Marc: You know, it's been quite some time since I've been able to build a piece of furniture for my own house. That's exactly what we're gonna do today because we need some end tables. (upbeat music) Marc: Before we get started, we should probably talk a little
bit about design concepts. At some point in your woodworking career, you decide that the
plans that are out there are just not adequate anymore.
You can't find exactly
what you're looking for, and you need to design something yourself. It's really a great time
in your woodworking growth because you really start to learn how to put parts together, how to design relative sizes of parts. You're not just counting on
someone else's experience, and something they've written down to design your furniture piece for you. You have a general idea,
you have a general size, and you kinda know what
you want it to look like. Maybe you don't even know that. That's when it's time to start picking up every resource you can get your hands on, and put some sketches down on paper.
I know I want an end table. I know I want something that maybe has some kind of carved legs, or some nice soft curves in it that complements the furniture that I've already built
for my living room. I also know the relative size because I know exactly
where I want it to go. Those are the restraining factors. Now, all it comes down to is creativity. Let me give you a little
bit of an explanation on how I see creativity and design, especially when it comes
to things like originality, I come from a science background so, for me, I see these great discoveries and the best inventions,
the best processes, have been developed because they built on the experience and the work of other scientists before them. Otherwise, no one would come out of from start to finish and be able to understand genetic
code if it wasn't already built upon by previous work.
I see furniture in sort of the same way. Of course, there's original ideas that have never really been done before, and a few people are capable
of coming up with those, but to me, when you've
got access to things like these design books, magazines, furniture that you see on the Internet, those are your starting points. People have paved the way
for us to take those ideas, and just make them blossom into something even more beautiful. I don't think there's
anything to be ashamed of by finding a piece of
furniture that you love, that you think is great, but you might be able
to tweak it a little bit to make it your own and
make it different enough from this person's original work that you can call it your own.
I don't think there's
anything to be embarrassed of when you do that. In looking through my design book, I found this really cool little table. It's got a glass top, curved legs. It has that sculpted, one-piece
look that I'm looking for. I think it's gonna be perfect,
but I don't have any plans. All I have is this little tiny picture. In fact, I think that's a good thing because the variability, just by me taking what I see and trying to do my own
interpretation of that, is gonna give this piece a little bit of a different look and a different shape that will make it my own.
If I had the exact dimensions
and scale drawings of this, I might be tempted to copy it exactly, and that's not what this is about. It's about being inspired by this, and making my own version. If things are off a little
bit, well no, they're not off. That's perfect for my piece of furniture. It might be off from this
drawing, but who cares? I'm not trying to reproduce this. I'm trying to build something new. (jazzy music) Marc: The first step in the
process is making a template. Without a template, the
legs are gonna all vary from one to the other. We've got four of them to make, so it's very important that
we get a nice solid template that we can work from. The good thing is, in this
process of designing a template, we can work out all the
kinks, all the details, and just make sure that
everything looks the way that we want it to look.
In fact, jointery at this point is a second-level consideration. I wanna see what this
leg looks like first, get that the way I want it to look, and then make some jointery work within the confines of what
I've constructed in a leg. A lot of people are
intimidated at this step because this is the
point when you've gotta take pencil to paper and create
something out of nothing. All we have is a little
bit of inspiration, and a small drawing,
or a small photograph. Again, we don't wanna copy
it exactly, so what do we do? The first thing is, I look
at what my restrictions are. I know I don't want this table to be any higher than 22 inches, so I take my template material and I draw my mark at
22 inches at the top. A few other things we know – we know that we want multiple curves, and we have a general
idea of where those go.
I also know that I want from the top, the piece that sticks up, to only be about three inches before that inside curve starts. You basically start drawing it. I actually draw right on my plywood. I will draw this maybe 10 or 20 times, erasing, drawing, erasing, or sort of like manipulating the lines a
little bit here and there just to refine them. Here's an example of the
point that I might be at that I would call step one. I know approximately what I
want this leg to look like, and I would draw my event points here, my total height, three inches down. I know I want an inside curve here, then to come back outside, then another inside curve to
the point that it hits the foot. I know I want this piece to come up, thin the leg out in
this area a little bit, and then come back out here, and have a nice curve
from the inside of the leg that just very smoothly meets
up with this crosspiece.
I know the leg piece itself is
going to end somewhere in here. That's where we're gonna have to come up with jointery to fit that spot. Once I'm at this point, I literally will erase and
refine, and erase and refine, until I get it the way I want it to look. A lot of times, you need
to walk away from it. You get to a point where
you know it's not perfect, but you're as far as you can go right now. So, you step away from it.
Walk away. Do something else. Maybe even have someone in the family come over and take a look and say, "What do you think looks off about this? "Should this be thicker? "Should it be more
severe of a curve here?" You'll be amazed at how much you can get, information-wise, from other people, just getting their opinions
on what looks right. Most people may not be
able to put it in words, but a lot of people will recognize when something lacks the
proportions that it should have, and you wanna go on those gut
feelings when you do this.
Once you have your basic shape down on your template material, cut it out on a bandsaw. Keep it about an eighth or a
sixteenth inch over the line, and then I take it over to the oscillating spindle sander, and clean up and finesse those curves. If your curves don't
feel completely smooth and you want them to be, you can hit it with either something like a flexible sanding strip. This is just a very thin piece of oak, straight-grained oak with some sandpaper attached to it with double-stick tape. You can even use a file or something like this, which is a rasp, to finesse those curves and get rid of any of those little lumps left by the oscillating spindle sander. What I want to do is use a piece of quarter-inch Baltic birch as sort of a giant work space to make a life-size
drawing of what the profile of the table is gonna look like. This is great. This is one leg and
this gets us pretty far, but sometimes, visually, things change when there's another leg on this side.
You may decide you don't like the effect that you've created with your curves, and you might need to make a
little change here or there. So, this is a critical step before we make any final decisions. I will take my template, and I'll actually draw it
on the face of this piece. Once I have the one side drawn, I'll actually flip it over, and make sure I put my end piece at the total width that I want this table. It's gonna be about 20 inches. That's how I know where to place it. Then, I am essentially
tracing on the mirror image of this work piece, so that I can then step away and look at the piece as a whole. Is this the kind of look
that I wanna go for? I also wanna make sure that I use my little angle guide here, and determine what the best angle is for these center stretchers, because that, in and of
itself, is gonna become a separate part that I'm gonna need to cut out later on. I may even wanna make a
template for that as well.
I've used a Sharpie
instead of just a pencil, so you guys can see it a
little bit more clearly. What's gonna happen here – we've got this sort of – I don't know. It kinda looks like the
Indianapolis Colts symbol. Eh, maybe I shouldn't
have done that. (laughs) Overall, it's kinda got the
effect that I'm going for. Again, a lot of these details
have yet to be worked out, so things can be finessed and thinned out, maybe add a little curvature in there, whatever's gonna look good at the time. It's not set in stone yet, so I don't have to worry about it. Over the top, we're
gonna have a recessed cut into the top of each leg, and then a solid top is
gonna sit in place like that.
I'm pretty happy with the
way this looks so far, and I think we can proceed
with cutting a sample leg. I've actually already made a sample. You don't necessarily have to, but if you have the time
and the material to do that, I really recommend it. It tells you a lot about the work piece that you can't get from a
two-dimensional drawing. You may, at this point, even still come up with something that you think really needs to be adjusted in your template. Better to find it now
than after you've cut your final working material
for the table legs. A few things that you
wanna keep in mind here, we haven't really talked
much about jointery. At some point, we're gonna
have to have jointery between this leg and this piece here.
What I'm envisioning is just a traditional mortise and tenon; perhaps in this case,
maybe even a loose tenon. I'm not a hundred percent sure what I wanna do there yet, but I know I need to figure it out before I cut this leg out, because this is nice and flat. When this is a full piece of lumber, like this would be a blank, it's gonna be very easy to create a mortise in this piece. Try creating a mortise in this, and you're gonna have quite
a challenge on your hands. It's important to have this down, but make sure that you understand we do need to resolve that jointery issue before we start cutting our legs out.
I've got a design that I like. I've got a nice solid template, and I've got a pretty good idea of where this project is headed. Keep in mind that even at this stage, I don't have a complete picture of what this table is gonna look like, or how it's even gonna be put together. There are still some jointery unknowns as far as I'm concerned that I'm gonna develop as I go.
That may not work for everybody. Some people may like to have this all worked out ahead of time, and make sure they know
every piece of the puzzle for the entire project. In general, I don't have
enough time to do that. That would require me to make a complete mock-up of the project, re-evaluate it, and go
back and do it again.
That's just not the way that I work. For me, it's important to be flexible, to adjust on the fly,
and I gotta tell you, some of my best design choices have come about by accidents. There have been times when
I've screwed something up, or I drilled too far,
or I nicked something, and I all of a sudden go, "Wait a minute. "I can use an inlay to fix this." Now that inlay becomes an
integral part of that design. I actually find design opportunities coming out of accidents. Not to necessarily promote doing that, but that just may happen, so it's important to
be able to be flexible and adjust on the fly as problems arise.
Decide what the right method is for you, and do whatever works for you. For me, I would have it no other way. I love flying by the seat of my pants, and just seeing what a project turns into. Next time what we're gonna do is not only cut out the legs, but we are gonna start
talking about this joint here, between the crosspiece and the leg itself, what the best joint is, why I'm using it, and then, of course,
we'll probably be able to cut the joint and then
cut out the leg itself.