length to establish our outside-to-outside distance on these stiles. So I'm gonna use it down here as a space temporarily. So squoze it between your two stiles and then put a clamp on there to hold that in place. Then what we're going after here is establishing where do these stiles meet this piece of banding so that the bottom of the face frame is located in the right direction. These are gonna get screw pocketed to this. So what I'm gonna do now is bring this whole assembly down. The end of my banding is even with the edge of the plywood, and then my only other check is take a piece of plywood and do this. And that's what establishes the overhang out here on the edge of this stile right there. And then double-check this. That's good. Make a mark. Same thing on this, make a mark. Then that, these marks then show the edge of the stile. The stile itself is gonna go there. Same thing on this end, that mark is the edge of the stile. Stile's gonna go there, and that'll lock this in so that the stiles are in the right spot to get the overhang so it covers the plywood and everything stays nice and square. Next thing I'm gonna do is head for the pocket hole machine, screw pockets, get the face frame put together, and then we'll come back and look at putting the face frame on the cabinet. My face frame's ready to go. I used pocket holes to put everything together. So of course, we're looking at the back of it here. I get this out of the way and then put a bunch of glue on my surfaces, and we're ready to install. Gonna start the install at the bottom. That's what makes the most sense. The reason being the banding for the base gives us our left-to-right orientation by getting it flush on the ends here. And it also gives us the top-to-bottom orientation by getting this top edge even with the plywood right there. Standard old fashioned finger test to make sure that's good to go. Next, I'm gonna head for the top, taking with me some of my plywood. And what you can do is use the plywood to establish exactly where the edge of that stile should be. Now I'm racking this to get it where I want it to be. And that's kind of a natural by-product of working with the plywood case and the solid wood face frame. So don't sweat that. Should it be good on this side, if it's also good on that side. Now here's a great trick. After that nail went in, it shifted back just a little bit. I wanna pull it this way to get the overhang the same, way easier to do this with a clamp than it is with my hand. So I'm gonna put some clamp pressure on there, check it again. And I'm just dialing that clamp until I get that face frame pulled in. It'll overcome that 18-gauge brad that I've got in there, no problem. Went a little too far. There we go. All right. And then it's worth doing a check partway down. That plywood case could be bowed. So it's worth giving that a feel in the middle and a feel in the middle on this side. And then from there you can go ahead and nail and one way you can gauge where the nail should be going is we have 3/4-of-an-inch overhang on the inside. So if I put that piece of plywood there 3/4-of-an-inch and then I use that to locate my brads. That'll get me on the right spot. All right, I'm gonna nail this off. And then I'm gonna put the casters on the bottom. And this case component part is all done. We're ready to start making our French cleats. And here's what we're gonna do. It's gonna be a two-step deal, and we're gonna cut them to width first. After the width has been produced, then we're gonna come back and cut the 45-degree bevel. It's the easiest way to make this happen. Now in the world of easy, here's the thing to do. Take a sheet of plywood, and cut it to the right length, the finished length of your French cleats. Doesn't really matter if you're doing this project or you're using French cleats for something else, it's a whole lot easier to start with this big slab the right length, and then every cleat we cut is already the right length, than to go back and cut all our cleats one at a time to get them to the right length. That'd be very tedious. Remember as you're cutting, we need enough to go on the cabinet, so check that count. Then you're also gonna need some that mount on the back of your hangers in the back of your shelf or box or whatever it is you're putting on the tower. So make some extras as you go. This part's straightforward, just a lot of ripping. Cut your rip fence to the right dimension. Drop it, drop it, cut it, cut it. What I just cut is only a small percentage of all the cleats you need for this project. It's a lot of cutting. Now, I'm gonna bring those parts back. I'm gonna tilt my saw blade to 45 degrees, and then we'll make the next cut. Let's have a look at what I'm making happen here. When you set the location of your rip fence, you wanna set it so that we're getting this perfect knife edge out here but not reducing the width of the pieces. So mess with your fence position until we have this just right, but we do want this top corner here to end up being a nice sharp knife edge. So blade at 45 degrees, do some test cuts. Make sure that you're getting the knife edge, but you're not reducing the width of this part. You're just undercutting that corner. I've got lots of parts left to cut here. I'm gonna get back to it, and then it's cool, we can start hanging French cleats onto the cabinet. We can start putting our cleats onto the cabinet but get a couple of spacers ready first. We need one that's gonna go at the top here, that's gonna hold the first cleat down from the top. We need a second one that's gonna go cleat to cleat to cleat to cleat. The layout I've generated for this project is inch-and-3/8 is the width of our top spacer. 3 1/2 is the width of our intermediate spacers. You can, of course, change that however you want. One of the things that's really convenient with the spacers if they're thicker than your cleat, and the reason is that let's say we use a 3/4-inch spacer, 3/4-inch thick spacer, when we put the cleat right next to it, and we're butting up to it, that 45-degree rip often has a tendency to climb up on it like that, and that's gonna mess up your accuracy. If the cleats or the spacers are thicker than the cleats and butts to it, it's a little easier to make all this happen. Whether you're putting these on this cabinet or you're hanging these cleats on a wall, using spacers like this is gonna make this way easier and way more consistent. It is the way to do this. Glue, locate, spacers even with the top, cleats kissing the spacer. And then on my end of this, what you do is pull the French cleat up against the back face of the face frame. Staple. Guess what's gonna happen now? Gonna repeat this process numerous times. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do all of this side and all of the other side. And then I'm gonna come back, and we're gonna talk about these trim strips that go on those outside corners and get those installed. And then that'll let us do the cleats on the last face. So lots of spacing, lots of stapling. We're off to the races. Now on these trim pieces, these corner pieces, cut them to width, square one end, just like we did on the face frame parts. But one end at the bottom, strike the other end off at the top, cut that to length, and then we'll have a look at getting those installed. That's the work I gotta do right now. Double-check my fit. Perfect. So really what this corner is doing is it's masking this end of the cleats. And then because it overhangs on the backside, it's also gonna mask those ends of the cleats. It makes it look a little neater. When you put this board on, push it. There might be a little flex in this pine like there is in this one. So give it a little shove or put a clamp on it to tighten it up against the ends of the cleats. Do the same thing on the other corner. Then when we have that on, you'll be able to lay this on its front. I know there's a stapler in there somewhere. Once this other cleat is on, you can lay it on its front and use the same procedure to put the cleats on the back, and all the French cleat work will be done. And there we go. We're completely French cleated. And that part of this project is done. When it comes to making your door, here's a really easy way to get the banding on it without having to pull your hair out cutting parts to exact sizes. Cut the door panel so it's the right length, but it's still too wide by about an inch or so then put only the end banding on to start with, this end and the other end. And the way we put that banding on is gonna be real important. Here's what I want. On one edge, and it's gotta be the same edge here and on the other end, hold the banding a little bit short, a 1/16th or an 1/8-of-an-inch short of that edge. Do the same thing on the other end. And then we're actually gonna go from here to the table saw. When I'm banding stuff four sides, like this door, I try to take advantage of this trick whenever I can 'cause it makes my life so much easier. Here's the trick. Remember that when we put the banning on the top and the bottom of the door, it was held short from one edge. So here's what we do now. This edge goes up against the table saw. Do a ripping cut of the door that's slightly oversized. That's gonna cut through the banding and the door, makes them automatically flush. This edge goes against the fence, cut to your final size. So what it saves you here is messing around with these pieces, the top and the bottom to try to cut them to exactly the width of your door. We're gonna do all of that right on the table saw right now. So remember this first cut has to be oversized. This is not the final dimension of the door yet. Now rotate. Cut edge against the fence. Final dimension. Now easy peasy, you can take the door back to the bench, put on the two pieces of long banding, and you're gonna have a great fit between the banding there and the banding on the top and the bottom, because of the way we cut it on the table saw. Really works great. Once the hinges are on the door, the door can go on to the cabinet. So here's what you need in order to make that happen. Put marks on the face frame that indicate how much the door will overlap the face frame. And then what's a little bit tricky with these self-closing hinges is that you position the door, so let's say I position right on that line, and then when I drive the screws into the hinge, it moves the door. So what you need to do is flatten the hinge and position the door at the same time. So that's what I'm doing. Now with my left hand, I'm holding the hinge flat. Then I'm manipulating the door to hit my two pencil lines. And I'm only gonna put one screw in this top hinge. And I'll talk about that concept in a second. And I'm gonna do same thing at the bottom. I've got another line down there to hit. Flatten the hinge, find the line, make sure the hinge is flat. And then double-check, all right? So on this bottom one, I missed by just a little bit. That's why you only drive one screw. Now I can loosen that. Grab another screw, move over. Now I'm on the line there, and then drive the second screw. So you get a couple opportunities to get this just right. That's much better. I'm gonna double-check the top. That one's gonna be good. Now that the door is on, let's look at making a couple accessories for this so that you can understand the concept of making stuff that works with the French cleats. Let's accessorize your French cleat tower. First thing, let's look at just making a simple shelf. What you wanna do for that is check the footprint of the thing you wanna put on the shelf. That's where those dimensions are gonna come from. Once we have that, that'll tell you how big the shelf has to be. Cut your cleat that'll hang on your tower to the same length. Easiest way to put these together is to put that cleat in a vise, and then we're gonna glue and staple. Make sure when you put this on you're going the right way relative to the angle on the cleat. The bevel has to be on the same side as the shelf. I'll show you in a sec. This is the right way. This is gonna cause them to engage when we get over to the French cleat. Now, we have to do another step here. So let's look at the tower itself. This, by itself, doesn't have a lot of support. If you were doing something really lightweight, you could probably get away with that, but let's give it a little bit more bracing. And I'm gonna do that by taking another piece of plywood, putting it up underneath here. And I'm gonna mark just above the bottom of the French cleat, which is that mark right there. Now check out the width. The width of this vertical is already just slightly less than the width of my shelf. That's perfect. I'm gonna go to the band saw, and I'm gonna just freehand cut a curve in order to turn this into a brace that goes below the shelf. And then glue and staple. And then that brace will rest against that lower cleat, give that a lot more support so it's not tippy when the tool goes on there. Next thing we'll have a look at, just a tiny bit different configuration is hanging a box on one of these French cleats. On a box, the only thing that really changes from what we've already done are couple of things. You don't really need so long a French cleat to engage with the other French cleat. So you can make that maybe 2/3 or so of the length of the box. And the other thing is we don't need a kicker down below it. We don't need a support brace because the box is gonna serve that purpose. And then that's ready to go. Like I said, because the box has some size to it vertically, no need for a kickstand, no need for a brace below it. The box is ready to go. Next thing, one of my favorites, PVC pipe storage containers that you can hang on here. In order to make your PVC storage containers, we're gonna start here at the miter saw 'cause cutting PVC on the miter saw, it can be just a little bit tricky. You do wanna make sure you've got a nice fine tooth blade in there. This is thin-walled stuff. And if you've got two coarse a tooth, it'll catch on the wall instead of cut the wall, so a 60-tooth blade is a great way to go. I'm gonna start by cutting the top of the tube at 22 1/2 degrees, that being the angle, not the temperature. I'm gonna make that cut, and then we'll move on. Now come back to 90 with the blade. I've got a stop block already set up that'll catch that end. And do your square cut. So part of what, in this sequence of events, I'm getting away from is you holding this really small part to cut it to length. Like I said, PVC can be just a little bit hinky to cut. I'd rather you have eight feet of tube sticking down this way like I do to hold onto than having just this short section And then for however many of those you need, we're just gonna toggle back and forth 22 1/2. Cut the angle. Repeat that process over and over until you have as many of these as you need. I'm working with 3-inch pipe for this, but there's no reason why I couldn't go larger to 4, smaller to 1, 1 1/2, 2, whatever you need, depending on what it is you're gonna store in there. Next thing, how do we get a bottom on these? I am just too cheap to buy PVC caps for all of these pipes and turn those into the bottoms for them. So instead, we're just gonna fabricate one here in the shop, starting by putting the pipe upside down in a vise and gently clamp that in place. Don't squeeze the heck out of it 'cause then you'll egg-shape this thing, so just enough pressure to hold it. I've got a plywood disc that I traced the pipe onto, and then I cut that so it's oversized. It's about an 1/8-of-an-inch, maybe a little bit more larger on each side. And then CA glue is a great adhesive for this. Dissimilar products, we got wood, we got plastic. This is thick CA glue, and it'll do a great job of holding these parts together. Center your base on there. I'm making sure I got a little overhang on each side, and CA glue will bond fully in 50 seconds, 70 seconds. So we're just gonna let that sit, and then we'll come back and finish it off. Once your glue has had a chance to set up, then the next step is flush trim router bit, and we'll just simply follow that pipe and trim the bottom to fit. Next thing, let's have a look at mounting this to one of our cleats. First thing we need to do in our PVC holders is find the middle of the back here. And you can just do this by, I don't go crazy, somewhere around there. I'm gonna drill a hole. And this is how we're gonna mount these. We're gonna screw them to our cleat. And I gotta say these PVC holders, this is like my favorite thing to put on the French cleat thing. I think these are really cool, really useful. The PVC is so inexpensive, and you can get different diameters of it. You can size the pipe to whatever you want. All right, now I've already cut my cleat to length, the length being just a little shorter than the cumulative length of my three tubes. And to keep everything referenced the same, I'm gonna make the top of the 22 1/2 degree cut even with the top of the cleat, run a sheet metal screw. And from there to there love them. So that's a great storage device. Overall, I hope that you enjoyed this French cleat tower. And as I said earlier, whether you do the tower for your shop or you just take advantage of what you learned about this whole French cleat system and put the cleats on a wall someplace to give your tools the adjustability, portability that you want, I think this French cleat idea is wonderful, and I can't wait to do more of this in my shop. So lots of great shop storage devices, lots of great shop storage ideas passed along to you here. Hope you can take advantage of them, get organized, keep your shop a little neater and cleaner. And it's gonna help you enjoy your woodworking a lot more. So get out there in the shop, make some shop storage, and make some chips.