All Your Friends Are Lying To You - The Shou Sugi Ban Desk Build

you know what the problem with having friends is problem with having friends is that they will never ever tell you the truth let me explain [Music] so at this point i've been doing this whole building thing for at least a few years now and there's one consistent piece of feedback that i keep getting from all of my friends and it's that they love everything i'm doing that's like really all of it even that pixelated end table or basically just phone the whole thing in i mean come on what kind of a fool do you take me for and really i think this is a trap that creators and makers of all types can fall into if you start accepting too much false praise you can lose the ability to objectively assess your own work but there is one way to know if your friends truly appreciate what you do but before i tell you about that let me tell you about the sponsor of today's video minwa mimwax decided to sponsor this build as part of their celebration for woodworking month which is definitely a holiday that i can get behind for over 110 years midwax has been a leading provider of high quality wood finishes and wood care products one of the hardest parts about bringing your creative vision for a build to life is getting the colors to be exactly right but i know that i can always count on minwax to help me get that job done they have a massive catalog of over 200 different colors and if that was enough they can custom mix colors to get you exactly the look you need so like i said i always turn to mimwax when i need deep rich colors and this build was no exception this little can right here was instrumental in getting exactly the look i wanted on this build but i'm getting a bit ahead of myself let me finish my thought the only way to know if your friends truly appreciate your work is if they ask you to build something that will then be prominently displayed in their homes and that's exactly what we're going to do today we are going to build a desk for my buddy robin who you may remember from my keyboard tray video this is something that robin easily could have bought at a store but instead he decided to come to me and that means a lot to me so we're going to make him something really cool we're going to make him a sugary bond desk this is a new technique for me and one that's frankly a little bit dangerous so i think we're gonna have some fun in today's video and if you don't know what shushubibon is then let me give you a little primer shosugibon is a traditional japanese wood preservation technique that dates back to at least the 18th century at the time japanese artisans had been using recovered sea driftwood as a building material weathered under a combination of salt water surf and sun it became extremely durable but there was a problem that naturally occurring supply of sea driftwood was running out and in their search to find a new source of weather resistant lumber these japanese builders turned to an unlikely ally fire they figured out that by charring and then cooling a piece of wood that you could make it resistant to water insects and fire itself the technique was so effective it became widespread across japan eventually though times changed and shosugiban was replaced by more modern building materials like plastic metal and chemically treated lumber and for hundreds of years it was largely forgotten that is until it was rediscovered by an unlikely group idiots on youtube speaking of idiot youtubers the first thing that i did for this build was just cut all of my wood to length and then i started milling it into square the one i'm working with here is red oak and that immediately disqualifies this build from being considered real shoshukimon translated to english shoshugibon actually means burnt cedar planks so i missed the mark a little bit with my wood selection but this is gonna be a desk that's subject to a lot of wear and tear so i wanted to use a good hardwood that would hold up well over time similarly i also wanted to use oak because it's dense and i figured it would be less likely to warp and twist during the burning process nice okay so the wood is all now cleaned up ready to go and ready to be glued into a table top and in order to assist with that i'm going to use the biscuit joiner to include some biscuits here while i'm doing this i want to address something that i hear quite a bit that i kind of disagree with i'm not kind of i fully disagree with it people often say that biscuits don't add strength to joy they're only for alignment and i don't like that line of reasoning i think what people mean to say is that biscuits don't add much strength to joint but if you think about the materials involved you're increasing the surface area of the glue joint so of course it's adding at least a little bit of strength so i would like it if everybody stops saying that biscuits don't add strength and they're for alignment only sorry for that biscuit rant but that one has been bothering me for a while to start here i marked out a bunch of lines at six inch intervals and then started cutting my biscuit pockets normally for my more complex glue up patterns i don't bother with biscuits i just accept that i'm gonna have to do a lot of leveling afterwards but for this build i really only had four pieces to worry about so i figured that the biscuits would save me some time after the pockets were all cut i started filling them with glue and the biscuits themselves just ignore the fact that i did double the number here i decided that i didn't like how close these ones were to the surface so i moved the biscuit joiner down a little bit as with all of my builds i didn't spare the glue here if you apply too much glue it just squeezes out but if you apply too little you run the risk of ruining your build so i usually err on the side of applying too much half a bottle of glue later and i was ready to start clamping i actually took the time to pre-set up all my clamps to approximately the right size before i uncork the glue when it comes to glue ups every second count so i like to front load as much of the work as i can while the glue is drying i want to take a quick second and talk about why i chose red oak for this project project project people always give me a really hard time about how i say projects i don't know what to tell you i'm canadian and i don't know it's kind of like a 50 50 split here some people say project some people say project i just say the word how it was written so you can't get too mad at me anyway so why i chose red oak is because i see a lot of shoshuki bond projects done there's that word again i see a lot of sugary bond projects done with soft woods like pine and spruce and what ends up happening is after you brush off the charred wood you end up with a very uneven surface that kind of accentuates the natural grain of the wood and that's good depending on what you're doing but this is gonna be a desk so i wanted to go for something that was going to be a little bit flatter after the shoshuki bond so red oak is what i went with it's nice and dense and uh we'll see how that plays out for me after a quick lunch break i pulled off the clamps and pulled out my random orbital sander despite my use of biscuits there were still some small ridges and glue squeezed out to be cleaned up but my random orbital sander coupled with a 60 grit sanding pad made short working okay so that's pretty good this all feels nice and flat now i got rid of all the ridges between the pieces and let me get this mask off my face i think that's about as far as i want to take it i don't see any particular point in getting this too perfect because i'm about to take a flamethrower through it using my track saw i squared off the ends of the desk and reduced it to its final dimension of 60 by 24 inches this is a pretty standard computer desk size that will accommodate most modern setups next i set up to cut a one inch chamfer the whole way around the perimeter of the desk when you're designing a flat slab desk like this there isn't a whole lot of room for creative design so this chamfer was my way of adding at least a little bit of visual interest you might also notice that i ditched my tracks off for these cuts and was using my circular saw instead that's because my track saw only bevels in one direction and wouldn't cut the angle that i wanted or at least that's what i thought at the time in hindsight i could have just flipped the desk over and cut the chamfer from the other side whoops now that i've got the chamfers cut the whole way around the perimeter of the desk i'm actually going to cut a relief here at the back of the desk this is gonna be robin's computer desk so he's gonna have a monitor a tower and then all the associated cables with that will need to get routed under the table and this just gives you a convenient spot where you can do that so you can push the table right up against the wall as an added bonus this belief also gives robin a good flat spot to mount an adjustable monitor arm you know in case he ever gets tired of using the factory one that came with this monitor to do the straight part of this cut i used a track saw because it's a foolproof way to get a perfectly straight cut and then very carefully i used a jigsaw to finish them off now look i know i said there wasn't much point in sanding the desk prior to burning it but hear me out here have you ever noticed how two by fours and really all lumber you buy at the store comes with rounded corners that isn't a plot by big lumber to cheat you out of a few millimeters of wood or well i don't know maybe it is but it's also a safety feature sharp corners make for really good ignition points so by applying a slight round over to all your corners you can make it harder for the wood to catch fire and that's exactly what i'm doing here i'm taking a lot of the hard edges off of the desk so that i don't end up over burning them so our desk is all cut and ready to go now and i'm about to take it outside and do the shoshuki bond but there's a couple quick things i wanted to note before i head out there and do that one of which is during the research phase of this build i watched a lot of videos of people making similar desks one thing that i kept seeing was people going really hard on one side with the open flame and then having issues with warping so you'll see while i'm doing this i'm gonna actually try and flip it frequently and just do light passes on every side and slowly build up that chart also obviously i'm going to be working with an open flame so behind me here i have a fire extinguisher ready to go in case things get too out of hand and i also have a bucket full of water that i will have on hand as well right i think that's it so let's get outside and let's play with a freaking flamethrower freaking freak oh that's that's a tongue twister freaking flamethrower i don't know about you guys at home but this is the part of the build that i was most looking forward to doing i mean come on it's not every day that you get to play with an open flame at work i mean if you consider this work in the traditional sense which i'm not sure that i do honestly i've kind of lost track at this point but anyways to start i gave the top of the table a light burn and almost immediately i realized that things weren't going to go exactly how i planned i expected the wood to burn much more evenly but as you can see here some parts of the wood took the char a lot easier than others while that did look kind of cool it wasn't really what i was going for i promised robin a desk that was pure black without any trace of color left in it and i intended to deliver that after a few minutes of torching the top i could already hear all sorts of cracks and pops coming from the wood so at that point i decided to flip it over and start on the other side it was on the bottom where i really started to get a good feel for the process in order to get a really good char you have to get the surface of the wood hot enough that it actually ignites you can see it here the bright orange flames are the oak itself burning which is way different than the blue flames that come off of the torch unfortunately even with a heavier burn i still wasn't getting that consistent deep black that i was looking for and to make matters worse the longer i held the torch to the wood the more pronounced the texture of the wood became also i got a bit overzealous and forgot to keep rotating the desks and you can see here that it's starting to develop a bit of a warp to it thankfully i realized before it was too late flipped it over applied some heat to the top and was able to remove about ninety percent of that warping okay i think we're about out of gas that seems a good timing because i don't think this table is going to get any blacker let's take it inside and see how badly i screwed up this desktop okay so a couple of initial observations while i wait for this thing to cool down a little bit it's still very hot i think i have to eat a little bit of humble pie i said i was going to do it like a little bit more light up the whole way around and do it evenly that doesn't really work because you need to actually get the wood to ignite before you can get it to start charring so i understand why people go so hard on one side and then flip it over and do the other side that being said i did kind of try to space it out a little bit and i am quite happy with how little warping i got in this tabletop one thing i'm not so happy about is a lot of these glue joints have really started to expand so there is a gap between each of these individual pieces i'm not quite sure how i'm going to handle that yet the glue joints do still seem to be holding very well so i'm not too worried about strength it's just more of a aesthetic thing at this point all right let's let this cool down while i formulate a game plan at this point i had three big problems to overcome first and foremost i needed to fix the color of the desk it just wasn't that uniform black i was looking for next i had the issue of texture to take care of this desk post burning was way too rough to be effectively used as a desk and lastly i had those pesky glue joints to take care of as well i started by lightly brushing off and then vacuuming up any loose char after that it was time for the sponsor of today's video minwax to save the day i picked up a can of their true black penetrating stain and brushed it onto the entire desk even after all that burning there were still hints of brown and gray streaked throughout the desk surface many other stains will claim to be black but will still show through a lot of the original wood color minwax on the other hand is not kidding around when they say that the stain is true black it did an amazing job of taking this disc to that deep shade of black that i had originally envisioned okay that is looking really black and i'm really excited about how this is turning out but that is an oil-based finish and the finish i want to put on top of that is water-based so that means we're gonna have to wait at least 24 hours for that to fully dry before i can do that but that's okay because you know frankly it's getting a little late now so i'm gonna pick this video up tomorrow and we'll keep going with the finish all right everybody so it is day three in the shop here and today is going to be the finishing day and i say that not only because hopefully we do finish this build today but also because we're going to be doing nothing but applying finishes as you can see this desk is looking so good with that black stain on it it's like a perfect midnight black which is exactly what i wanted and now we need to lock that all in using some sort of top coat so i'm going to use a hybrid oil and water polyurethane top coat to do that the nice thing about working with a hybrid is that it's really easy to clean up you just clean it up with water it has a fast dry time but it also has the durability of an oil finish so i'm going to do like two or three coats and then maybe i'll think about sanding it again i really don't want to sand this because i don't want to expose any bare wood down below so that's the name of the game today my hybrid of choice for this build was minwax's water-based oil modified polyurethane not only would this top coat seal the wood and provide a durable finish but it would also help me to even out the texture of the desk as well my plan here was to use the fast dry time of the finish to my advantage and layer on a lot of coats in a short amount of time eventually i'd be able to fill out all the little micro valleys on the surface of the desk and get it nice and flat while i waited for the first coat to dry i stashed my tray and roller in a plastic garbage bag to keep them from drying out the nice thing about water based finishes is that they dry quickly but that can also be a problem when they start drying in your tray and you end up with all sorts of weird contaminants in there that get in your finish and also while we wait for that first coat to dry we can start applying the finish to our table legs which surprise are already done actually what happened here is robin was nice enough to just order a set of pre-made legs in order to save me all the hassle of fabricating my own and i think these are a great option for diyers out there who don't want to go through all the work of learning metal work the spray i'm using here is krylon's fusion matte clear coat i went with a matte sheen because i really wanted to keep that raw steel look and i think a semi or a full gloss would have made the legs look a little too finished i'll include a link to where robin ordered these legs in case you want to get a set of your own but check around because there are tons of independent retailers selling very similar products i wasn't super impressed with the quality of these legs they were sold as pre-finished but also included a note saying that if you don't want them to rust you really should paint them so i don't really know if they can be called pre-finished i was however impressed with the clear coat it dried really quickly and i was able to get on three full coats and about the same amount of time that it took me to get one coat on the desktop okay that's the end of that can that's three coats on those legs and two on the desk so legs are done but this uh this top is gonna take a while with the legs done it was back to rolling on the polyurethane finish and i'm not gonna lie this took a long time watch closely from here on out in the background you'll see day transition into night pretty quickly as i work the reason it took so long was because i had to apply a lot of coats every two or three coats i'd sand the desk to knock down any high points but this was a dangerous game because if i accidentally sanded too much i risked removing the char that i had worked so hard to maintain and if that wasn't enough i still had the burning question of how i was going to fix the small gaps that had formed at the glue joints for that i actually came up with what i think is a pretty clever solution somewhere around coat five or six i realized that i had recently received some samples of colored ca glue from starbond adhesives using these super fine applicators i was able to squeeze black glue into all of the small gaps and then using this handy activator spray i was able to instantly catalyze it and harden the glue not only did this fill the gaps but it also effectively glued the pieces back together alleviating any minor concerns i might have had about the long-term strength of the desk this actually worked out really well the black and ca glue blended in almost perfectly with the black and oak i gave the entire desk one final sand to remove any excess ca glue and then i started applying the last couple coats of polyurethane so that if you can believe it is six coats on the bottom of this desk i'm not quite happy with how the top is yet so i'll probably do another coat on that but i figure since the bottom is now looking good i'm gonna take this opportunity to throw the legs on it so nothing too fancy here we're just gonna plunk these down in position and screw in place nothing too exciting to explain here but i did make sure to pre-drill all of my screw holes oak is so hard that you can easily shear the head off of a screw while trying to screw into it if you don't one thing that i did like about these legs is that they had slotted holes for mounting this gives the wood some room to expand and contract without binding against the legs and really this is something that i should probably be doing on my own homemade legs as well and now we're going to see if i can pick this thing up by myself oh yeah definitely got some weight to it because i'm an absolute glutton for punishment i decided to do one last coat on the top of the desk before signing off on it for those keeping track at home that brought the final count to seven coats or maybe it was eight or no nine either way it was a lot of coats that is nice and dry now so i'm gonna do one last thing see how shiny this wood is right now i'm just gonna dull that a little bit by uh rubbing it down with a scouring pad i don't want to like dull it too much but i want to take a little bit of that sheen off it because it's looking a little too plasticky these scouring pads are like a super fine sandpaper but they're also softer so they do a really good job of stepping down the sheen of a finish without physically removing that much of it the way sandpaper would and just like that we are now done so i haven't even talked to robin yet about dropping off this table to him but i'm thinking i might just bring it home with me and do the outro and the b-roll back at my place and then make the actual drop off to robin kind of short just because it's coveted times i don't really want to be in his house for any longer than i have to but don't worry you will get your b-roll sequence back at my place here we are back at home it's the next day and i have the shoshubibon desk all set up here in my home office and you'll see i actually had to raid a bunch of stuff from my own desk in order to create a semi-realistic home office set up here and i say uh semi-realistic because if you look you'll see a lot of these things aren't even hooked up they're kind of just there for show you'll have to forgive me this desk is wired to look as clean and as clutter free as possible so getting some of the wires out of it is a real challenge so i kind of you know i kind of faked it a little bit for the sake of this video with that being said let me take you on a quick visual tour of the shoshukibon desk [Music] so what do you guys think of the shogibon desk and i want your real honest feedback i don't want you to sugarcoat it because you're worried about hurting my feelings i think earlier in this video i said something to the effect of the only way to know if somebody really likes your work is if they're willing to have it in their own home and obviously that's not the case you can't cultivate real relationships with people where you give each other honest feedback but it takes work on both sides when you're giving somebody feedback you have to give them real actionable advice and you also have to take the risk that you might hurt their feelings and on the flip side when you're receiving feedback from somebody you have to be willing to actually internalize it and not let your feelings get in the way of that but anyways that's enough philosophizing for me um i am super happy with how this dust turned out and i am really excited to give it to robin i'm also super excited that you decided to watch this video if you made it this far in the video then hopefully you enjoyed this video if you did i would really appreciate it if you could hit that like button and subscribe to my channel if you aren't already both of those are huge indicators to youtube that this is a quality video that it should show to more people and that will just help me to grow this channel and reach a wider audience if you really like this video you can also consider becoming a supporter on patreon patrons get early access to ad free versions of my videos bonus content behind the scenes sneak peeks at upcoming builds and the ability to ask me questions about their builds at home alright i think that's it thank you for watching and i will see you in the next oh i was gonna say see in the next video but we still have to deliver this death to robin so let's go do that here we are at robins and uh we actually cheated a little bit and we already brought the desk up and we got it set up so here it is here set up in the corner and here's robin so what do you think of the new the new desk man it is so beautiful it is honestly nicer than i'd even imagined it would be it's just just sounding like the way the texture comes through and it just i mean as you can see i'm a fan of black furniture and yeah true let me do a quick spin around the room you really have a whole black thing going on in here i've got a vibe going and i think i said that at some point in the video that you have a little bit of a black black aesthetic going on and that's why i wanted to give you the shirt should be bond it is gorgeous and it just continues my love affair with with black furniture with amazing texture on it it's just stunning i'm gonna be standing here just kind of petting it a little bit awesome man well as the creator of the desk it brings me a ton of joy to see you liking it so much thank you so much all right and uh with that i think we're gonna end this video see in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Zac Builds

Views: 408,480

Keywords: diy desk, desk, shou sugi ban, diy, desk build, oak desk, oak, woodworking, carpentry, shou sugi ban desk, shou sugi ban table, woodart, woodworking tips and tricks, diy project, diy building, diy office desk, office desk, computer desk, battle station, oak shou sugi ban

Id: _q_wMmJIldQ

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/it_doesnt_mather]

Pretty cool! I've been wondering if it makes more sense to burn before or after glue ups. Would you ever try brining before gluing next time? Or do you think that would cause even more problems?