Video: How To Build A Buffet Table With Storage

In this video, April Wilkerson shows you how she built a practical custom buffet table for her outdoor kitchen. Made mostly from shop scraps, it provides a spacious surface to serve food and drinks with plenty of shelving for supplies, an insert for a drink cooler and room for tucking away a mini fridge. While she builds two units to support the long tabletop, you could certainly shorten the design and reconfigure the shelves and other details to fit your space.

Pocket Hole Joinery Keeps Construction Simple but Sturdy

April uses pocket hole joinery extensively for this project. It's an excellent choice for attaching stretchers and aprons to legs, because assembling the parts is as easy as clamping the workpieces in a jig, drilling angled holes and attaching the parts with screws. It takes no special skill to use a pocket hole system, and the joints are remarkably strong! When clamping the pieces together before driving the screws, our Quick Release Pocket Hole Clamp can ensure that the joints are properly aligned, for a perfectly flush connection.

Track Saws—Arrow-straight Cuts Automatically

Breaking large pieces of plywood down to size can be unwieldy on a table saw and tricky to do accurately with an ordinary circular saw. But with a Triton TTS1400 Plunge-Cut Track Saw, April makes the process look easy—because it is! Just line up the edge of the saw's aluminum track with your layout marks, hold or clamp the rail in position and slide the saw along the rail to make the cut. Track saws rival table saws for accuracy at a fraction of the cost, with the added benefit of being lightweight and easy to store.

Why Fuss with Dust When You Don't Have to?

Like most saws, track saws produce a lot of fine wood dust that's unhealthy to breathe and makes a mess of a workspace in a hurry! So, April connects her saw to our Dust Right Separator with a FlexiPort Power Tool Hose Kit. The separator prevents heavy particulate from clogging up her shop vacuum filter prematurely, so she doesn't have to clean it as often. And the pliable, multi-shaped FlexiPort adapters simply friction-fit into the dust ports of power tools for a quick, secure dust hose connection. Here's the easy way to keep your handheld power tools running cleanly!

Bandy Clamps Lending a Third Hand for Projects and Much More!

Spring clamps are invaluable for holding parts in position when you need both hands for other tasks. In this build, April uses Rockler’s award-winning Bandy Clamps to hold shelf slat runners in place while she attaches them with brad nails. These clamps are much faster to install than screw-style C-clamps, and their pivoting, grippy contact pads hold securely. They also have a pliable, super-tough rubber band between the jaws that applies lateral pressure. It's a unique feature you won't find on other spring clamp styles and a real benefit for attaching edging and other moldings to shelves or when you need to hold all sorts of parts in position between the jaws.