7 Tips for Perfect Woodworking Panel Glue-Ups

the ability to create a flat panel is probably the single most important skill that you can have as a furniture maker so in this video we're gonna go over the top seven things that you can do and avoid doing and the more of these things that you're able to incorporate into your workflow the better off you're gonna be so let's get into it okay the first thing we can do to achieve the best possible panels is to choose the straightest and flattest lumber that we can find and we often have to contend with things like bowed crooked and twisted boards so let's talk about some of the things to look for when picking out lumber first how straight and flat are the boards it's pretty obvious that the straighter and flatter the lumber is to begin with the better your panels are going to come out but sometimes we aren't lucky enough to find perfectly straight and flat boards so we have to weigh our options we obviously have machines that can help us get our material too straight and flat but making considerations first and not totally relying on your machines will help get better results i'll get into some of the reasoning when i talk about milling but for now i'll try to keep it simple and i have two ways of thinking the first is if i'm going to be keeping boards long maybe for a big table top or if i'm going to be cutting them up into smaller sections maybe for cabinet panels so with that in mind if a board is bowed it's very likely that i'll be able to use it for the most part a bit of bow is not something to worry about as there are multiple ways to make it work as long as it isn't extreme if a board is crooked it's also very likely i can use it during the milling process one of the main things we do is cut straight edges onto all of our boards so this really isn't a big deal now if a board is twisted i'll almost always try to avoid it unless i know that i'll be cutting it up into smaller sections which can then be milled much easier so i just consider how bad the twist is and if a board is kinked maybe where there's a large knot or something similar for the most part i'll try to avoid that as well the other thing to think about in addition to all of this is how the lumber looks so much of making panels has to do with how well all of the boards match and making the seams look as seamless as possible so i always try to find boards with matching color and grain and weigh that against the quality of the boards ideally when milling lumber the process would start with jointing one face of a board then planing the opposite face to get them both flat and parallel to each other then jointing one edge of the board to get it straight then taking it to the table saw to rip the opposite edge to get that flat in parallel as well and though this is how it's usually done there are times where this isn't possible sometimes a board is too wide for our jointer or too long and thin to joint flat so let's talk about some of the considerations the first thing i like to do is rough cut boards to the shortest length i can while still leaving myself plenty of working room if a board is bowed or crooked by cutting it into shorter sections a significant amount of the bow or crook can be diminished and any bit that might still remain in these shorter sections can be flattened or straightened during milling but let's say you're making a large table top and you need to leave your boards eight feet long if a board has even a moderate amount of bow in it and we attempt to joint the first face flat we would very possibly need to remove so much material to get it flat that the board would essentially become unusable especially if we are starting with thinner boards like four quarter lumber and we certainly don't want to buy unnecessarily thick boards just to be able to get them jointed flat so what we'll often do with longer thinner boards is skip the jointing step altogether and just plain both sides then we can joint and rip the edges this won't eliminate any bow in a board but if we're careful to buy the straightest lumber we can we should be able to correct any leftover bow during the glue up okay so you've done everything you could do so far you bought good boards you milled them up the best you could but in all likelihood your boards aren't perfect but there's still plenty of things that you can do to get the flattest panel possible and the first of those things is picking grain orientation so let's pretend that i've got a three board panel and i like all the faces equally but i noticed that they all have just the tiniest amount of bow to them still here's an example of what i'm talking about well rather than gluing them up like this you would want to flip one of them so that the direction of the bowing is opposite that way instead of having three boards all pulling in the same direction you can have a tug of war going on that hopefully keeps things in balance now if the boards are so flat that you can't even see any bowing first off congratulations but what you can use here to figure out what orientation to use are the rings that you can see by looking at the end grain basically if you look at all of them and you can see this sort of pattern rather than putting all three boards like this alternate one of them so that you end up with a wave pattern now in reality this is more indicative of potential cupping not bowing so i only use this to determine my board orientation if i'm 100 completely indifferent as to what face shows otherwise if we're doing a good job everywhere else then i'm just gonna pick the side that i like the looks of the best and that hasn't failed me so far all right at this point you would think that we're ready to glue up our panels but there's still some prep work to do so i'm going to show you an example of how good boards can create bad panels and what we can do to avoid that so what can happen is that because the panel's gonna follow the geometry of the board's edges and your edges probably aren't perfectly square rather than making a flat panel you might be making a barrel and the more boards that are a part of your barrel or panel the worst things are gonna get thankfully there's a really easy fix to this so in an ideal world you wouldn't need to fix it because you'd have a perfect 90 degree fence on your jointer or a perfectly 90 degree angle set on your blade when you created this edge prior to assembling but in reality even the most perfect tool setup is probably slightly off so a really good way to combat that is with what's called the in out or the up down method in either case what you're going to do is lay out all of your boards in their final orientation that you like then you're going to write in and out on the face of each of the mating edges of your boards from there you're going to take one more pass on the joiner with each face labeled in facing in and each face labeled out facing out so now no matter how off your joiner fence is since you're alternating your cuts you're creating complementary edges on your boards which is going to result in a flat panel instead of a barrel for the up down version of this it's really the same exact idea only instead of joining pieces either in or out you're taking one last rip on the table saw with the piece facing either up or down and again by doing this you're creating those complementary edges which will give you the flat panel so dow's dominoes and biscuits aren't a bad thing and actually dal's dominoes and biscuits can be a good thing but an over-reliance on dal's dominoes and biscuits can be a bad thing basically people have this tendency to think that you know i'm getting sick of saying this so i'm just going to call them del miscutos going forward so people have a tendency to think that del mesquitos are some kind of magic solution to perfectly flatten your panels no matter how bad they are and that just isn't true really the main place that i use damn mesquitos is when i'm in need of coplanarity which just makes for an easier glue up thus helping you to get a better panel so maybe i have one board that's just a little wonky or even just one spot of one board that's where they can really shine i mean i guess in theory you could have some banana boards and you could just reverse them and use a bunch of dal misquitos to hold it all flat but i wouldn't want to rely on that being the case i think a really good way to think about dow mesquitos is while they aren't a magic fix all solution if you've done a good job of getting to this point they can really help you get that last little five percent of flatness that you're hoping for if you missed somewhere else all right everything that we've done so far has been leading up to this point you milled your boards you picked good orientation everything's looking good and you're ready to go but you're not out of the woods yet so the next thing that we're going to talk about is clamping strategy and i think it's good to start here with an example of what not to do so here's a clip from the video where i was building this piece the surly table which is a round table so the panel for the top was pretty wide and i promised that here i had taken every step possible to get a good panel i'd even loaded it up with dominoes as you can see here but when i started clamping it up look at how the entire panel wanted to fold up like a taco shell well that's because at this point all of the clamps are on the underside of the table but as you can see here as soon as i put some clamps on the top side and started clamping everything flattens back out so the takeaway here is don't put all of your clamps on one side you want to try to get even pressure on both faces of your panel so that it stays flat while it's gluing dry a few other things about clamps if you're having trouble with coplanarity but you either can't or don't want to use domino kits that's not it domeskidos you can use clamping calls now i'll be honest it's pretty rare that i use these but the basic idea is you get a piece or pieces of wood that run perpendicular to the boards of your panel and you clamp those from both ends to help hold your pieces coplanar while the glue is dry now if this is something that you think you might do often you can even get specialty clamps like these deluxe panel clamps from rockler which are kind of like a panel clamp with calls built in something i do do pretty often is use clamps on the ends of my panels because this is usually the hardest spot to keep things coplanar because you might not be able to get down misquitoes that close to it and it's just harder to get clamping pressure sometimes all right real quick let's take a second to thank squarespace for sponsoring today's video both chris and i have been using squarespace to build and maintain our websites for years now and that's because squarespace makes it super easy to get up and running with plenty of professional looking templates to choose from as well as making things like purchasing domains really simple squarespace also has plenty of e-commerce tools to help you grow your business things like inventory management a simple and secure checkout process and unlimited products allow us to easily manage online transactions and not get bogged down with mundane tasks so that we can devote more time to doing the things we enjoy like making perfect panels so if you're thinking about starting a website or even if you already have one go check out squarespace to see if it might be a better option for you head to squarespace.com for a free trial then when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com4i's to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain all right thanks squarespace now let's get back to the video okay so let's assume that the worst has happened you did everything you could but for whatever reason your panel still has a slight bow to it well thankfully there's still a few things that you can do to fix it and the first of those things has to do with how the panel is going to be used so you would think that the last place that you want a bowed panel is for a tabletop but i personally think that a slight bow and a tabletop is less noticeable than bow in a cabinet panel and the reason for that is that on a table it's really hard for your eye to pick up on any small discrepancies like if you had an eight foot long table with a quarter inch of bow in the middle you'd probably never notice it but in a cabinet with drawers or doors if you have a quarter inch bow in your top panel seeing a gap that's a sixteenth of an inch on either side but 5 16 of an inch at the center is gonna look like the grand canyon well here's the good news if you're building a small cabinet chances are that the boards are so short that there's not going to be any bow and if you're building a large cabinet chances are that there's going to be at least one vertical partition in it so as long as you make the length of the vertical partitions match the interior height of your cabinet you can use that to your advantage to pry or pull your panel flap honestly the main place that i've used this has been when i was working with large plywood cases and i really didn't have any control over the flatness of my panels it just came down to the plywood so all things being equal when i'm faced with that i like to make it so that my panel has the convex side facing in that way the partition pushes rather than having to pull on tabletops even though flatness is less important like i said depending on the design there are times that really similar concepts can come into play i think a good example of this was the giant desk that we built a few months back where the tops were pretty flat but they weren't perfect but thanks to the leg design which basically functioned like giant calls and just the overall weight of the base any bow was negated now in different situations this might not be a solution so sean do you have some tips for us i sure do like chris said we won't always have the luxury of an apparatus helping to keep our panels flat but there are techniques we can use like breadboard ends and inlaid c-channel to get a similar result for example a large table with a base that doesn't do much to hold the top flat could benefit from breadboard ends breadboard ends are essentially a piece that is attached to the ends of a tabletop with perpendicular grain direction to the rest of the table which will counteract any movement that might cause the table top to cup along its width the only thing about this is that breadboard ends have a very specific look so what can we do if we don't want to change the way a panel looks but still ensure it will remain flat well inlaid c channel works in a similar way though it's less conspicuous since it's attached to the underside of the table by inlaying and attaching metal c channel the table can be held flat without changing the way it looks from above which is very likely the main reason for doing it this way all right so now you know a bunch about making flat panels and the next step is making good boxes so go check out this video i think there's a lot of tips that you're really going to like in it

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 185,894

Keywords: Woodworking, woodwork, wood working, DIY, how to, modern furniture, furniture design, Mid Century Modern, Modern Furniture Project, Woodworking Project, DIY Woodworking, woodworking plans, DIY woodworking, building cabinets, how to build a cabinet, how to build a box, woodworking box, making boxes, making cabinets, flat panels, panel making, how to make panels, perfect panels, panels for furniture

Id: 3b-GmvUhwUU

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022