Bent Wood Table // Bent Lamination // How to Bend Wood

[Music] oh haha jerry very funny okay here is what we are going to be building a dining table base with four bent lamination arches possibly one of my most challenging projects ever the first step was to start cutting down some plywood to make the bending forms for the arches first i marked the center point on one piece of plywood three inches up from the bottom you'll see why in a minute and then i made this little paper template so i'll tape that on and use a little ca glue to glue down this little pivot point then i can screw on the trammel onto my router when i put it on that pin you can see i get a perfect circle or half circle in this case so i need to make two passes the first is the inside pass and then i'm going to move the router out to a second position to make the outer pass the flashing orange arrow on the left indicates that i'm stopping my router short of going all the way because i need that last three inches to be straight and not a continuation of the circle on the bandsaw i can remove that waste from the middle then with a little ca glue i'll put a block on there so i can actually get a nice flush and straight edge and you'll see a little later why i need to do that but using a flush trim bit i'll clean up this first template and that becomes my master yes master and then i can use that master to trace onto another piece of plywood which i can screw together very rapidly so i can rough out multiple templates simultaneously i do this on the bandsaw which makes pretty quick work of this task it gets a little heavy gotta clamp it together so they don't fall apart on me and fall onto the floor and my foot and then one by one i'm taking my master template and screwing it to one of my roughed out templates and flush trimming them all to the same size now in hindsight i could have probably done two at once but that would have saved me half the time so why would i do that i do the same thing to the outer part of the template and then i glue the whole thing together into a giant stack of plywood goodness so seven pieces of plywood stacked together gives us roughly five and a quarter inches and as you can see i ended up making two full forms for this project and now i could begin the long and arduous process of re-sawing roughly 48 thin strips of walnut my boards are just over five inches wide so even with a good resource set up it just takes a long time i'm ripping these to just under 3 16 of an inch which gives me a little bit of room to plane them down to get me to my final thickness of 1 8 of an inch so after each piece is re-sawn then i take the original board over to the joiner to clean up that sawn face and then back to the bandsaw to rip another strip put it to the side and here's a sampling of what comes off the bandsaw now since i do not have a drum sander which would be the ideal tool for this task i have to run them through my planer you can see that piece of plywood which acts as kind of an auxiliary booster seat because my planer maxes out at about a quarter of an inch thickness so what this does it allows me to get even thinner with my pieces unfortunately when you go this thin on a planer you're likely to catch an edge and it will pull that board up and turn it into mulch for you so the moral of the story be careful and have some extra pieces in case a few get ruined oh and don't forget to subscribe to my channel click that notification bell so you don't miss out on any of my future projects so next i took some six inch pvc to basically make a dunk tank for these strips to let them soak a little bit and become more pliable some may say this step isn't necessary but when i'm dealing with a tight radius like this and all those hours of resawing this expensive walnut yeah i'm gonna give it every opportunity i can to bend for me without crack and while those were soaking i decided i misre-song on the bandsaw so much that i figured i would start on the center post of the dining table now you could make this center post out of solid walnut but i decided to use plywood and then skin it with walnut for a couple reasons i had some scrap plywood around that i wanted to use up and the wall that i had for this project was kind of limited so i didn't want to waste it all on a center post that you wouldn't really see much of and i just ended a sentence with a preposition which is really going to disappoint my eighth grade grammar teacher and if you're wondering why i used a router to run a chamfer down the edges that just allows a little bit of a spillover canal for any excess glue to pull in the corners and with everything glued dried and out of the 400 clamps i could flush up the corners as you can see here i had a few little gaps right there so what i do is i work up a little sawdust use some translucent wood glue and then with the sawdust make a little slurry push it into that little gap and just like that it's gone adios senor gapo then at the joiner planer i squared it up and got it to the exact thickness and width of five and a half by five and a half inches square and i squared up one end and there's your center post ain't she swell okay let's move on to the top and bottom sections of the dining table as you can see the orange arrows had to mill up a little bit of walnut for these to one and a half inches thick i'm using half lap joints which creates a nice and strong and robust joint for the top and bottom of this table i cut these things to length oh boy this one i had to glue up two individual pieces and i didn't mark where the domino was so we're gonna have to do a little fix clean out any kind of waste and then i cut another little piece of end grain to match it as close as i can a little glue tap tap taparoo let that dry fully and then using a flush cut saw flush trim saw whatever you want to call it trim off most of the excess use a little block plane to kind of get down a little bit closer little sandpaper a little hand wipe little mineral spirits and it's pretty much good as new i mean it's not bad and now we can finally assemble these now the screws are actually just acting as clamps right now because they will be removed later and then i will screw through the bottom into the center post so basically pilot holes slash clamps and now it seems like is a fairly routine operation of routing a cove profile is really not you can see that piece of plywood i have there which is acting as a stop block so this is basically a stopped profile where they meet in the corner it's actually a pretty delicate operation you can see where the corner of that post sits right where the two profiles meet now if i just kept going around with the router instead this is what would happen it would overhang it would just look horrible and you could continue that profile up the center post but number one that's not the design and number two you would eat right through that walnut skin into the plywood core now i could work on making these little half inch kind of applique feet that will go on the bottom of the table basically just adds a nice little detail it raises the base up just a little bit this was kind of an afterthought i wish i had thought of it before uh so i could get the grain a little bit better of a match but it worked out fine so i glued these on and then using a flush trim bit got all the excess off and then just kind of sanded everything flush you can see that little cove detail i put on there which matches the cove on the base now i know it seems like these strips were soaking forever but they were really only in there for about an hour it's just the way the filming looks here so wiped off all the excess water and then using a bending form i am pre-bending these strips which some will say is not necessary either but i like to do it because i want this walnut to know hey you're going to be bent and glued so get used to it here's a little warm up and these erwin quick grip clamps are a lifesaver for this operation you can basically just steer that thing in and line it up perfectly now i don't have the cork liner in this form yet which you will see later which is why it doesn't fit perfectly and i'm using a clamp at the bottom to kind of squeeze everything together and the next morning i could take it out of the form when everything is pretty much dried and look at that they're bent ish so to finish up the form what i'm doing is screwing down some rails what this does is ensures that the male and the female form come together perfectly in alignment nice and smooth using some double-sided tape i will apply the aforementioned cork to the form what this does is it takes out any high and low spots or inconsistencies in the form and then i cover it in packing tape to make sure that no glue will stick to it now i am using gorilla polyurethane glue to glue up these bent laminations it gives me about 30 minutes of open time which is plenty of time to spread and roll a nice even thin film thickness on each bent lamination now if i were to use a pva glue like titebond i just found that it cures way too fast and it was about 80 degrees in my shop here and everything was drying way too fast and when you're dealing with an intense and stressful glue up like this the last thing you want to have to worry about is the glue drying before your pieces are even in the clamps i want to quickly point out that all pieces have a center line drawn on them which ensures they all come together in alignment so after each one was coated i layered them up slammed it down into the form then using those quick grip clamps steered at home it's definitely a little bit of a forearm workout here tried to make sure all pieces were relatively flush even though at this point they were kind of stuck but they were all made oversized so we can fix that later you can see i got a nice little bit of squeeze out there and now we got to let this thing cook for 24 hours and after that 24 hours we can move it from the form that was the release of 24 hours of nervous attention because i honestly didn't know if i had some glue squeeze out and this thing was going to stick together or if nothing was going to stick but turned out pretty good uh for the first of four made a couple passes on the jointer because i wanted to see what that edge looked like and it's very happy you can see a couple little gaps in spots there but those will actually get removed when i rip this to width because they don't go all the way through and another tip i picked up to prevent any glue squeeze out from sticking to the form is to coat everything in paste wax it works really well oh look that one's round two very nice clean this one up a little bit so to trim the arches to width i'm heading to the table saw now some of you may think this is not a very safe operation and it can get a little dicey but i found as long as i go nice and slow and controlled everything is fine as you can see as i'm coming through i'm grabbing the top of the arch to help guide it past the blade you can see the feather board kind of towards the bottom of the screen i tried to use that and it ended up just getting in the way and being more dangerous i found this to be the safest and easiest way then take those saw marks out on the jointer okay now i needed to trim the arches to their final length by cutting off the ends now you'll notice that the form i'm using here has no cork that's because the final glue up was still in the form and this was the pre-bending form so i'm putting these little shims in here which represent the cork and give me the most accurate layout so this has to be 29 inches and shockingly it's right on the money so now i can transfer my cut line using a square and you'll notice two lines on that form one was the cut line that i just drew and the other line is the actual center of the circle but we want to make it an inch longer so i have a flat spot to attach to the top and bottom of the table so clamping it to my crosscut sled makes easy work of these and while i hunker down for a coffee break don't forget to subscribe hit that notification bell to keep up with all of my tomfoolery and now i can do a little dry fit and get everything clamped into place so i can mark and lay out for my dominoes which will join each arch to the center post now if you don't have a festool domino you could use dowels or if you wanted to you could drive screws straight through the face of each arch into the post and then plug those holes and once again when using the domino accurate layout is essential and my buddy nick barboza over at nwb wood gave me this little tip to just flatten out the area where it's going to make contact with the post just so you have a little more glue surface area and with a slightly firm hammer fist that goes in nicely once all my dominoes were cut and my arches were dry fit in place i could determine the final height of the center post using a square from the center post and lined up with the top of each arch and then it was back to the table saw to square off that end next i needed to get the holes drilled that would house the recessed adjustable feet i made this little template that slides over each foot and is easily clamped down and then using my router a guide bushing and a spiral up cut bit i can route out all the waste and with the template it ensures that every one of them is exactly the same so that first hole that i did on the drill press was that hole for the threaded insert and with that inserted then the recessed foot recesses quite nicely now i could glue that center post in place a couple of clamps just to kind of hold it in place and then i flipped it over on the floor and then drive these three-inch screws home with an impact driver and feel like a real man okay that's a bit of a stretch and next up i could basically dry fit this whole thing together and get a little bit of satisfaction to see it coming together and now i can drill the holes for the bolts and the threaded inserts i'm going to countersink the top where the bolts will go then i can remove each arch and drill out for the threaded inserts i'm using starbond ca glue on each threaded insert just to give it a little more bite into the wood kind of sand away any rough areas and then a final test fit to make sure everything fits together and the bolts line up oh man this thing just keeps going uh here i had to route out a little bit of a cove profile to match the profile on the foot so i'm using a couple blocks on each end to bring any tear out and that looks nice and then i'm going to plug the screws on the top this isn't really necessary but in the case that the client ever wants to put a glass top on this it'll just look a little nicer so flush trim those sand them down and now it was finally ready for final surface prep i found a card scraper and this little hand sander made quick work of these arches well quick is a relative term really when it comes to sanding i also had to sand all of these cove profiles using a little edge profile sander and then basically just go on a sanding spree i'm on everything oh and get a splinter along the way and yet again my favorite combination of rubio monaco pure and air dried walnut and my process is always the same i'll sand up to 150 use a old hotel room card or driver's license or some kind of squeegee to spread the material around use a white scotch brite pad to work it in and then either a microfiber cloth or a white clean rag to wipe off all the excess and then i could glue and reassemble all the parts back together and somehow i deleted all the footage of me clamping and gluing this thing so here's just a little bolt action for you and the final step was to actually drill out for these clear little rubber bumper standoffs and with the grippiness of these bumpers and the weight of the granite top there's no need to actually permanently screw through the base and into the top and risk cracking the granite so you may have noticed during this build that hey wait a second that doesn't look like the table it was building before it looks kind of different well that's because it is uh this is version two uh version one when it was delivered was too tall it was built for the customer specifications but it was too tall so had to redo the entire table forms everything between the two table bases i have over 180 hours of time spent so today is delivery day of the revised table base and this should be the right size and we can move on to the next project [Music] you

Channel: Keith Johnson Custom Woodworking

Views: 611,473

Rating: 4.873117 out of 5

Keywords: bent wood table, kjsawdust, how to bend wood, wood bending, bent wood, dining room table, how to bend wood for furniture, how to bend wood without steam, woodworking tips, walnut, walnut table, bent wood lamination techniques, bent wood lamination, bent lamination, bending wood, bent lamination table, bent lamination furniture, bent lamination table legs, bent laminated wood, wood bending techniques, wood bending jig, wood bending furniture

Id: B4zJsDCfpXs

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020