Extreme Curves in Woodworking!

Welcome to make something.
How are you doing. Today I'm gonna take you through the
crazy journey that I had to go through to learn how to make this
super curvy drink stand. Today's video is brought to us by
Squarespace. This is gonna be a good one. Check it. The inspiration for this drink stand
came from this Instagram post that I saw recently, and I wanted to challenge
myself to make this out of wood. I've been really into vacuuming
press veneering lately. And I've got a video on getting started.
If you want to go check that out.

Now, this uses some techniques
that I've never seen before. So there was a learning process and
quite a few failures along the way. And I wanted to show you the journey
that I had to go through to get to this point and to show you that failing
can be a motivator and a good thing. So sit back and enjoy the
ride and watch me learn. This drink stand needs to be thick enough
so it has some strength and doesn't wobble and spill your drink. And my first thought was to use some
bending plywood and that's plywood where the grain is all running in the same
direction, and it allows you to bend it.

It's a really cool material to work with. So I'm cutting that here on the table saw, and then I'm cutting out some maple
veneer that I will veneer to the bending plywood. There are a couple of traditional ways
to use a vacuum form to do curve pieces. One way is you take your veneers around
a form and then stick that whole thing in a bag. And then when you pull
it out, it keeps that shape. Another way is to put
the bag around the form, and then once it dries, you can pull that out of the
bag and it will keep it shape. I'm trying something that I've never
seen before.

So here in the video, I'm just going to make a wood box and
shove my veneers within this wood box. And the box is just there to
kind of keep the outside shape. And the thought process is once it
dries and I take it out of this box of veneers will hold a shape and
I will have my drink stand. So this is just a super simple plywood
box that i pocket holed together, and it is perfectly square.
So here I'm using titebond, cold press veneer glue.

And the cool thing about this glue is
it doesn't pull through the pores in a vacuum press. So I'm just rolling
this on the plywood cores. And then I'm going to sandwich
that with my maple veneers. Most of what I learned about vacuum
pressing comes from this book right here, really good book, highly recommend it. In the book they suggest
taping up the ends.

So veneers don't slide around on you. So that's why you see me
taping everything up here. I've got some wax paper on there just
in case there's any glue squeeze out and everything goes into this vacuum bag.
This vacuum bag comes from rocker, and then the, the red netting that you see that just
allows it to pull air from all areas of the bag. So now I'm taking that bag and throw
in the whole thing inside this box and getting the S-curve
that I'm looking for.

It turns out I couldn't get as many
bends in there as I wanted because of the plywood. There's a limit
to how much it can bend. So I'm clamping it to the
form and I'm letting it dry. So here is version one,
a complete failure. It turns out I had to break it just to
get it out of the bag because when it goes into the bag, everything is flat,
but then it dries into the shape. And I, there was just no way to get
it outta the bag without breaking it. And like I mentioned, I didn't
have as many curves as I wanted. And just look at this. This is pure crap. So very disappointed. I went in, I went into this with a lot of confidence
thinking this is gonna be awesome and then was very disappointed. So this has one layer of quarter
inch bending plywood with two sheets of veneer. So version two, I've decided to not use the bending
plywood and just use nothing but veneer.

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So for version two, I'm using
this rockler two ply maple veneer. One layer has the grain going this way. And one layer has the
grain going this way. So it bends quite a bit without breaking. And so my thought process now
is to use six sheets of veneer, get rid of the bending
plywood. Don't use that at all, and I have to make a sacrificial bag. So I cut my six layers of veneer, and then I am making a custom bag. This is just some vinyl that
I got from my friend, Joanne. She has a fabric store here in town, and then I'm using sealing tape along
the edges. It's just this really thick, rubbery tape that will
create an airtight seal. And it is removable. It's not a permanent
seal. So I'm adding this to the edges.

And then I fold the bag in half
onto itself leaving one edge open. This worked really, really
well for this project. So I'm taking this barbed brass fitting, and I'm adding some hot
glue and a washer to it, and this will go outside the bag. So then I have the second washer and this
brass cap that will go inside the bag. So I need to draw a hole in that
cap. So air can flow through there, and then I will hot glue
the washer to that cap. So now these two pieces screw on
and off. So I cut a hole in the bag. I put some of that sealing
tape around the washer, and then I thread them
together. This worked very well. So if you need to make your own bags, you can get all the stuff that you
need from Joanne and home Depot. To close off the end, I'm using two
pieces of pecks and on the bigger piece, I'm cutting a slot in there and you'll
see how this works here in a second. Now I'm adding glue to all the veneers, but this time I'm switching glues from
the titebond cold press to this uni bond one, which is also made for vacuum
pressing, but it dries extra hard.

And I'm hoping that, that this takes out some of the
springiness in the drink stand. This type bond is a very
good glue, but when it dries, it still has some flex to it where this
is a little bit more hard and brittle. And I'm using this roller and
tray that I got from rocker, which spreads the glue nice and even, which is something that you
need when vacuum pressing. So now I'm sliding everything into this
custom made bag, which is not so bulky. And again, I've taped up the
ends and added the red netting. That way you can pull air
from all areas of the bag. Then I wrap the open end of the
bag around a smaller piece of PEX, and then the bigger piece snaps into
place, creating an airtight seal. Now everything goes back into the box
and I was able to get that extra bend in there, like I was
originally hoping to do so, and I'm clamping everything to
the box. So it stays in place. The one thing that I realized, and I'm just following the directions
in the book is I taped the ends, cuz that's what you typically do.

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But because this has so many
curves that caused binding. So I quickly tried to take everything
out of the bag and reposition it, but the glue had already set and I
realized that this was failure number two. There was nothing I could do. So I just threw it back into the
form and let it dry. And here it is. So I've got, I've got a bind
down here and then a bind here. And that is just because I taped the ends. We got the first one complete
failure. We got the second one, kind of like a proof of concept.
I know that this is going to work. And I learned some lessons along the way. So at this point I was really thinking
about calling it quits and I had to proof of concept. I knew it could work,
but this gets pretty expensive. Each failure costs a lot of money.

What a terrible journey it would
be for me to just call it quits. Let's take a chance. Let's
go. Let's do it one more time. I think I know everything that I
need to know to make this work. Drive fast and take lots of chances
because I made the bag slightly too big. I was able to cut this out and
reuse the bag for a third one. So once again, I cut my six layers of veneer and this
time I'm using Walnut veneer for the outside, using the same uni bond one glue, and I throw everything into the
box and look at these curves. This looks like it's going
to come out. Perfect. I'm getting really excited at
this point. And so once it dries, I pop it out of the box and I can
see that it is held its shape almost perfectly. There's a little bit of
flex, more flex than I expected, but we're gonna work on that. So I cut the ceiling tape off and pull
out the piece and I did save the bag cause I might be able to get some good
use out of that later and then took a hand plane and cleaned up the edges and
then used the disc sander for the two ends.

Oh my goodness. It finally worked after three attempts
and we're gonna finish this up here, add some final touches and stiffen up
the whole chassis here in a second. But first I would like to tell you
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have fun and fail at things so we can all learn together.
So thank you Squarespace. Now let's finish this guy up. So
after a couple of failed attempts, we finally got one that worked. I
freaking love how good this looks. You can see these little
springiness too there. You probably wouldn't wanna set
your drink on there. And then, uh, after pulling out the clamps,
it kinda shrunk a little bit. And so it's not level, but I'm gonna fix that by putting
some acrylic rod in there.

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But first I'm gonna add some finish
because it'll just be easier now. So we got some finish on there. Now I wanna take some one and a half inch
acrylic rod and put it in between here to take out some of that springiness. Of course you would probably want to
do that before putting a waxy finish on there for a better grip.
Sometimes I do things outta order. So I'm gonna cut this out on the bandsaw
a little too big and make that spring out a little bit. And then I gotta cut this curve right
here that kind of follows along that shape. I put some tape on there just
so I wouldn't scratch it all up. And so that's gonna fit in there like
that instead of cutting that curve on the bandsaw, I decided to just kind of
stand away at it on the spindle sander. And now I'm gonna make another one
for the bottom, the exact same way.

So I put some tape along there.
So I have a registration point. So I know exactly where to put this. I have a pool noodle that I'm going
to kind of wedge in there to pry it up that way. I have some space to get that in there
without getting epoxy everywhere. And I gotta mark there and a mark
there and those two marks should align for perfect placement. So now I'm gonna
mix up some epoxy here, not too much, cuz I don't want it squeezing out all
over the place and at my registration marks and then pull out my spacer and son of a gun. We got
a little squeeze out. Now we just gotta get that bottom on
line. Do the same thing about right. Cool. We'll let that sit dry and
then we'll take the tape off. So I cut four more pieces of acrylic
that I'm going to use for the feet. And then on there I put these little
traction dots. So it doesn't slide around. I'm just gonna use some CA glue. I'm not real sure that this glue is
gonna hold to this finish.

If it doesn't, we'll, we'll figure out what to do,
figure things out. We'll fix it. I'm a woodworker. I can figure things out. I think it's gonna hold good
enough for this project. I did think about making a
custom coaster just for this, that would be permanently attached to it, but then I decided I'm gonna make
another video just about making coasters. And of course we're
gonna push the coaster, making techniques to the limits and do
something crazy. So look forward to that. Over on Patreon, I have a weekly show called Sundays
with Dave tentative title where we talk about behind the scenes stuff and
what goes through my thought process. Patrons also get access to
our private discord server. Watch this video next to
take your woodworking to the
next level and get started in vacuum pressing as
always be safe, have fun, stay passionate and make something..

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