Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Poker Table!

Adam Savage here in my cave and I know I'm in a different spot than I normally am at the start of a video but that's because of what this video is about yes to my right are my rounders poker chips in the case that I built night I know I've already done a couple of videos about them so why are they here again well because once you have poker chips of course the next step is to play some poker and in addition to some players you need a surface to play upon and that is what I'm about to do I'm about to actually make a replica of one of Teddy KGB's poker tables from rounders to play with my rounders poker chips and it's gonna sit right on top of my white oak table here in the display area which is why this is where I'm sitting now this is a one-day build that I have to complete in a day because a whole bunch of friends of mine are in town for San Francisco's sketch fest and we're gonna have a poker party here tomorrow night so those are the stakes let's get building now the dimensions of this poker table are going to be 47 inches in diameter because that fits nicely inside a 48 inch wide piece of plywood I had an interesting issue with the size of this table right at the back because I don't have any 48 inch wide material here I have all my wood cut to 24 by 48 to store in the wall behind the camera now so last night I did a biscuit join of two sheets I know I could have just bought a 4x4 but since it was the end of the night and I realized it late I just clamped up and glued these together so this will be the base of the table and then I'm going to cut a border for the the padded border of the table and then cover the whole thing in felt and vinyl but first I have to make a bunch of curved cuts in big pieces of plywood and that's going to require a specialized piece of equipment this is the tool I'm gonna use to make all those curved cuts yes it's a router a Milwaukee router Milwaukee was one of the tool sponsors for savage builds and I ended up with this and I really liked it it's actually a nice simple straightforward router and to make large curved cuts I actually built a custom router radius cutter I took a long piece of plywood I traced out this ring shape so that I could replace this with my plywood I drilled three holes too I could attach the plywood with the screws and this is the piece of plywood I ended up with it clamps to the bottom like that and each of these holes is a specific distance from the cutting edge of a half-inch router bit so you can cut any radius up to probably thirty four inches which is 68 inch diameter that's a nice big round cut so this is a tool I'll probably have in my shop for many many decades and it starts its first cutting today one thing Milwaukee does that a lot of tool companies do is they use these 1024 torques headed panhead screws it's like do you really need to use torques headed I mean I got to go find the special bit and everything so I replaced them with some 1024 Phillips head screws just to make it easier to swap stuff out I have a ton of Phillips head screwdrivers and there you go that is all that's required to attach this I drilled these holes on my mill so they are super exact and the first radius I'm cutting is 47 inches that's the first diameter I'm cutting and so I'll be going to this mark right here for my pivot twenty three and a half it's a forty seven inch outer diameter right yes okay so twenty three and a half all right uh-huh so I gotta set the depth so it cuts all the way through the plywood depth is set I know here's the issue that I'm grappling with right now I need these to be perfect what I'm making is the rail I'm making the padded rail but my rail needs to be perfect half rounds which means I need my pivot to be right in the middle here on this guy so I need to just make a little bit of a slice here so I can drill down through the center and be right at that apex point don't need to be perfectly lined up good I feel good about that those are all clamped together let's clap together this is uh this is indicative of how small this shop is is how difficult it is to build something like a 4-foot round table top it's just the reality of the space alright so now I want to go ah I want to do an inside radius okay and that means I need to actually measure from a different spot okay so there's my main that's the proper radius and everything's held in orientation good now I am going to measure from the outside of the router bit to a pivot point same spot I know if your carpenter there's probably a better way to do this and you do this all the time and you're yelling at me at the screen because I'm doing it in a less efficient way I recognize that it's quick and dirty over here all right let's take this all apart and see what we got smaller table and I thought after chips here this is a six person table I was hoping it was a seven person table but it's six and maybe even a little tight yeah that's fine okay so if that's the deal dealy-bob then radius of this thing wants to be like about here there okay so what is that dimension dimension is give or take what did you see okay so all right have one more big router cut to make oh my god this so much dust this is crazy now that's the top this is the bottom and because I'm laying this down on my table I want to give it some structural stability so I'm gonna add a rail along the inside here but I have to figure out exactly what diameter my table is so let's measure that who all right so now I have to us attach the two halves of the rail together and I have to do that before yeah I have to attach these two halves to each other so that is a biscuit joiner moment biscuit joiner what's a biscuit joiner well it's the greatest thing to happen to dowling do one there one there there a biscuit joiner well that is a biscuit I know it looks like a little chunk of wood but they're called biscuits and what happens is you use a biscuit joiner ie this little bad boy and you it actually has a blade in it that sticks out and cuts this little radius that matches that that's what you do is you go real real real real then you filled the slots with glue I can talk about it but I could just show it to you because I'm about to do it anyway you fill the slots with glue you put the biscuits in the biscuits soak up the glue they suck it up they expand and they hold really tightly it's awesome way better than dowels woodglue is without a doubt my favorite of all the glutes it is the one glue that does what it says it does glue wood better than almost anything else you could imagine you glue two pieces of wood together with the right amount of wood glue with the right procedure and it's harder to get it's like the wood will fail before the glue dust that's how good it is yeah I really dig that stuff all right so now we killing the nice thing about biscuit joining over dowling and the reason it's vastly better is because with biscuit joining you can actually move the part a little bit you actually have a little bit of room to adjust things and that's humongous that's good this doesn't have to be perfect cuz it's gonna get its strength from being mounted to the tabletop itself so I'm not super concerned about that part but I do need to route the outside edge of this bad boy and that means I need to clamp it down again since this gets covered with padding it's fine if it's a little bit marked up I don't really mind that all right it's time to start actually assembling my table oh I'm gonna hit that with a little bit of sandpaper but remember I said I wanted it to clear the outside of that table and have a little structural stability which is why I routed this channel in here but how does this channel get used well here's the thing is I am going to use a technique called kerfing in which you run a piece of plywood through the table saw many times and make shallow cuts actually in this case quite deep cuts very close together and it allows me to bend my plywood on a radius but that's way more of a radius than I need for this poker table so I went with a slightly wider spacing on this test piece and this I really like so it was weakened while I was dealing with some other stuff I came in here and I did some kerfing of enough wood to go all the way around this table and that's what I'm about to do I'm about to circulate around this table with this stuff and the slot is just big enough time for some gluing and a glue from here to here well that whole thing that you see carpenters do on YouTube where they paint every facet of the joints they're gluing I'm here to tell you that's real it's just really good practice to do it the more you do it the more secure your joints are the fact is I'm not building this table to a super high tolerance it's some it's a little loosey-goosey and if you look up close they're some of the wing hitches and it's get along but I don't really care because I'm gonna use this to be playing poker on or it's not like we're it's all been World Peace on this thing what I really want it to be is solid and it's gonna look just fine we're gonna hide a lot of crimes with a cloth that's for sure what is this this is a 22-gauge nailer and I didn't know how amazing 22-gauge nailers could be until tom sex introduced me to the magic of them they make these little tiny staples they're super super thin and you can't even you can't even barely see them in the wood they're amazing it's one of my new favorite tools this is totally amazing what's just happened I screwed up so I cut all these this weekend thinking ah definitely got enough but I did not measure I was off by an inch and a quarter all right I can easily fill that piece and I will go what it what an idiot can't believe I didn't measure it I was so lazy I think I feel like I'm taking out every power tool at this job I am using a lot of different things honestly this is a project that could be done with simply a drill of a jigsaw you don't need a lot of complexity for this one everyone has their own way of working that utilizes the tools at their disposal and that's fine there there's no one right way to do it that's just the way that you like to do it so in order to fill this gap I need to kerf one last piece of plywood that wide which is great because now because I didn't film the kerfing you get to see how kerfing works so what I'm doing is I'm gonna be setting the depth of my cut to be close to the sort of 2/3 point of the wood I made a pencil mark here on my sled and what you'll see is I'm gonna just start slightly in I make a cut that's a kerf cut then I move the left edge over to the pencil mark and cut again and I just keep on doing that that should be enough now a really important note here this is repetitive boring work and the fact is everyone I know who's ever been injured on a table saw has been injured doing repetitive boring work it's how it's you can zone out so you sit there anyone you look good and then you can start to look elsewhere and that's when you're gonna lose the tips of your fingers and it requires a lot of vigilance to do tedious work with specific attention but it's required on the table saw you just can't let that attention lapse these are really important to you yeah that was the only other note I have another safety note for you nail guns are the bane of every freakin employer because there's so many creative ways you can harm yourself with them the fact is is when you are about to I'm actually gonna unplug this so I don't accidentally do it when you're about to put a nail into something you want to make sure your hands not on the other side that seems totally obvious right you move your fingers apart that's great you want to or you or you get a piece of wood backing and you do it like that but let me explain that I've seen people use a thick piece of wood as a backing for their nail gun and accidentally drive two nails where the first one went in and the second one followed the first one and drove this first one right through the finger of a friend of mine at ILM so nothing on your body should be in line with anything close to the path of the staple as it goes through the wood in fact they'll even go so far as to say your fingers should be separated from the nails path by the radius of its distance that means if it's a one-inch nail you don't want your fingers within an inch and a quarter of anywhere that that could go cuz I've seen nails go through wood at right angles to show up and enter your tender flesh be careful when using nail guns be aware that those nails can travel and they seek out human flesh and once they've tasted blood it's all over I think the next step is kind of exciting the next step is to take this over to my white table and make sure that it stand on top pretty shirt though oh no I was pretty sure from the measurements that was gonna work but ya never know okay time to move on from the woodworking portion to the soft goods portion it's now all about foam and cloth and vinyl and staples and that's what I've got here I am going to inorder separate the ring from the base of the table I'm going to attach some foam to the base of the table then I'm gonna put on some speed cloths which I'll talk about in a minute then I'm gonna attach some foam to the rail and then I'm going to cut and trim the vinyl to the rail and then I'm gonna staple it all together and then I'm gonna screw the whole thing together I know what I'm gonna do okay the biggest issue here is that I've got screws that are going through the main table into the arm into the rail and I'm just gonna screw them together but when you have felt in there the felt can grab the screw in and totally torque which means I could spend all this time make them felt nice and tight and then screw it up with the screw it also means I have to get my alignment perfectly right and I've got the screws and I got an alignment mark but that's not quite enough so I'm going to actually help myself out with two other alignments I'm gonna drill a quarter inch hole at either probably here and here and put a little alignment bolt in their alignment bolt yeah like a little you know a pin basically so that I can pin it and that's when I know that my screws are all going in exactly the right place one two are you really serious as possible and I'm not quite have enough I ordered some closed cell foam from Amazon to arrive today and it didn't I had some closed cell foam but it's not enough you can use any kind of felt for a poker table I decided to go with what's called speed felt because it's nice high quality it's beautiful stuff this is actually what they used to cover pool tables with and it's really nice stuff very very tactile and delightful we're gonna secure it on this puppy in a minute and think I think that might be it I think I might have all the staples I need in the perimeter of this thing yep-yep-yep yep-yep-yep yep-yep-yep all right time time to cut this I was gonna say time to cut the staples some time to cut the staples time to cut the felt but I think about the meat of the camera and I got it all wrong - have you got the film here we go that was me marking my school hols from the underside pocket sevens I'm in I'm on the button let's do it ah yeah this and upholsterers foam cutter you don't really need one of these they're like 350 bucks it's pretty freakin expensive but I bought it back when I was making TV money don't even want to know all right okay so oh they're both the top I'll feel that tomorrow while that's drying I'm gonna put a little tape on top of these holes to keep the fabric from doing its work worm thing good enough you know the worst part is I bought a pneumatic stapler but it didn't arrive it was supposed to arrive today it's probably gonna arrive tomorrow it's very physical labor I was exhausted just a note I didn't know how to the exact right methodology for attaching vinyl to a circular rail like this but there was a YouTube video about how to build your own poker table on the cheap that was very instructive for me linking to them in the comments below so you can see where I get my inspiration almost every build I do I check out some of what other people are doing doing if it's aesthetic I don't because they like my own vision on it but for this kind of thing totally so I think that's what we'll call a poker rail and that's a poker table let us join these two things and make them one alright let's take it looks pretty Oh my tables in the way with my own table okay yeah it's definitely a small poker table this is a tight game I thought it would I thought it alright so let's see here alright let's see I'll start with three stacks of high society okay mister son of beech let's play some cards yeah yeah dump my hand looks pretty good actually I hadn't shuffled them that is my one day build of my poker table and it's a little rough around the edges but I'm pretty pleased with it and clearly I need to build a bigger one someday

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 1,705,528

Rating: 4.9370427 out of 5

Keywords: adam savage, one day builds, adam savage's one day builds, tested, testedcom, adam savage one day build, one day build, tested adam savage one day build, one day builds adam savage, one day builds tested, adam savage tested, adam savage one day builds youtube, poker, poker table, poker table build, felt, felting, rounders movie, poker table diy, poker table top, woodworking projects, woodworking furniture projects, woodworking ideas, adam savage builds

Id: SgCJeoDNmYU

Length: 41min 20sec (2480 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/shawnaroo]

I feel like if Adam tried really hard, he could've found a smaller and even more wobbly work table to build this thing on.