Marc:The Wood Whisperer
is brought to you by: Powermatic, the gold
standard since 1921 and by Rockler Woodworking and
Hardware, Create with Confidence. (groovy brass music) Now here comes the fun part. We need to make this thing
look like it is all one piece. It's a little bit of a
challenge because we've got a thicker piece at the top
and the bottom than we have in the middle so we've got
to transition this as we go. Everything is squared off at the corners now so we need to round those over. There's quite a bit of work and dust and wood chips involved in this process so if I can I like to use
machines, where possible. We'll be using the router to do some of the initial rounding over. I'll be using a die grinder
to do so some of the blending and things
that need to be done but I'm not 100 percent sure,
I don't have a complete plan from beginning to end at this point.
I just see what needs to be done as I go. I start by making the roundovers and then I'll put the piece back together, take a look at it and I'll
build upon that process as I go. Let's jump right in, start with the router table and then we'll come back and do the handheld router for the vertical pieces. I've got my biggest roundover bit here and I do want to give you a safety precaution. We're going to be cutting a
lot of different angles so even though we have straight grain
right here we have two areas of end grain where you could
potentially have an issue. This mahogany routes like a
dream so it's not necessarily going to be that big of a
deal for me but depending on the species of wood you're
working with you may have some serious issues if you
try to route end grain, so be very careful and
try to know the wood that you're working with before
you start working with it.
For the most part I'm going
to take a light pass and then come back for a second round
and take a second pass, bringing the wood up against the bearing. (mechanical humming) Now my next step is to take my
three quarter inch roundover bit and round over all four
sides of my vertical piece. I'm going to attach the
vertical piece to the foot to give you a better idea of
what we're up against here. You see this little ledge?
We have to transition this thicker area into this thinner area. That means that this
roundover, this large roundover has to somehow transition
to a smaller roundover. I really don't want to do
any carving or anything up here other than a little
fine finesse work at the end. What I'm going to do is start by tracing around to establish my shape here. On the back side as well. While the pieces are still
apart I now have a nice outline that tells me where that
material needs to be removed.
I'm going to get this guy
secured to the bench and we're going to start carving
some of this material away. Here's one of our reference
lines that we just drew and that's basically telling us
how far in we need to go. It's also helpful to have
a reference line to tell us where that taper is going to
start because really we're just trying to remove a wedge
of material right here now. To me two and a half
inches down looked pretty good so that's what I'm going to go with. I'll draw a pencil line here. You can use whatever tools you have handy to make this sort of a wood removal here.
Your cabinet maker's rasp is
always a nice reliable tool. It's a little bit slow
though so what I'm going to go for at this point is a die grinder. I've got a one inch
ball mill at the end and this stuff can really
hog away some material. I love using it for stuff like this. You have to be a little bit
careful though because it's very easy to run off track
and ruin the whole piece. We'll take our time
but this is going to be my primary tool for this
part of the process. (bluesy rock music) Before I go too far I'm going
to check my progress and try to see what I'm dealing
with here, if I've got a hump or divots or anything
that might be in the way.
I could still remove
quite a bit of material. You can see over here I'm
almost to my line and I've got a real big dip that
happens right here which means in this area I've got a
whole lot of extra material. Ideally what I'm going to shoot
for is a little bit of a scoop. It will be a concave surface
here between these two points, but for now I'm really just
looking for a straight line. I could always add that contour later, this is just to get the
bulk out of the way. A straight edge gives you a
real good idea where you're at. Not too bad. Once I'm this
close and I have the bulk of the material removed I'm going to
switch to my cabinet maker's rasp and start to try to clean
things up a little bit more. Get rid of all those little
divots created by the ball mill.
That's about as far as
I'm going to take it. I'll just flip it over and
I'll do the other side. I'm going to attach the vertical piece and you can see the progress
that we just made. That little taper made
a pretty big difference in how these two pieces
relate to one another. That's about as far as I feel
comfortable going right now. I don't want to do too much
because a lot of the last minute work is going to
happen when this is all glued together and I'll get a
much better idea at that time on how some of these
contours are going to work out.
For now the next thing
would be to work on the top. The top is going to be the
exact same process that I used for the bottom so there's
no reason to show you that. I will see you in a few minutes and we'll talk about the glue up. With a project like this
you can't just jump into the glue up, slap the glue
on there and hope everything turns out okay, you
really need to strategize. For instance when I was
making this prototype here I learned the lesson the hard way. I basically put a clamp
at the front and a clamp at the back, tightened
them both down and figured, "Hey they should balance out," right? That's not going to happen.
When you put a pressure on both the top and the bottom this
piece wants to collapse so it winds up opening, and no
matter where I put the clamping pressure I couldn't get it to
close up, until I realized, kind of a "duh" moment,
but you need to clamp at the same angle as that vertical piece.
If I can get my clamps to run
this way right across that middle piece that's going to
close everything together. But what kind of problem
do we run into here? Now these clamps are approaching the work piece at an odd angle. That's not going to be
very good either because we're going to probably
dent the work piece. Even if you put a caul in
there the head of the clamp is not going to put a
lot of pressure on there. It's going to keep sliding
because it's only contacting at one point until it
finally gets to the point where it's flat, and now we're no longer in alignment with that vertical piece. So we have to make some cauls that are custom made for this project. Fortunately you've probably got some scrap sitting around after
you've made these cuts. There's a good reason to
never throw away your scrap. Let me show you. Over by the bandsaw I
found this little guy. If you take a look here you can see exactly where that piece came from.
This is going to give us
a nice curved surface that will spread the pressure
along this bottom piece here, but the one thing it
doesn't do is it doesn't solve our angle of attack problem here. When I close up this clamp and I am pretty much in line with the vertical piece … See what happens? I'm only
making contact right here. Here's a real simple way
to use the clamp itself to give us the exact 90
degree notch that we need. Just going to grab a
little straight edge here, put it along side the clamp.
Make a pencil line there. Now to get a pencil line that's
perpendicular to that I'm going to run this little guy
across the front like this. Put a line that way. Now when I cut this notch
out I'll have a perfect little pocket for the clamp to sit into. (sawing) Let's so how we did here. Oh yeah, that's going to be perfect. Now let's take a look at the top.
You can see we've got another issue here. If we close this clamp up it's
going to make contact right here on this side and have
a big old gap over there. In order to equalize that pressure and to make sure this clamp doesn't want to slide we need another custom caul for the top. We either have to make
one or if we're careful about the use of our scraps we've got one sitting in our hands, we just made this. This is what I cut off
from the bottom piece. Because we cut it off
from a straight piece of material the angle here
is exactly the angle we need to get a perfect
shaped wedge here. I'm going to loosen up the clamp. I'll show you how well
this is going to work. Slide it right in like this and you can see that is the perfect angle. Now with our wedge and our
custom caul in place we can start to apply some clamping
pressure and observe the joint, just look for any problems.
If everything was cut right
there shouldn't be any. All the gaps should be closed
up and all we need to do is take this puppy apart, add
some glue and tighten it up. One clamp does the entire job. For my glue I'm going to be
using a West System epoxy, just a standard two part epoxy. I'm adding this little filler.
The epoxy can be a little bit thin and runny and I like
the filler because it gives a little bit more structural
integrity to the glue bond and if there's any little gaps or
anything it helps to fill them. I've got it set up here so
I've got one pump from each, both the resin and the activator here. Give it a good mix. I'm going to put a good amount
of glue here in the joints.
Not being stingy at all. This is not a joint that I want to take any kind of chances with. Where this joint meets here
is a whole bunch of end grain, which is what I'm
spreading the glue on now, to the long grain of this part here. Normally that's not
going to offer us a whole lot in the way of bond
strength because the end grain is going to
soak up most of the glue. This epoxy though tends to be a little bit slower on the uptake. It's a thicker material, it's not water-based so my hope,
at least if I'm … Just using some guess work
here, I'm hoping that by putting a good amount of glue
on that surface that I may actually get some sort of a
glue bond and get some help by taking advantage of all
this wood to wood contact here, and not completely relying on the dominos themselves for all of the strength.
This is where the planning
pays off because if you did everything right
there's no reason to panic. You see all the glue squeeze out here? Normally we'd be a little
bit more cautious about that but I have plenty of
sanding and sculpting and things to do still so I'm
not worried about staining. I also want to keep that
there just in case by some chance there's
actually some sort of a gap, well that epoxy is going
to fill that gap with something that is a dark
brown, reddish colored material which is perfect
for this mahogany anyway. I'm going to leave it
as is, make sure I don't have any drips on the
workbench but as far as going around the perimeter and
wiping it up that would make the problem worsen,
take away some material that could very well help
hide any potential flaws. I was all set this morning
to go to my trestle leg and start doing some
serious rounding over.
I really wanted to have almost a circular rounded feel to these parts. Then I talked to the boss and she said … Nicole:I like it the way it is. Marc:Which means that we have a little bit of a change in plans. Not a big deal. She
really likes the way it looks at this point so
I'm thinking what I may do is simply smooth the
transitions a little bit. When you run a router bit
over a corner like this it's a nice smooth roundover but
there's a very clear transition between the part where the bit
cut and the flat of the wood. If you just grab some 180 grit
paper, 120, something that can make pretty good work of
it but you don't need it to be too rough, and just
smooth that transition out, you'd be surprised at how much more fluid it looks as it rounds the corner. That's one thing that
we're going to focus on.
Obviously I need to get
rid of all the glue schmutz that's here, and I really
do want to work on these transitions between what we
called the cankles earlier. I want to work on those a little bit to make sure that those are much smoother. A few of the tools I'm going to use for this are my cabinet maker's rasp. I may even get my random
orbit sander involved with some 80 grit so
I could introduce some nice slight curves and smooth things out.
A gooseneck scraper is a good
option for this type of thing. I've got a bunch of scrapers
I'm going to employ for this. Bottom line is let's
get it into the bench, in the vice and just start
removing some material. This process is very time consuming but I find it incredibly therapeutic and fun. The primary goal is to simply blend those parts so that they appear as one. Believe me, if I can do this so can you. I thought it was important
for you to see the entire process so thank goodness
for the fast forward button. (downbeat reggae riff) I'd like to talk you through this process. Now that you've seen it
actually happen I can give you some of my logic for
why I do certain things. If you look at the taper
here I've got not only glue here but this is
sitting a little bit proud.
My roundovers are sitting
a little bit proud. I need to blend these in. The real key here is to
stop thinking of these as two separate pieces and
think of them as one piece. If I just had one piece of wood and it had a little bump here what I'd probably do is start using my rasp to even that out, until this roundover is smooth. The flat side of the rasp is
okay to an extent but I've got to be careful because
as I push here I could start to really dig into my vertical
piece, which I don't want. I'm going to very carefully
work it and use the glue as my visual indicator
on when I've gone far enough and removed enough
material from this section. I've also got some material
at the top here that needs to go away so I want to
be careful of that too. If I flip the rasp over I've
got the rounded end here and that helps me roll it through
and stops me from gouging. I don't want to go too much further until I remove some more material
from the front here.
I'm going to try to focus
my rasp on the high spots. At this point I may switch
to my curved scraper here. That will give me a little
more gentle control. Even though we're going to
be going against the grain here you can still bring
your scraper up like this. It tends to make a little
bit of a rough cut but I find this to be one
of the easiest ways to transition from this
flat to something that basically is going to
be a nice upward curve. What you're looking for
here is that glue line. When that disappears, that
little white spot is gone, I know we've removed enough material. Once this transition is
looking pretty smooth I want to make sure that I have a
little bit of a scoop here. I definitely do not want this
to be bowed out this way. Straight edge will tell you where you need to remove material. There's definitely a lot of material in the middle that needs to go.
Using the rounded edge of the
rasp I can selectively remove that middle area. Another thing I like to
do is use the random orbit sander because I could
really dish this out nicely, which is something we normally
don't want to do and is very easy to do if you use a
sander like this improperly. We're going to do that
intentionally in this case and try and create a
little bit of a scoop here. (grinding) Now you should be able to see what we've created is a bit of a dish out there. I would say that's maybe a
16th of an inch at the most. Just enough to give us a nice
subtle, smooth transition. Most of the work with our legs is done. I could put them on the side
and I'll do a little bit more of fine finessing and
sanding later on but for now I need to turn my
attention to the table top.
Yesterday was a Friday afternoon. I was tired from a long week, I really didn't feel like
going to the lumber store but I knew that if I wanted to get
some work done this weekend and start fresh Monday I would
need to have the material. Well anyway, long story
short I made the trip and I'm really glad I
did because I found some amazingly wide boards, check these out. I've got two Honduran
mahogany boards here. The biggest one is a full 14 inches.
The smaller one here is twelve. Between those two I actually
should be able to get my full table top depth
just from two boards, which is pretty amazing. Here's the key:Big boards like this, number one they're very heavy. And this has to be 92 inches long. Fortunately these are twelve footers so I could easily get the 92 out of it. The problem is planing them down. There's no way I could
fit this on my jointer. The good thing is there
is a method called skip planing and that's exactly
what I'm going to do.
It's basically relying
on the fact that you have a pretty straight
board to begin with. If your board is all
wavy, forget about it, you don't want to do this. You could look at the board,
see if there's any major high spots and either knock
them done with a plane or you can send it right
through the planer, rough. What it will do is clean
off the high spots and then once you get a decent relatively
flat surface you could flip it over again and run
it through a second time. Again, the key is these boards have to be pretty darn flat to begin with.
If they're not, if
there's a curve or a twist the planer won't take
a curve or a twist out, that's just the way the machine works. Fortunately not only were
these boards very wide, but they were also very straight. I think I'm going to be
able to get away with simply skip planing these and I'll
have my material for the top. Let me hit the planer and hopefully I won't knock my back out while I do it. When dealing with a board of this size you really need to be careful.
It's too heavy to manage
on your own so what I like to do is get a little extra support from my little helpers, my roller stands. I've got one on the infeed
side that's out wide enough to support the board
and I've got one on the outfeed side that will
help support it there too. The thing is obviously if that roller stand is too high it
can really mess up the registration as this board goes through. The stands are only there to
spot me, to help me through this. As I push it through I'm
actually going to pick up the board and let the planer decide
when this board is level. Also when it comes through
out the outfeed side, I'm not really there. I'm going to hold it myself but once it comes all the way out I'm going to drop it down and let the roller
support the weight. The rollers are actually a
little bit below the level of the beds. I think that's the
easiest way to handle it.
Let me get everything set up here. We'll run it through and
hopefully when it's all said and done we'll end up with
a pretty straight board. The first pass or two may be tricky since the surface is rough
and the planer rollers may have trouble gripping the board. Once a decent amount of material is removed it's time to flip. I continue this plane and flip cycle until I have two clean sides. Let's talk a little
bit about the jointing. That is going to be a little bit tricky. With a board this long even
if you have a power jointer it's going to be really tricky
to hold that on the surface, and if there's even a slight
bow in it that could make it really difficult to register
properly off the jointer.
You need to start with something that's pretty straight to begin with. Like the same concept
of skip planing on the planer we need a pretty
flat board to begin with. I like to use that same concept if I'm trying to power plane this edge. I will be using my jointer but I want to show you a few other methods. Obviously the no brainer old
school method is to use a plane. If you have a number seven jointer, in fact I do and I can show it to you.
Number seven or a number eight, something with a really long
body like this, a nice long sole, you can actually plane this surface … Blade's not set right here. And you can joint this edge manually. Nothing wrong with that
if you've got the skill, the time and that's
the way you want to go. On a surface this long it's
going to be a little bit tricky because this will
be a glue joint so it needs to be perfect in order for
you not to see that seam.
Eventually you could
wind up getting a surface that's nice and flat all the way across. Here's another option. If you
plan to use the jointer what you want to do is remove the
really high offending spots. I've got a high spot here
and a high spot in the back. I want to make sure that
it's relatively flat so I'm going to grab a little
bit more of an aggressive plane here and start removing
material from each side. What I end up with is
a mostly straight edge. It's not perfect but it's pretty close. Now that that's pretty close I should be able to run that over
the jointer carefully and wind up with a perfectly jointed edge. If you're a track saw owner
this is pretty easy to do, assuming you've got a nice long track. You can go all the way
across and with a good quality blade you can get
a pretty darn near perfect straight edge with one
cut, that's kind of nice.
If you're not a track saw
owner you could certainly use a circular saw with a
high quality blade and just go get yourself a nice
eight foot piece of MDF, the prime stuff that
they use for moulding, at Home Depot or Lowes. That stuff is pretty darn straight. It may not be absolutely
perfect but if the idea is to clean up
this edge in preparation for the jointer it will
certainly do the trick. To successfully move these
monster pieces across the jointer we're going to
employ a similar thing using a stand in front of the
jointer and a stand behind the jointer and have them being
just a bit below the surface. I don't want to register from those, I just need them to help me
like another set of hands. One thing I will rely on are
my magnetic featherboards. I've got a couple different types here, one from Magswitch and
the other is a Grip-Tite. Basically this is going to
help it hold up against the fence because I can't be in
more than one place at once.
As I'm pushing the board forward these are helping me keep it
tight against the fence. Now we have the challenge of
gluing this behemoth together. Excuse the stupid smile on my face but I'm really excited about
the fact that I'm able to get this entire top out of two pieces. Any time I can get really
wide boards instead of having a whole bunch
of small ones together, I know some people are
concerned about stability and things like that but I don't care. For me, if I can have this entire top in two pieces I'm very happy about it. We have to come up with a
little bit of a strategy because there is a lot of material
to glue together here. The wood-to-wood bond
would be strong enough but because there could be a little bit of issue where maybe one
piece raises about the other a little bit I do
recommend using biscuits, a spline or even something
like dominos across the length of this to help hold everything together and keep
everything nice and flat.
And it will make our
lives a whole lot easier. I've already started by
placing a few dominos here and I'm going to finish
it off with a few more but really once the dominos are
in we just add the glue, add the clamps and we
should be good to go. The glue I'm going to use
here is TiteBond Extend. It's going to give me a
little bit more working time and with so many mortices
to get glue into and these long surfaces it's
just the safer bet to use something that gives you
a couple more minutes.
(swing music) Oh that's not light. This is the bottom so I don't mind just coming along and scraping this glue off. I've removed the clamps
from the glue up and it's time to trim this top to
its final length and width, which is going to be pretty long at 92 inches in length and
then 24 inches deep. I'm going to use my track
saw to do it but again a circular saw and a
straight edge or even that long piece of MDF will get this job done. (sawing) Instead of keeping my
ends perfectly square I'm just going to give
them a nice soft arc. Really not a whole lot,
just something that adds a little bit of a visual interest. To do this and to make
sure that it's perfectly consistent on both sides
I'm going to make a template using some
leftover quarter inch MDF here which will fit right on the end. Then I can use a flush
trim bit to get my sides to that exact arc that
we're going to create. I don't know if you guys have seen these before but these are sold by Lee Valley.
You can certainly make something
like this in the shop but I find thes drawing bows,
bending bows very, very cool. They've got a little strap
on the back and you just pull on them and you can
get a different sized arc. For someone who does a
lot of curves in his work this thing is awesome,
well worth the investment. If you don't have something
like this you could always use a thin cutoff, a thin
piece of wood and bend it, and just use it as your own bending strip. It's a very simple process. I just mark the center
and that's going to line up with my center line
on my bending strip here. Then I want to mark in three
quarters of an inch on each end because that's as far as
I want that curve to go in. Not trying to remove a
whole lot of material here.
If I line this up flush with my center line and flush to the front here … Just draw the curve in. Our template is ready to
roll and we can drop it on to the work piece here and
just transfer that curve. All I'm really going to
do here is make sure it's flush with the front, even
on both sides and then transfer this curve to
the side of the table top. Although I do intend to use
a flush trim bit to clean up the material here I don't
want to use it just yet. I've got about three quarters of an inch of extra material at the ends. That's a lot of material to
remove with a router bit. I'm going to use my jigsaw to
cut the excess out of there. I'm going to still stay about
a 16th away from my line. I don't want to go right
to the edge because if there's a little bit of
tearout I want to have some room to spare and
I don't want to risk the possibility that I go
off course with this.
I still recommend using a blade that has a very high tooth count
for a very fin cut and that's going to help reduce your tearout. (sawing) I've got my template clamped
down to the table top and I've got my router set up with
my big monster pattern bit. You may have seen this
one on the show before. This is something that I
really do feel is a good investment if you're somebody
who makes a lot of these templates and patterns and you
need to do a lot of routing. A bit like this with the
number of blades and the orientation of the blades being
on a bit of an angle there means you get a cleaner cut
and it's actually a lot safer because you have less chance
of it kicking back at you. When I'm doing something
like this that's, I think we've got about an inch and
a quarter in thickness here. Plus I'm working on the end grain. Those are two situations where it's going to be a lot of work for your router bit.
Something like this comes in real handy. Even if you just have a
regular standard bit take your time with it. Don't push
it too hard and too fast. Take your time and you should be okay. Let me get my protective gear on and we'll fire this bad boy up. That is not too bad folks,
that looks really good. I do have a little bit of
material at the front and back and that's really just because I'm
a little bit cautious about tearout and I just get uncomfortable
when a bit of that size moving at speed gets too close
to the edge. You could have really disastrous things
happen so I usually like to leave it alone and file it
down or sand it down later. The next logical step with our top would be to add our edge
profile but I don't have the bit that I need just yet to do that, so I'm trying to come
up with ways to utilize my time in the most
efficient way possible. One thing that we need to do is finish the bottom of the table.
Look at the size of this thing. This is going to be a
pain in the butt to try to finish if it were already
attached to the legs. Just maneuvering it around,
just going to be a pain. Plus I'm going to be using
an oil-based finish on this which means I need
a significant amount of time to dry between
coats and that's the part that tests our patience most of the time. If you're waiting six
to eight hours between coats and you're just
finishing the bottom, something you're never going to see, that's when a lot of
people like to rush it. If you can do that
process while you're busy doing other things, doesn't hurt anything.
That's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to sand this
surface down so it's nice and smooth and then
I'm going to probably give it three to four
coats of a wiping varnish. That's the same treatment I'm going to use on the rest of the table. Even though I still need to
cut a profile on the top edge here that's not really
going to affect the bottom. The bottom can be completely
finished and then when I'm finishing the top as
I put my finish on the top surface I just make sure
that I also get that edge treatment and it should come
out relatively consistent, because we've got a
nice corner between the bottom surface and the
side, the edge here. Let me grab my sand
paper, start sanding this beast and we'll add a
couple coats of oil finish. One other thing I'm going
to do at this time is add a little bit of a chamfer
to our bottom edge here. Doesn't really need a whole lot in terms of profile but I do want to soften it up.
I don't want a sharp corner
that you could hit a knee on. This is definitely going to be more of a quick and dirty application. I've got some Arm-R-Seal satin here. It's not the freshest stuff that I've got sitting around so I want to get rid of it. Perfect place for me to
put it because I'll be using Arm-R-Seal on the
top but I'm going to use the freshest stuff
that I have for that. I've got my foam brush here and I'm going to be very generous about how I spread this on the surface. You can see most of this is absorbing so I won't really have much to wipe back. Give it a couple seconds to pull as much as it wants into the surface.
And before it gets tacky you want to come
(sultry jazz music) back with a cotton rag and smear it around a little bit more, wipe off the excess. (woman singing) Voiceover:Next time on The Wood Whisperer. (street carnival music) Marc:As we know end grain
is a lot harder to sand than regular face grain,
so what do you do here? Unfortunately it's just elbow grease. Yeah I need one of those now. Right now. (tapping) Want to take your woodworking
to the next level? Join The Wood Whisperer Guild..