WARNING! Power tools, including drills and saws,
are extremely dangerous and can cause injury or death!
Use at your own risk! Let me show you how to make this color checker. It's very simple and easy to make, and doesn't require any expensive materials. As far as the tools that you'll need, it's just a hand saw, like this, and a drill, and that's it. As far as supplies, you're going to need a little piece of plywood,
a scrap piece of plywood like this one. You're going to need a screw eye, like one of these two. The larger one is the one that I would recommend that you use. You can buy these at any hardware store. If you want to focus on really small areas of color, then you can certainly use the smaller one. The larger one is the one I would use for almost everybody. As far as the plywood goes, this one is actually slightly less than a half-inch (1.25cm).
I'm not sure what they call it, but half-inch is about as thick as you want to go. There's no reason to be any thicker than that. A real thin piece of plywood,
like this, is actually ideal. The only problem is, is that when we try to screw this into the edge here, and drill a hole, you end up splitting the wood because it is so thin. But if you want to grind down these threads, and make this much thinner, then you can just drill a hole and stick it down in there
with some epoxy or something. But a thinner one is better, only because if I hold this thick one out, and use it, now I've got a thick line that I'm looking at. When I hold it out, I'm seeing a fatter line. It's not a big deal. If you're using a thin piece of plywood, then you're looking at a thinner line.
The other thing you're going to need, as far as materials go, is just some of this epoxy, and this is 5-minute, 2-part epoxy. You want to make sure that you get the quick-dry stuff. There's some of them that will dry in hours. We want the one that dries in five minutes. This is like a grey paste, and you can get this at most hardware stores also. Now, the next thing.
This is just a simple little
piece of plastic that I've put here and that's going to be where you put your color when you want to check your paint. That's where your paint goes, and then you look through this way. But this is just a simple piece of plastic. This is a tag that came off of a plant from the nursery, but any kind of plastic like this that you can get from many different sources, and that you can cut with a pair of scissors, is what we want. So, that's it for materials. What we're going to do is we're going to take this piece of plywood and we're going to draw on it. First of all, find the square edge. This one was cut a little irregular on two sides. I want to make sure that I'm using
the square corner to start with.
It looks like this corner is nice and square, so that's the one I'm going to work from. I'm going to pull up this graphic here, and you can hit pause on your video so that you can make note of this on a piece of paper. OK. So, I've got all those lines drawn in. And the only line missing is the diagonal, which is going to go from up in this corner, down to this corner. That's it. Now we've got all those lines drawn. We are going to first cut this one, and we're only going to go this far and then stop. We're only going to cut from there to there. This is the most important cut we'll make.
So, we want to really take our time
and go slow on this one. And make sure that when you cut it, cut it parallel, like that. Or on this side, that's fine. Just try to keep the angle the same. And the other thing is, make sure your saw is up and down. This is even more important. You don't want to cut like that, and you don't want to cut like that. You want to cut nice and dead straight. So really take your time. Clamp this wood down if you've
got a table and some clamps. If not, you can set it on the edge of a stair, have somebody stand on this side. But, this is the cut that's the most important. Now that that cut is finished, we'll cut this one.
OK, so that's cut out. Now we're going to cut along this line, and along this line, and then we'll be done with the saw. Almost. OK, so now I'm finished cutting everything. The only thing left to cut are these corners. You can just cut the corner off, like that. Which is not real important. It just makes it a little more comfortable to hold. So, we'll cut those off. Let me just go ahead and do that. Now that I've cut those corners off, we're all set. Now we're going to drill a hole right there for the screw eye to go into. When you pick out the drill bit to use for this screw, normally you would pick one that is…
That's real close in size. It's just barely smaller. The drill bit is just barely smaller than the screw. And that's what we want, because this thin plywood is prone to be split, and we don't want to split it. And if you want to put a little epoxy in there to hold your screw in place, that's fine. Now, you screw your screw right in. We can adjust the height of it a little bit later. The last step is to take this piece of plastic, and, first of all, make sure it has
a nice straight cut on the end.
Like that. Nice and square. The next thing is, we're going to make that— Again this is not real critical, I could tell you how long it would be, but it really kind of depends
on how it lines up with your screw, which we're going to measure later. But roughly, it should look like that. Then, we're going to round—
We're going to put a bullet-end on one side. Cut these corners off. Like so.
Doesn't have to be perfect at all. Just more or less. Then, we'll take the back side of it— This has got some writing on it,
so I'll put that side down. It's not important what color this is. The paint is going to completely cover it up, so I don't have any problem with what color it is. It could be black, or it could be white. I've tried both, and they both work just fine. The yellow also is good. The yellow kind of lets you know
that you haven't covered it with paint. Because when you go to check your colors, this surface that's plastic should be completely covered.
Typically, when you paint your color checker, you're not going to paint it real thin, you're going to put a nice stroke of paint on there. I'm just roughing up the back of this so that the epoxy will stick to it a little better. And this is really, really, really fine sandpaper. So that side is going to go down, and we're going to stick that right there on the end. It should be flush with the end of the wood. Not like that, sticking out, and not there, but right on the end. It can stick out just slightly, but I mean just slightly. So let's take some of this epoxy and glue that on. And you only need a teeny little
bit of this epoxy to start with. We're going to actually glue it twice, and you'll see why in a minute. To start with, we're going to put just a touch of epoxy. This is even way more than I need.
And this stuff is pretty expensive, so go easy. Mix this epoxy up 50/50. Make sure you mix it really good, one part with the other. I always take it and put it in a new little pile. Then I even get a new stick, so I make sure that I don't have a little film of part A, or part B, and then it doesn't stick well. I got a new stick. Just going to put a little dab… This is just to hold this in place temporarily, then we're going to come back. That goes right there on the end. When you look through this eye, like this, along this sightline, the end of that piece of plastic should be horizontal. So, I'm going to hold it at arm's length, and this is the best way to check this thing.
Instead of trying to look at it from this point of view, hold out the color checker, like you're going to use it, and the line should be horizontal, which this one is. This can very slowly drift, so we want to hold it while it is drying in such a way that it stays flat. See what I mean? That way, it won't move while it's drying. I'm going to let that dry for 15 minutes, and then we'll come back. Once the epoxy has had plenty of time to dry, we're just going to add more epoxy. If you look on the back here, because this is a thin piece of plastic, and because we want this to be glued on for years, we don't want this plastic to bend as you use it. So even though it's pretty stiff, I'm going to put some epoxy back behind here, and that's going to add a lot of stiffness to the edges. I'm just filling in right on the back side.
Then, when you're all done, just take a little paper towel
and wipe it off the front surface. There. Now, we'll let that dry upside-down, like that. Make sure it's upside-down. In fact, you may need to hold it. Kind of watch it. Depending on how much epoxy you put in there, it can drip over the edges. So, if you need to keep rotating it for 5 minutes while it stiffens up, then do that. Now that the epoxy has dried, let me explain something about the length of your screw. These screws come in a number of different lengths. Some of them are actually very long, in which case you would have to drill a very long hole, and sink it way down in there, which is fine. But if you have a really short screw, like mine's pretty short. It needs to be long enough. See how that line comes in, halfway? Halfway through the circle? This edge needs to intersect the circle at halfway. Like that. And if it doesn't — in other words, if your screw is really short, and it's not — then you're going to need to make this even shorter than it is.
Which means before you epoxy this on there, you would snip off the end of this wood a little bit to lower it down, so that this doesn't have to be up as high. That's if you have a really short screw. So, just make that adjustment before you epoxy on your plastic tab. The very last thing to do is just
to sand the edges really good. Make it nice and round, like I've done on this side. And then once it's all sanded — and do that before you put your screw in, just sand it real good — and then after it's done, just mix up a little epoxy and we'll screw that in. I'm just going to mix up some of this epoxy, put a little bit on the end of the screw right there, and it's going to go everywhere, but that's OK, and then screw it right into the hole. You should have already figured out the height, which I have, and it's about right there, so just make it nice and straight.
There it is. I'm just going to wipe off the excess and it's finished. And you may want to rotate it around so that the epoxy doesn't drip. The very last thing to do with the color checker is just to make a little stand like this. And I don't even need to show you how to make it, it's just three pieces of wood that
I've screwed together like that. But when you make this gap, make sure you make it nice and loose. Because when you start to use it, it's a lot easier if it is loose and you can just drop it in there like that, instead of having it tight. But that's great to have, because then you're not laying
it on the table all the time. So make a little stand like that for yourself. That's all there is to it..