marc:the wood whispereris brought to you by: powermatic, the goldstandard since 1921 and by rockler woodworking andhardware, create with confidence. (groovy brass music) now here comes the fun part. we need to make this thinglook like it is all one piece. it's a little bit of achallenge because we've got a thicker piece at the topand the bottom than we have in the middle so we've gotto 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 usemachines, where possible. we'll be using the router to do some of the initial rounding over. i'll be using a die grinderto do so some of the blending and thingsthat 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'llbuild 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 alot of different angles so even though we have straight grainright here we have two areas of end grain where you couldpotentially have an issue. this mahogany routes like adream so it's not necessarily going to be that big of adeal for me but depending on the species of wood you'reworking with you may have some serious issues if youtry to route end grain,
so be very careful andtry to know the wood that you're working with beforeyou start working with it. for the most part i'm goingto take a light pass and then come back for a second roundand take a second pass, bringing the wood up against the bearing. (mechanical humming) now my next step is to take mythree quarter inch roundover bit and round over all foursides of my vertical piece. i'm going to attach thevertical piece to the foot to
give you a better idea ofwhat we're up against here. you see this little ledge?we have to transition this thicker area into this thinner area. that means that thisroundover, this large roundover has to somehow transitionto a smaller roundover. i really don't want to doany carving or anything up here other than a littlefine 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 stillapart i now have a nice outline that tells me where thatmaterial needs to be removed. i'm going to get this guysecured to the bench and we're going to start carvingsome of this material away. here's one of our referencelines that we just drew and that's basically telling ushow far in we need to go. it's also helpful to havea reference line to tell us where that taper is going tostart because really we're
just trying to remove a wedgeof material right here now. to me two and a halfinches 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 isalways a nice reliable tool. it's a little bit slowthough so what i'm going to go for at this point is a die grinder.
i've got a one inchball mill at the end and this stuff can reallyhog away some material. i love using it for stuff like this. you have to be a little bitcareful though because it's very easy to run off trackand ruin the whole piece. we'll take our timebut this is going to be my primary tool for thispart of the process. (bluesy rock music) before i go too far i'm goingto check my progress and
try to see what i'm dealingwith here, if i've got a hump or divots or anythingthat might be in the way. i could still removequite a bit of material. you can see over here i'malmost to my line and i've got a real big dip thathappens right here which means in this area i've got awhole lot of extra material. ideally what i'm going to shootfor is a little bit of a scoop. it will be a concave surfacehere between these two points, but for now i'm really justlooking for a straight line.
i could always add that contour later, this is just to get thebulk out of the way. a straight edge gives you areal good idea where you're at. not too bad. once i'm thisclose and i have the bulk of the material removed i'm going toswitch to my cabinet maker's rasp and start to try to cleanthings up a little bit more. get rid of all those littledivots created by the ball mill. that's about as far asi'm going to take it. i'll just flip it over andi'll do the other side.
i'm going to attach the vertical piece and you can see the progressthat we just made. that little taper madea pretty big difference in how these two piecesrelate to one another. that's about as far as i feelcomfortable going right now. i don't want to do too muchbecause a lot of the last minute work is going tohappen when this is all glued together and i'll get amuch better idea at that time on how some of thesecontours are going to work out.
for now the next thingwould be to work on the top. the top is going to be theexact same process that i used for the bottom so there'sno 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 thisyou can't just jump into the glue up, slap the glueon there and hope everything turns out okay, youreally need to strategize. for instance when i wasmaking this prototype
here i learned the lesson the hard way. i basically put a clampat the front and a clamp at the back, tightenedthem 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 thispiece wants to collapse so it winds up opening, and nomatter where i put the clamping pressure i couldn't get it toclose 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 runthis way right across that middle piece that's going toclose everything together. but what kind of problemdo we run into here? now these clamps are approaching the work piece at an odd angle. that's not going to bevery good either because we're going to probablydent the work piece. even if you put a caul inthere the head of the clamp
is not going to put alot of pressure on there. it's going to keep slidingbecause it's only contacting at one point until itfinally 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 afteryou've made these cuts.
there's a good reason tonever throw away your scrap. let me show you. over by the bandsaw ifound this little guy. if you take a look here you can see exactly where that piece came from. this is going to give usa nice curved surface that will spread the pressurealong this bottom piece here, but the one thing itdoesn'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 onlymaking contact right here. here's a real simple wayto use the clamp itself to give us the exact 90degree notch that we need. just going to grab alittle straight edge here, put it along side the clamp. make a pencil line there. now to get a pencil line that'sperpendicular to that i'm
going to run this little guyacross the front like this. put a line that way. now when i cut this notchout 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'sgoing to make contact right here on this side and havea 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 makeone 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 offfrom the bottom piece.
because we cut it offfrom a straight piece of material the angle hereis exactly the angle we need to get a perfectshaped wedge here. i'm going to loosen up the clamp. i'll show you how wellthis is going to work. slide it right in like this and you can see that is the perfect angle. now with our wedge and ourcustom caul in place we can start to apply some clampingpressure and observe the joint,
just look for any problems. if everything was cut rightthere shouldn't be any. all the gaps should be closedup and all we need to do is take this puppy apart, addsome glue and tighten it up. one clamp does the entire job. for my glue i'm going to beusing 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 likethe filler because it gives a
little bit more structuralintegrity to the glue bond and if there's any little gaps oranything it helps to fill them. i've got it set up here soi'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 amountof 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 hereis a whole bunch of end grain, which is what i'mspreading the glue on now, to the long grain of this part here. normally that's notgoing to offer us a whole lot in the way of bondstrength because the end grain is going tosoak 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 workhere, i'm hoping that by putting a good amount of glueon that surface that i may actually get some sort of aglue bond and get some help by taking advantage of allthis wood to wood contact here, and not completely relying on the dominos themselves for all of the strength. this is where the planningpays off because if you did everything rightthere's no reason to panic.
you see all the glue squeeze out here? normally we'd be a littlebit more cautious about that but i have plenty ofsanding and sculpting and things to do still so i'mnot worried about staining. i also want to keep thatthere just in case by some chance there'sactually some sort of a gap, well that epoxy is goingto fill that gap with something that is a darkbrown, reddish colored material which is perfectfor this mahogany anyway.
i'm going to leave itas is, make sure i don't have any drips on theworkbench but as far as going around the perimeter andwiping it up that would make the problem worsen,take away some material that could very well helphide any potential flaws. i was all set this morningto go to my trestle leg and start doing someserious 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. shereally likes the way it looks at this point soi'm thinking what i may do is simply smooth thetransitions a little bit. when you run a router bitover a corner like this it's a nice smooth roundover butthere's a very clear transition
between the part where the bitcut and the flat of the wood. if you just grab some 180 gritpaper, 120, something that can make pretty good work ofit but you don't need it to be too rough, and justsmooth that transition out, you'd be surprised at how much more fluid it looks as it rounds the corner. that's one thing thatwe're going to focus on. obviously i need to getrid of all the glue schmutz that's here, and i reallydo want to work on these
transitions between what wecalled 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 randomorbit sander involved with some 80 grit soi could introduce some nice slight curves and smooth things out. a gooseneck scraper is a goodoption for this type of thing.
i've got a bunch of scrapersi'm going to employ for this. bottom line is let'sget it into the bench, in the vice and just startremoving 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 importantfor you to see the entire
process so thank goodnessfor the fast forward button. (downbeat reggae riff) i'd like to talk you through this process. now that you've seen itactually happen i can give you some of my logic forwhy i do certain things. if you look at the taperhere i've got not only glue here but this issitting a little bit proud. my roundovers are sittinga little bit proud. i need to blend these in.
the real key here is tostop thinking of these as two separate pieces andthink 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 isokay to an extent but i've got to be careful becauseas i push here i could start to really dig into my verticalpiece, which i don't want.
i'm going to very carefullywork it and use the glue as my visual indicatoron when i've gone far enough and removed enoughmaterial from this section. i've also got some materialat the top here that needs to go away so i want tobe careful of that too. if i flip the rasp over i'vegot the rounded end here and that helps me roll it throughand stops me from gouging. i don't want to go too much further until i remove some more materialfrom the front here.
i'm going to try to focusmy rasp on the high spots. at this point i may switchto my curved scraper here. that will give me a littlemore gentle control. even though we're going tobe going against the grain here you can still bringyour scraper up like this. it tends to make a littlebit of a rough cut but i find this to be oneof the easiest ways to transition from thisflat to something that basically is going tobe a nice upward curve.
what you're looking forhere is that glue line. when that disappears, thatlittle white spot is gone, i know we've removed enough material. once this transition islooking pretty smooth i want to make sure that i have alittle bit of a scoop here. i definitely do not want thisto 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 therasp i can selectively remove that middle area. another thing i like todo is use the random orbit sander because i couldreally dish this out nicely, which is something we normallydon't want to do and is very easy to do if you use asander like this improperly. we're going to do thatintentionally in this case and try and create alittle 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 a16th of an inch at the most. just enough to give us a nicesubtle, smooth transition. most of the work with our legs is done. i could put them on the sideand i'll do a little bit more of fine finessing andsanding later on but for now i need to turn myattention to the table top.
yesterday was a friday afternoon. i was tired from a long week, i really didn't feel likegoing to the lumber store but i knew that if i wanted to getsome work done this weekend and start fresh monday i wouldneed to have the material. well anyway, long storyshort i made the trip and i'm really glad idid because i found some amazingly wide boards, check these out. i've got two honduranmahogany boards here.
the biggest one is a full 14 inches. the smaller one here is twelve. between those two i actuallyshould be able to get my full table top depthjust 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 couldfit this on my jointer. the good thing is thereis a method called skip planing and that's exactlywhat i'm going to do. it's basically relyingon the fact that you have a pretty straightboard to begin with. if your board is allwavy, 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 knockthem done with a plane or you can send it rightthrough the planer, rough. what it will do is cleanoff the high spots and then once you get a decent relativelyflat surface you could flip it over again and runit through a second time. again, the key is these boards have to be pretty darn flat to begin with. if they're not, ifthere's a curve or a twist
the planer won't takea curve or a twist out, that's just the way the machine works. fortunately not only werethese boards very wide, but they were also very straight. i think i'm going to beable to get away with simply skip planing these and i'llhave 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 manageon 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 infeedside that's out wide enough to support the boardand i've got one on the outfeed side that willhelp support it there too. the thing is obviously if that roller stand is too high itcan really mess up the
registration as this board goes through. the stands are only there tospot me, to help me through this. as i push it through i'mactually going to pick up the board and let the planer decidewhen this board is level. also when it comes throughout 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 rollersupport the weight.
the rollers are actually alittle bit below the level of the beds. i think that's theeasiest way to handle it. let me get everything set up here. we'll run it through andhopefully when it's all said and done we'll end up witha pretty straight board. the first pass or two may be tricky since the surface is roughand 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 littlebit about the jointing. that is going to be a little bit tricky. with a board this long evenif you have a power jointer it's going to be really trickyto hold that on the surface, and if there's even a slightbow in it that could make it really difficult to registerproperly off the jointer.
you need to start with something that's pretty straight to begin with. like the same conceptof skip planing on the planer we need a prettyflat 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 oldschool 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 longbody 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 thatif you've got the skill, the time and that'sthe way you want to go.
on a surface this long it'sgoing to be a little bit tricky because this willbe a glue joint so it needs to be perfect in order foryou not to see that seam. eventually you couldwind up getting a surface that's nice and flat all the way across. here's another option. if youplan to use the jointer what you want to do is remove thereally high offending spots. i've got a high spot hereand a high spot in the back. i want to make sure thatit's relatively flat so
i'm going to grab a littlebit more of an aggressive plane here and start removingmaterial from each side. what i end up with isa 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 overthe jointer carefully and wind up with a perfectly jointed edge. if you're a track saw ownerthis is pretty easy to do, assuming you've got a nice long track.
you can go all the wayacross and with a good quality blade you can geta pretty darn near perfect straight edge with onecut, that's kind of nice. if you're not a track sawowner you could certainly use a circular saw with ahigh quality blade and just go get yourself a niceeight foot piece of mdf, the prime stuff thatthey use for moulding, at home depot or lowes. that stuff is pretty darn straight.
it may not be absolutelyperfect but if the idea is to clean upthis edge in preparation for the jointer it willcertainly do the trick. to successfully move thesemonster pieces across the jointer we're going toemploy a similar thing using a stand in front of thejointer and a stand behind the jointer and have them beingjust a bit below the surface. i don't want to register from those, i just need them to help melike another set of hands.
one thing i will rely on aremy magnetic featherboards. i've got a couple different types here, one from magswitch andthe other is a grip-tite. basically this is going tohelp it hold up against the fence because i can't be inmore than one place at once. as i'm pushing the board forward these are helping me keep ittight against the fence. now we have the challenge ofgluing this behemoth together. excuse the stupid smile on my face but i'm
really excited aboutthe fact that i'm able to get this entire top out of two pieces. any time i can get reallywide boards instead of having a whole bunchof small ones together, i know some people areconcerned 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 alittle bit of a strategy because
there is a lot of materialto glue together here. the wood-to-wood bondwould be strong enough but because there could be a little bit of issue where maybe onepiece raises about the other a little bit i dorecommend using biscuits, a spline or even somethinglike dominos across the length of this to help hold everything together and keepeverything nice and flat. and it will make ourlives a whole lot easier.
i've already started byplacing a few dominos here and i'm going to finishit off with a few more but really once the dominos arein we just add the glue, add the clamps and weshould be good to go. the glue i'm going to usehere is titebond extend. it's going to give me alittle bit more working time and with so many morticesto get glue into and these long surfaces it'sjust the safer bet to use something that gives youa 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 clampsfrom the glue up and it's time to trim this top toits final length and width, which is going to be pretty long at 92 inches in length andthen 24 inches deep. i'm going to use my tracksaw to do it but again
a circular saw and astraight edge or even that long piece of mdf will get this job done. instead of keeping myends perfectly square i'm just going to givethem 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 makesure that it's perfectly consistent on both sidesi'm going to make a template using someleftover quarter inch mdf
here which will fit right on the end. then i can use a flushtrim bit to get my sides to that exact arc thatwe'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 somethinglike this in the shop but i find thes drawing bows,bending bows very, very cool. they've got a little strapon the back and you just pull on them and you canget a different sized arc.
for someone who does alot of curves in his work this thing is awesome,well worth the investment. if you don't have somethinglike this you could always use a thin cutoff, a thinpiece of wood and bend it, and just use it as your own bending strip. it's a very simple process. i just mark the centerand that's going to line up with my center lineon my bending strip here. then i want to mark in threequarters of an inch on each
end because that's as far asi want that curve to go in. not trying to remove awhole 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 toroll and we can drop it on to the work piece here andjust transfer that curve. all i'm really going todo here is make sure it's flush with the front, evenon both sides and then
transfer this curve tothe side of the table top. although i do intend to usea flush trim bit to clean up the material here i don'twant 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 toremove with a router bit. i'm going to use my jigsaw tocut the excess out of there. i'm going to still stay abouta 16th away from my line. i don't want to go rightto the edge because if
there's a little bit oftearout i want to have some room to spare andi don't want to risk the possibility that i gooff course with this. i still recommend using a blade that has a very high tooth countfor a very fin cut and that's going to help reduce your tearout. i've got my template clampeddown to the table top and i've got my router set up withmy big monster pattern bit. you may have seen thisone on the show before.
this is something that ireally do feel is a good investment if you're somebodywho makes a lot of these templates and patterns and youneed to do a lot of routing. a bit like this with thenumber of blades and the orientation of the blades beingon a bit of an angle there means you get a cleaner cutand it's actually a lot safer because you have less chanceof it kicking back at you. when i'm doing somethinglike this that's, i think we've got about an inch anda 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 aregular standard bit take your time with it. don't pushit 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 ofmaterial at the front and back and that's really just because i'ma little bit cautious about tearout and i just get uncomfortablewhen a bit of that size moving at speed gets too closeto the edge. you could have really disastrous thingshappen so i usually like to leave it alone and file itdown or sand it down later. the next logical step with our top would be to add our edgeprofile but i don't have
the bit that i need just yet to do that, so i'm trying to comeup with ways to utilize my time in the mostefficient 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 apain in the butt to try to finish if it were alreadyattached to the legs. just maneuvering it around,just going to be a pain.
plus i'm going to be usingan oil-based finish on this which means i needa significant amount of time to dry betweencoats and that's the part that tests our patience most of the time. if you're waiting sixto eight hours between coats and you're justfinishing the bottom, something you're never going to see, that's when a lot ofpeople like to rush it. if you can do thatprocess 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 thissurface down so it's nice and smooth and theni'm going to probably give it three to fourcoats 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 tocut a profile on the top edge here that's not reallygoing to affect the bottom.
the bottom can be completelyfinished and then when i'm finishing the top asi put my finish on the top surface i just make surethat i also get that edge treatment and it should comeout relatively consistent, because we've got anice corner between the bottom surface and theside, the edge here. let me grab my sandpaper, start sanding this beast and we'll add acouple coats of oil finish. one other thing i'm goingto do at this time is add
a little bit of a chamferto 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 cornerthat 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 toput it because i'll be using arm-r-seal on thetop but i'm going to use the freshest stuffthat 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 grainis 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 woodworkingto the next level? join the wood whisperer guild.