The Wood Whisperer is sponsored by Powermatic, Titebond and special sponsor, Rockler. Hey everybody, we're having a huge back to school sale at the WoodWhisperer Guild. 40% off a single project one per customer and you only have until the end of the month. Use the code "Bowtie" at checkout. So today we have a fun, interesting and challenging project. I'm gonna make shutters. It's a first for me. So this is my master bedroom. We have a big window here and thankfully we were able to upgrade to some light blocking drapes, but there's a big window up here and it lets tons of light in and we've been here for about five years and Nicole finally let me know that it really bothers her.
She likes to sleep as long as possible and doesn't want the sun in her face first thing in the morning. So We have to figure out a way to block off some of that light. The window itself is huge, it's over eight ft in length but it has three different sections. So I had to kind of come up with a strategy that would make this possible to build in the shop and then take back to the bedroom and install it. I think what we're gonna do is inserts instead of building a whole giant frame, we're just going to pop these things in individually. Now you can see it's already done here, but we need to go back in time and show you how we took the measurements and got the shape so we can get them back to the shop real quick.
I want to mention that our sponsor of this episode is Rockler and Rockler has amazing tools for this. They've got a calculator, This wizard that you can use just punch in your numbers and you get all the spacing just right. A bunch of tools, jigs and also the accessories and things you need to put the shutters together. Let's hop up on the ladders and I'll show you how we did it. So, the challenge that we have here is how do we get an exact copy of this shape? Because that's what we need in the shop so that we can actually build this thing. Well, we're gonna use something called a spiling stick or a…spilling…stick. I don't know how it's pronounced, I'm not a boat builder. So, the first thing we need for this process is a board that goes in this space that will be kind of in a fixed position.
That allows us to get data points for the location of the curve. So, let's keep it simple. All we need to do is kind of go up to our point where the curve starts and we're just going to measure this height. Okay, that's our height. And then we need this exact length and we're gonna cut a piece that fits into this opening. All right, let's see how we did definitely a snug fit and that's what we want. So let's go back to the shop right? So now we can make our spiling stick. But I've been thinking about it. I think a better name would be a Spag stick. The key features here. We need to have it come to a point and we need to have a couple of things in the surface that make it recognizable, asymmetrical and something that when I trace around it, I could later put it back down and find that exact location.
We've got the board in place. It's immobilized for the most part and now we just need to grab various positions as many as you want. The idea here is we're trying to find important event points. So what's an important event point? Well, this top corner here our maximum height. We also have a lower corner here and then we have a lot of points along this curve and the more of them we get the more accurate we can be. So I'm just going to take the point of the stick, push it up into my corner and just make sure I have a good amount of meat of the stick here on the board wherever I want it to be and then trace around.
You want to hold this firmly. You do not want it to move during this process. I think we got maybe one more here and we're good. Okay, let's get back to the shop. All right, so here is how we replicate that shape. I have a piece of half inch plywood that's going to essentially be my my core template for all of this. I'm going to bring the piece that we drew on and make it nice and flush with the bottom and the sides. Now you'll note that this piece of plywood is cut to this exact length of this piece and I have the height so that it is the maximum height of my window. All right. So once I get that in place, I'm gonna clamp it so it doesn't move. And here is where the magic happens. Now, if you recall the first one that we did in the upper left corner is the upper left corner of the window. So, if I've already cut this to the appropriate height. When I put my little stick in place, we should see that this point comes right out to that corner and it does perfect.
Right? So we can actually call that one done and move on to the next one. Because I have a little bit of a gap here. When I find my position, I'm just gonna push down to bring my stick down to the surface. And I'm gonna put a little line here little dot. Now you can see why having as many marks and notches as possible. Makes it a whole lot easier to line these things up. So that stick can only sit down in one position and it should be right up at this corner and it is all right. So now we can remove this board and see if we can't use these dots to draw the perfect curve. It may not be perfect, but it will be a perfect copy. So what I've done is I've clamped this rough curve in place, it's at my top corner and I'm going to start drawing a line and essentially connecting the dots. But instead of connecting dots with straight lines, were connecting it with a curve that's pretty close to the desired curve that we want.
And I'm hoping that means we will get even closer to a perfect results. I'm gonna start drawing couple dots at a time. If I see them going off course, then I will make an adjustment. So at this point we're gonna cut away our waste material and then we will have something that we can actually pop into the window. All right. So, we're gonna drop this in place, see how we did.
And just in case I have a screw that I've added to the board because if you push that all the way in, good luck getting it back out again. It's a nice night fit. Now, once this is in here, what you want to do is kind of take a look along the top and what we're looking at is the light, we want to see how that light pokes through and the light itself and the width of that light line kind of tells you where you need to remove material.
So just get a pencil if you see something that's kind of a tight fit and you can just kind of mark lines along the board in every spot where you need to remove some material and hopefully you don't have too much removed already. But this is a pretty accurate method of doing this. So it shouldn't be too bad if you do have a lot of areas that need work, you may just want to grab a scribe and run that along the edge and give yourself a nice new line to work too. But in the end I want this, I don't want to say loose, but I want this to be a fit that doesn't scratch on its way in. It's just gonna drop in place and we'll secure it later with screws. But that looks pretty good so far. I don't really think we need to do a whole lot of work to this one, but let's take this board and see what it looks like on the other window. That's supposed to be the mirror image and I'll tell you what, we may have lucked out here because there's a little more of a gap at the top then I have on the other one, but I think we can compensate for that in the shop.
I don't think we need to make a second template for this side. While we're here, we are going to get our template for the center window. We're just gonna use the same board and cut it down. No reason why we can't recycle that. So I'm just gonna get that guy in there mark a lion and we may have to cut a couple times to get a perfect fit, but I'll get us close. And one thing I'm noticing my Spag stick is too short, so I think I'll make a quick another one of these.
Right? So I think we've got a pretty good fit here on that board and my longer stick and we'll do the same thing. We're going to go up to each one of these corners and then of course we'll do a few more lines along the length of the arch. The same drill is before we have the width matching our bottom piece here, of course are height is pretty close to the height that we need for the window and I'm just gonna match up the stick and draw my points. Same thing we did before. We're just going to grab our curve and I tightened it up just a little bit, but it was pretty close to the same. And this one thankfully actually does kind of hit all of our points, which makes this pretty easy. All right, let's see how we did. There was a little bit of back and forth here that we're going to save you the trouble of seeing, that looks pretty good to me and don't be confused by these notches.
We're just putting scrap pieces together. So that's just what we had in the shop. Right? So now we have both of our templates here and this is all the info we need because of course this right template will work on our left side as well. And I'm thinking about the design of the shutters themselves. The structure we're going to employ, we've got a very large radius arch here. Now if the arch was really high and came back down very quickly, it would be a little bit easier to design horizontal slats that just get kind of cut on the ends. But in this case with this large radius, I think it's gonna be pretty tricky. So I'm opting for a different design. That's kind of a step pattern that allows us to keep our slats nice and square. So you can actually see on this drawing, this is not a drawing, that's what we call a photograph. This is kind of the idea I'm going to go for and of course we have three panels and not two, but I think we can pull this off.
Now. Here's the thing, I don't make shutters. I've actually never made shutters in my life before. So there are some standard numbers that we need to be able to decide how we're going to build this thing up across this template. Here's the cool thing. Rockler actually has a wizard on their website that makes this super easy. And if you have regular shutters, it's going to give you everything you need. In my case, we've got a weird shape to deal with. But I still need to get some basic information about the size shutters that I want and what kind of spacing we need. So check this out. So I'll go to shutters.rockler.com to get started. First, I'm going to select movable because I do want the louvers to open and close.
The louvers size will be the largest one at 3.5 inches. Now, the control arm is the thing that moves the louvers up and down. And in our case we're going to go with a front mounted option. The total height of my shutter will be exactly 20 inches. So I'll input that number. For the width it really doesn't matter since my shutter is curved at the top. It's essentially like a variable width, I'll just then put a dummy number like 16 and you can then name the project and give it a description. And then you could either review the pdf, print it out or email it Now with this print out back in the shop, you could see, I mean we have every piece of information, we could possibly need to build this thing including measurements, dimensions, a cut list and even a parts list, if you want to buy some of the components directly from Rockler.
Now, the piece of information that I'm after here has to do with the vertical dimension in the spacing. So regardless of what this bottom rail is, because I'm gonna change my dimension for that. I'm really curious about the spacing of these slats or louvers. So what I see is an inch and a half up from the bottom rails, the center point of our first louvers, and then from that point on its three inches on center for as far as you need to go, it doesn't really matter what the height is. Eventually you're going to get to the top and you have your top rail here. But then the top louvers has once again 1.5 inches until it hits that rail. That's a key piece of information and I'm going to apply that to my drawing.
So in my example I have a 2.5 inch bottom rail here and from the rocker drawing. I know that I have to go an inch and a half to get to my first center point of the louvers and then I have another inch and a half to get to my top rail. Now, what's interesting about my structure is that I kind of have a bunch of top rails, don't I write this top rail is curved, so this is representing the top rail as is this and it's stair steps on its way up.
So it might be a little bit confusing, but just understand that that spacing is what's allowing me to figure out all of these numbers. And now with all of this worked out and each of these pieces sort of representing a single segment that will eventually be glued together to make up this rail. We can dive into our pile of alder Now with everything rough cut, we have to think about the strategy here and the slats for this piece. We're going to re saw these boards down the middle and sometimes wood can move. And especially since this wood is fresh into our shop today, we probably want to give it a little bit of time to sit and acclimate at least as much as we can.
We're gonna move on to the rest of the frame parts. So we're just gonna joint in plane each one of these and take them down to the final thickness. Before we can start constructing this wacky top rail here, we have to think about drilling. So I've got my largest stile and we need to know where these drill points are. Now the cool thing is every center point of one of the louvers is actually where we need to drill. So it should be very easy to bring our work piece right up against our template here and mark those locations and how are we actually going to have these louvers rotating.
Well. Rockler to the rescue again, you see these little plastic pins here, the skinny side will go into one of the louvers and then the fat side goes into the rail. So all we need to do is nowhere to place those marks. Keep in mind though, I have a stile here, which is pretty obvious how we need to drill that. What may not be so obvious is the fact that I have to drill into the end grain of these short pieces, which I'll be gluing together later and that represents.
It's sort of like a stile, but technically that's part of the rail, but just think you've got a slat here or a louver here, so you're gonna need a connection on both sides and that's why these get drilled into the end grain. Now, in our situation we have a very weird setup, right, is very non standard. So we have a short stile on one side that then transitions into a rail and this little step pattern, it's a whole different thing. But if you're just doing normal windows, this is where Rockler has a really cool system. So you would typically have two stile in your shutter that are exactly the same. You would bring those together with a drilling jig in the middle and then you just drill all the way along using their system. It's so easy in our case, it's a little bit more difficult because of our wacky shaped window. So we're gonna do it a little bit more manually here. Now if you don't have a drill press and you don't have the rockler jig, you're not lost here, you can still do this with a hand held drill, it's not that deep of a hole.
Just try to keep your marks in place, keep your bit on that mark, just keep it nice and straight, it'll be fine. Oh this is gonna be weird. Right, so we've kind of cobbled this thing together with the table up right like this and a fence in the back, little magnetic stops so that we can do all the different length slats as we go with these are not slides, these are parts of that top rail, but you know what I mean? So we'll be able to move the magnet as needed and this is just kind of helping hold it in place and resist gravity.
I'm just gonna use my hand make sure it doesn't move for each set of these because I have two windows will be able to use the magnet in the same position twice. Then we have to move it for the next one. Right so now for this top rail with that stair step design, we're gonna have to figure out exactly how to locate these pieces accurately. And I am going to use the domino to help prevent things from shifting around. So this is where that original drawing once again comes in real handy. We have all the marks that we need right here. So I'm gonna take the actual off cut piece to support my work pieces. I'm going to bring peace number one right in here to the corner, line it up and I'll bring in peace number two and its location. You'll see. I already have a pencil mark here on piece, number two.
All of these pieces in fact have that mark. That's my domino line and I'm trying to get as close to this edge as possible because I'm gonna be doing a cut over here later and I don't want to expose the domino and I also want to know where this piece begins right here. And this is because we're gonna be cutting a rabbet that's gonna stop right there. So I need that information for later. Now at the router table, we're going to use a straight bit to cut our rabbet and sometimes it's gonna be hard to see right because we're going in sort of a blind way here. So what I need are marks on the top of the work piece. So if I know my rabbet's gonna stop here, it can just kind of transfer that around and that's my clue for where I need to stop and then pull away from the cut. But how do I know where the bit starts and stops. Well we can actually use the fence in this case if you don't have a movable fence, you can just draw on your fence, take a square piece of material with a bit with the wings facing left and right.
Go to the point that you contact the bit and now we're gonna move this fence to be nice and flush with that piece of wood and the fence itself is now going to tell me when I've gone as far as I need to. So if I'm making this rabbet for instance, we're gonna start plunge all the way through and then pull away right here so I can make the cut this way, keep going, keep going. And once that pencil line is in line with this part of the fence, then I stop. Now those were the tricky ones. These are the easy ones. I've got some bottom rails, a top rail that we haven't shaped yet. These all need rabbets too. Now it's time for some of that hot domino action. So now we're gonna glue this top rail together. It's probably a couple different ways you can do it. I'm just gonna kind of do one section at a time, but do it all at once if that makes sense. You could do it flat on a work surface or you could do it on top of clamps.
So let's get this going here. Because this is alder and it's very very soft. I'm just gonna use a little piece of scrap here that's going to prevent the clamps from denting. Okay. Alright. So we'll let this set up but that glue dry. So while our rails are drying we can move on to something else to make ourselves useful. We have a bead that needs to go on the stiles so on the inside edge, it's just gonna be this nice little rounded over bead that's just going to add a little visual flair really doesn't serve any function.
It's just for looks So there is a beading bit. Check this out already in the router table here, it's got this nice profile that will be able to run our pieces along like this and the end result look something like this right here. Very, very nice. And this is part of Rockefeller's kit as well, so perfectly made for this purpose. One additional thing we need to do here is the result of making this bead. So we have a stile with a bead and then we have rails that come into that stile and if that rail just has a square corner on it looks a little bit rough. It's not very elegant. So here's a solution. If we put a slight chamfer on the end grain of the rails and you bring those two together, check that out.
Very, very nice. It kind of mimics the other side of this profile looks pretty good. All right. So one thing we could do with these top rails is of course clean them up. We have some sanding to do. But the thing that's gonna take us a little bit of time is squaring up the corners where the router bit ended and where the cut began on the next piece. So I've already done quite a few here, but here's the last one on this piece. And what you really need is just a good sharp chisel and a mallet. Now the cool thing is with chiseling. If you have a reference surface, you have everything you need to continue something and make it square. We've got a reference surface right here and then we have a reference surface right here. And I'm gonna use those to my advantage by cutting right along there.
I'm gonna put the flat back of my chisel along that edge, starts to chop in and sever those fibers, angle it up a little bit because I can't take it all at once. I can come back and remove some of this extra material. I can come along this back end and remove that extra material. With a wider chisel, I can kind of come in like this and angle my way in. Just kind of use hand pressure to clean that up. Now when we made our top rails, we actually left the one side just a little bit too long, we're gonna trim it to final length now. That just makes things a little bit easier in terms of getting the perfect length. So what is the perfect length? That bottom rail. So we're gonna use this as a guide. I have a little piece of material, you'll see why we need that in a minute. I'm gonna put that on the fence and then just make sure that this bottom rail fits between the blade and this work piece. Now, let me show you why we're gonna use that here.
It's a safety reason. This thing is kind of a wacky cut, a little bit weird, right? And we also have the work piece now kind of jammed between the fence and the blade and it does have a little bit of a tendency to possibly move. So by putting this here, we could reference the beginning of our cut right there. Then once we move past that block, if there's any movement here, we're not touching the fence. So purely a safety reason for doing that, but I think it's definitely worth doing, let's get this clamped in place. Alright, so I've got the bottom and the sides clamped together. I'm gonna bring the top piece in and we've got some marks kind of tell us where we're supposed to line up and then we're going to lay out for some dominoes. Now, one important piece of information is to know where that curve is at the top, That's why we've got this wonderful little template Now, if we did everything right, we should have a line that clears all of these joints, but we can draw our curve all the way through.
So now with this curve here, we can see exactly where our cuts are gonna be. And we can make sure that we have a domino that does not poke through after we make that cut. Alright, so now we're just going to pop in some undersized dominoes here to do a bit of a dry assembly, make sure everything looks good before we move on to our slats. That's looking pretty, pretty, pretty good. So now we've got the frame dry assembled here. I'm actually gonna pop it apart to make this curve cut. We technically have three pieces right? The stile gets cut, the rail gets cut and then the other stile gets cut. So let's knock this apart. Let's make them cuts. You do one more for good luck. Alright, so now with a little bit of finessing done, we could bring our template back. Here's the great thing if it fits it fits right this we know fits into the space, so anything protruding from our template should be trimmed down and hopefully this will fit on the first shot.
Let's go test it out. Look at that very nice back to the shop, right? So now the only thing left to do with these frames is to start the sanding process. Now on a project like this, it's a real good idea to pre finish your parts because think about it, the shape the way the louvers are going to be in place inside that frame would be a nightmare to stain and finish later. So that's what I've done here. I've got a coat of stain And then a light coat of an oil-based varnish on top of that in these parts will just dry. We'll work with them a little bit later and we don't want to assemble yet because we still have to make the shutters or the louvers and that's what we're gonna do now. Now the louvers have to be 3/8 in thickness. So I'm grabbing thicker pieces of wood, resawing down the center and it will split it into two pieces. Each one being one of our louvers. With all of our slats cut to width we have to cut them to length.
And the easiest way to do this is to have our frame dry assembled. And I'm just gonna use a shim. The gap I need is a 32nd per side. So this is 1/16. I'm going to go flush on my left and cut this board down until it slides right in there with the shim. So now at the ends of each of our louvers, we need to have a small hole for that little plastic pin to go into. So we're gonna drill it by hand right here at the workbench. And this is a nice alternative if you don't have a drill press, we've got some squares that show us where the dead center point is. Now the bit that I need to use this 9/64ths. I don't have that in a brad point. So I'm going to get started with brad point cause I really want this thing to be as close to center as possible.
Once I get started I could switch to my twist bit which has tape to show me my depth and it should pop right in there. I just have to do this like 1,002 more times. So after the louvers were cut, I got them caught up in terms of finishing with a little bit of stain and the top coat, This is one of those projects that absolutely makes sense to pre finish all of these parts before putting them together. We're at the point now that we need to think about how the louvers are going to move and adjust. So let me show you with the frame here. Normally when you want to adjust louvers, you probably would put that control arm right in the middle.
The problem with the middle is that we miss two of our louvers here. So the only way the control arm can operate all of the louvers is if we move it off and offset to this left side and of course the mirror image on the other side. So that's how we know where we're going to be placing our hooks at the center of the smallest louvers and we're going to take that same distance on the rest of these guys. I just got a little story stick here, that's gonna allow me to get the same measurement on each one of these, my mark in there and then I'll use a scratch awl here to start my hole. Now Rockler actually sells little clips that go into these and they sort of have a square look to them.
But I already had these little screw eyes on hand. So I decided to use what I got. I'm gonna drill a very small pilot hole here, trying to be as straight, true as possible. Grab one of my hooks a little bit of wax, send it all the way in and then I'm gonna stop when I'm parallel to the slat. And for all the larger ones, we'll do the same thing using that same little story stick.
All right, so now it's probably a good time to just do a little bit of a dry assembly here. I can start to add our little pins to the louvers. All right, let's see if we can get these guys all lined up for us. Okay. With the louvers in place, you can see if we have a control arm and this is just a piece I cut from some scrap stock, the control arm that connects to all of these. You can move them in unison, but we've got a little problem here. The hook winds up hitting the frame here. So even when we have the control arm in place, it gets worse because we need that arm to be able to go below the surface just slightly. So we'll just use a router to create what they think they call a little mouse hole, but just it's a little relief. Now the screw eyes have to be opened up on the control arm so that we can actually drop them into the closed screw eyes and the louvers, right? So they hook together just like that.
And now with some finish applied, I can start to add the screw eyes. This is obviously my first time doing something like this. So there may be other easier ways. But when I think about trying to crimp this down and to capture all of these hooks, it's gonna be pretty hard when we're bringing this whole thing together. So I think I could pre attach this very easily because I can kind of move those around is needed and then we can tighten them up, Move right on to the next one. Okay. And one last thing we need to do to our frame parts is to counter bore and drill a hole for screws, the screws going to go through the side stile and into the frame.
This is essentially what's going to hold the shutter in place. So I'm gonna use epoxy for this because it's gonna give me extra time even though I only have four joints, you know, something goes wrong, I need some time to respond. So a nice slow set epoxy is a good choice. Get some glue in the mortises. All right. Let's see if we can start putting this puzzle together. You're thinking if I get the shutters in first, those might be the trickiest things to align. At least get them started. Should be able to come in with our bottom rail and that guy we can sink all the way home. This is where things are going to get a little tricky because I got to be able to get the the bar here in place and line up our pins. I all right, not too bad. Okay, now I can only get a clamp on the bottom here because I really can't clamp a curved surface at the top.
So let's get this guy in place first and by bringing it together down here it does kind of square us up, which is really helpful, but I'm only gonna be able to use hand pressure up here and these joints are closing pretty nicely. So I think that's all we really need. Everything looks good. Just wipe away the squeeze out. We'll just let that sit for a while. Alright, so here's the final result and I got to tell you a project like this is something that I normally don't take on. Not only the complexity of just how everything is oriented, the spacing and stuff like that, but interior trim, carpentry, it's something I have a lot of respect for fitting things into imperfect spaces is something I'm not that good at. So I was actually a little bit cautious when I was going into this thinking we'd run into a lot of problems.
But thankfully, honestly, with the Rockler calculator, that was the reason I was able to take on this project because it really answered a lot of my questions about spacing and then I was confident to move into changing the shape at the top and overall, I'm really glad we went with this stepped design. Once it's installed now, I actually like it a lot more. Each one of these operates exactly as expected. You go full motion up and down if we wanted to, we could add another hook on here and possibly put a hook on a stick and this way we can operate these from the floor. Would have got to be honest. I think we're probably just gonna leave these closed most of the time. Alright. So overall I think it came out pretty good. I just don't know if I would do another one of these any time soon. But with the kit that Rockler sells, this thing actually was a heck of a lot easier than it could have been.
All right, So thanks for watching everybody and we will catch you next time. I started slow and then I went back puppet the puppet beep boop boo. Oh, the magnet actually is slipping a little bit. We got this beautiful deep red and then these guys are the older ones..