Best In-Depth Wood American Flag Build | Save Money Woodworking | Cedar Sense

[Music] everyone knows that cedar sense makes the best wooden flags in america but have you ever wondered how we make them if you have you're in luck with this video because we're going to be explaining how we make one of our small original american flags basically we're going to take this regular piece of wood that you see in my hands right here and we're going to turn it into this original wooden flag we sell them all over the internet just like the big one you see behind me that has our xl we also sell a lot of these small ones and in this video i'm gonna teach you how you can make it yourself so you can maybe save a little bit of money and not order on my on my website and have one of these hanging up in your home all by yourself we're going to do a step-by-step process with one of my employees scott we're both going to show you how to make one of these small original wooden flags so first things first when you're starting to make one of the r flags is you do have to have sort of a basic knowledge of carpentry it's kind of tough if you don't know how to run a saw and for safety purposes you want to be able to know how to run your equipment the right way without losing the dinger or anything like that and you want to be able to just have a just a general knowledge of carpentry 101 and you can find so many videos online that'll teach you how to run these certain saws that we're going to be running in this video if you are just even a beginner or a novice in carpentry you can definitely make one of these flags first off we're going to be using a 1 by 12 11 and a quarter inches wide and this piece is a little bit longer than the 17 inch flag that we'll be making but we have it that way so we can show you you know in case you have to cut your material down to the right size we give you that step-by-step process what you'll see in front of me here is a table of basically the tools you'll need besides the saws and the air compressor to make this flag so that's another thing is we're going to have a list of everything down below of complete material list that you'll need tools of our paints of our the types of poly that we use so you can make this beautiful flag yourself let's get started and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to cut this down to 17 inches our flag is gonna be 17 inches by nine and a half high and let's start the process basically step number one [Music] we've got our piece of one by twelve right here what we're gonna do is we're gonna measure out to 17 inches with our tape and our regular old pencil and we're going to give her a chop right on the miter saw and we'll show you that process [Music] now that we've made our 17 inch cut over there at our miter saw we moved over to the table saw [Music] we're going to be ripping this 17-inch piece down to three-quarter inch strips or slats as i like to call it once we have these ripped then we'll show you what we do with it to turn it and get those beautiful colors that we do in our plaques but first we have to rip them into three-quarter inch pieces [Music] now we're gonna do one of my favorite things and that's play with fire you might have been asking yourself mike you had a one by twelve there you cut three quarter inch pieces how did you get 13 because there's 13 stripes to flag right well you were right we only got 12 but good thing we always have an extra one laying around here in the shop to make our 13. so just know that you need 13 of these strips right here cut out three quarters of an inch right here to get your 13 stripes so in case you didn't know by now the american flag has 13 stripes seven red eye and six white and we're going to be using each one of these strips now to mimic that certain color and to get the union in there the union is the blue part with the with the stars all by using a technique with fire right here before we get into using fire i do want to express the importance of always having a fire hydrant what bro what are you talking about man nearby when you're doing this stuff a lot of times we use a bigger torch uh but you can do you can use one of these little handheld ones just like this i do want to recommend not using propane but to use map gas and these yellow canisters it gives you a little harsher burn that gets it done quicker and better just trust me on that one that is definitely the better way to go but before we get into that there's one thing that i want to show you guys is i always like having a knot look in all my wood so you see a strip like this it has a little knot if i were to turn it over about right there you wouldn't have as big as one right here you have a bigger one so you gotta remember that each one each strip that you burn the side that you burn that's the side that's going to show so i always try to find the strips that has the most character it's pretty hard to see here but this one tighter lines this one wider lines this one's going to show a little bit better character that's the one that we're going to burn so with our assistant scott we're gonna bring these over to some metal racks and we're gonna show you the burning techniques real fast and then how and what we do to get the red the white and the blue onto these strips right here after we're done burning it but let's go play with some fire [Music] so we just got done playing with fire we have a 13 strip sitting here that pretty much got burnt easily we have six slats sitting here and we have seven slats sitting here that's because these seven here are going to be the red and these six here are going to be the white but you also have to remember that in the red there's going to be four that have the union on it and in the white there's going to be three that have the union on it if you take a real good look at every american flag there's seven strips that have a union on it so we want to put these seven strips kind of off to the side and we're going to demonstrate in just a minute of using the stencil right here to help create the union before we get to that point we want to explain our stains that we're going to use our stains are going to be red white and blue of course right but there's a little bit of a technique that not very many people might know about that we use over here at cedar scents and i'm telling you this is what the video is all about right here is just giving you some of the inside tips and tricks that we use to make our flags stand out up and be above and beyond everybody else's and that's one word contrast if you have a light color that you're using you want a dark background to give it contrast if you have a dark color that you're using you want a light background to give it contrast and there's a couple different ways we can do this we're going to roll you through that process right now so with the white right here we want to keep a dark background we want to get rid of this top layer of fire that have ash basically that we used by using a polishing technique which we're going to run you through very simple and then on the red we're going to use a sanding technique you can use a mouse sander or you can just use a regular old piece of 120 grit sandpaper right here and do it by hand we like to do things the easy way so we use this little mouth sander we also use an orbital sander on bigger flags but for the small one you get away with the mama sander i think these are like 20 or 25 bucks seminars super simple super cheap with this with the polishing technique you can use a wire brush just like this and when i very first started doing these things this is actually how we did this to get our polished look but we've kind of graduated to a higher level we use a little bit better equipment now and we'll get into that too but first things first is i want to show you why we use a stencil right here and this stencil that you see can be found on amazon i'll have a link down below where you can find these things and i'll just show you super super simple right here on what we want to do with the stencil so what we're going to use here is as our speed square we're going to make sure we got these just like that or take our stencil because this will be the size of the union right here we're going to set it on our pieces now you're not going to exactly have it but we'll make our mark right here make your other mark right about there once you've got your two marks as you can see then you just put your speed square on it right there and you have your union line now got a good union line now we can separate the blue from the white and the red like you see right here and we'll get to how we do them techniques here [Music] i'm going to introduce you to the grizzly drum flap sandy now this bad boy can get up there and cost a little bit but when you do stuff like we do over at cedar sense you're going to want something that makes you work a little bit more efficient like i said you can just use a wire brush like like i used to use when you're just doing this one off or just doing a couple of your own you start getting into the uh the big game you might want to invest in something like this and as you can remember we have one line that we did draw the union line on and then we have one that's just going to be a regular white stripe now there's two differences here now because blue and red we sand we have a light background on so this is going to be your blue right here we're going to want to keep that light your white stripe that's going to be blue and white and then this one alone that's going to be white we just want to give it a nice little polish we don't want to knock too much of it off we want to keep kind of a darker base on it scott is going to show you how to run one of these drum flap sanders right here that we see here and then we'll get into the sanding [Music] so you see it all you've seen old drummy go to work here now we're going to give oh mousey a run here uh you might have noticed that on one of these we we did get a little past the line and that's okay none of these flags are ever perfect and to tell you the truth i i've learned more off of making mistakes and in for imperfections are sometimes what people like the most in some of these plans so if you have something that happens like this don't beat yourself up up over it it'll actually turn out pretty good yet uh just just roll with the punches whenever you do this and just know this that so much of the technique that we use was learned about so many mistakes that that i made in the very beginning and we we continue to make these little mistakes and learn stuff uh so yeah all i can say is don't beat yourself up on it uh and what you do see here is we have the three that we polished but we haven't sanded yet we're gonna sand down the rest of that we're gonna get a real light look to it and then we're going to actually stand every single one of these pieces down fully we'll have to remark our four again um with this little jig that you see on the table right here that we use and uh scott will scott will show you how to get all the sanding done also so let's see how that's that's completed right here [Music] so [Music] now wasn't that exciting we just learned how to sand and we learned how to polish our stripes now you can definitely see the difference between a sanded and a polished stripe now once again polish is a dark background so we're going to use a white stain sanded is a light background so we're going to use a dark stain and you're about to see why we do that right now but first before we start you might have noticed that on the red and blue stripes we completely knocked out the line that's fine if you do that all you gotta do is just come back and redo our lines now you might be asking mike it's not really precise that's okay because we're gonna show you and we're gonna show you towards the end of the video why it doesn't need to be precise before i start diving into the the stains and everything we got we have it separated into four different sections this section right here is going to be our blue and red the blue union with the red stripes four stripes this section here is going to be our blue with the white stripes we got three slats all together this is going to be our three red stripes and this is going to be oh i apologize it's going to be our three white stripes and this is going to be our three red stripes and once we get them all stained out we'll show you in what order they go but first off before we do that we'd like to use the stain that we use you can use all sorts of different stain this is the stuff that we found the best it's uh barothane wood stain not gel uh but just regular stain and we do use foam brushes that you see right here foam brushes seem to be seem to work the best out of anything that we use for this and uh yeah we'll uh we'll do a demonstration super simple to get the the stain on each one of these and we do like to cut them stop our stain right here and and and normally on a regular process once you get your stain on you want to let it sit for at least very least an hour it does say fast drying after an hour we typically let them sit for a whole day before we get into the next staining process but for now we're just gonna we're gonna show you how everything looks stained all right let's uh let's get going here we're gonna speed this up a little bit and walk our way through the staining process the first stain scott is applying is the blue stain which creates the union for which the stars will fall on later scott is using a foam brush which i find the best brush you can use but feel free to utilize any method you would like notice that he got the top of the flag and the ends of the slats we do this to give the flag a better look from the sides i don't know if you notice or not but he accidentally did two you only need to do one top per flag now we move on to the red stain where scott is using a wipe technique after he applies a stain we only use this with red and the reason being is we want to pull the burnt grains out of the slat to make them stick out we only wipe the red stain and not the blue and white and last but not least we move on to the white stain which is my personally my favorite stain to apply we brush it on the same way as the blue except the white goes onto the polished slats and not the sanded contrast it's the secret to a good looking flag this entire process in total took just a hair under 15 minutes [Music] we recommend that you take your time and not try to speed through this it's the learning process that is kind of the fun part about making these flags scott's done quite a few of these i've done quite a few hundred of these by this point and it's not about the time it's about the fun of of making it and that's my opinion and as you can see here uh this is what they look like when they're completely done and there's now we have to slap the stars onto the thing put it together and add the finish and the bad boy is going to be complete all right let's give it up to scott that was really his first ever social media appearance that he's made on cedar since so yeah i thought he did a very good job staining and as you can see here we have 13 individual stripes like we explained it earlier and we cut it off at the union this is actually going to turn out to be a really nice flag like i said earlier in the video we typically let this sit for a day now before we put the backing on because and you can tell it doesn't have any backing nothing to hold them together yet but we don't have that kind of time so we're going to be using this piece right here and we're just going to kind of give you a run through of how to get the furring strips on along with the wire hanger and why you see these little black pieces here we'll take you right over to the table on the other side of the shop and we'll teach you how to get these nice stripes hooked up together all right as you can see here we have all 13 pieces put together no stars on it yet we're going to kind of skip the process of the fern strips but i'm going to give you a sh i want to show you real quick how that's done is basically you find any scrap pieces these are actually just edges that we ripped off the table saw and we you try to get it halfway up your last slat just like that and that's kind of the trick with each one um it don't matter the thickness you they come out thick they can be as thin i try to keep them as thin as you can as you can see right there but you want to usually use four of them and then what i'll do i'll always do is use wood glue premium tight bond number two will glue and then we'll nail with these are three quarter inch 18 gauge brad nails and as you can see right here we have our our brad nailer and our air compressor hooked up right over there just because it gets pretty loud and it's kind of a different process as you can see we'll put two in the in on the outside slats and we'll put one in between each one but what's kind of the more pro that's kind of an explainable process there but what's kind of what people wonder about a lot is how do we hang this what do we do with the hanger and that's where we're going to bring you in a little bit closer and show you how to get the hanger on first off is we got these three quarter inch phillips screws that don't really matter what they are if they're fill up or not but we like to get three quarter inch so we're not blasting through on the other side if they were longer than that they'd come out the other side and that definitely is not a look that you want and then right here is we have 16 gauge which is regular old 16 gauge wire you'll want to come back a couple inches past your screw on either side give it a snip and then what we'll do here now is we'll put in the shrink tape shrink wrap shrink tape this is what electricians use a lot with their wiring we kind of we kind of stole their idea for a reason and we'll explain that in a little bit but all you'll do now is you'll always start one side i'm right-handed so i usually start my right side and then you bring that tight about like this just two times around that's it that's all you really have to do i'll move my shrink wrap over here i'll give her a couple twists this is where it's nice to have some strong fingers and you want to get your end nice and tight there and put your shrink wrap on just like that now we'll remove our shrink wrap to the other side here this is a little bit longer than i like so i'll snip that off [Music] and i'll bring it once around bring it twice around you can use a pliers to do this kind of stuff too i always i just use my hands it seems a little quicker and then the reason we have that shrink wrap over these pieces because when you get this hung on the wall we don't want this digging in to the wall and putting scratches on on the exterior so we always we always put a protection right there once we got that in drive down our screws and people can leave it that like that we like to put some fire on it to shrink it in and it does very good that way but either way that's that's a good way to do it and now we have a hanger ready to go keep this kind of flat in it up and she can hang on a wall very good look at that we'll just give her a little hang right there super easy you have a wall that will keep that out flat and i always like this hanging technique compared to having a hanger here and a hanger here and have to balance that out this is just one super simple tackle hanging nail into the wall just one and she can sit there and you can level it out very easy this is the best way to hang anything in my book that people might want to do with things people might want to do a little separately they're sawtooth hangers i've seen people put on me on the outside like this hey man it's your flag you do whatever you want this is the way we do it and it's the way i suggest it if you look at it now i think we're missing 50 things on it and that's star so we'll go back over to our table and show you how you put the stars on each one of these flags all right now we have the flag put together we have the hanger on it as you can see we're ready to put the stars on now and now this can be a very tricky process so listen carefully i've messed up on this quite a bit you really want to kind of look at what you're doing here we do have our stencil here but as you can see if you just put the stencil on like that and you spray paint like we always use you'd get it all over the rest of the flags so that's why we are it we always make these little precast sort of it just super just workshop towels uh painters tape super simple and we line it up right here one of the biggest things is it will come show you up close how to get this really where you want it to be this is kind of the this is one of the more important parts of the flag so everything we've kind of done so far you know you can get away with a little mistake here and there but if your stars aren't aligned and they're off to the left or too high or too low it's really kind of it really takes away from the flag and that's that's why i really emphasize putting so much effort into this part of the flag and getting this right more than just about anything because you will definitely notice if these stars are sitting over here or our kitty womp is our left right or up or down more than anything so you want to get this part right we're going to give you a nice close-up shot here and show you how this is done the right way and what tools we use including these little balance weights to help get it done right i am pretty confident that we are centered on and like you can see we have a towel here a towel here we have even taped up here there should be no other white paint that gets onto this flag except for where the stars are going to be here's where the counterweights come into play is we want to try to eliminate this gap it might be tough to see but there is a gap there we want to press down on that otherwise these stars will come out a little spackled some of them are just going to be that way and and to me it kind of adds to the to the character of the flag but you don't want too much of it and that's that's my personal opinion some people might think that looks awesome and want their flag like that all the time i tend to not want that so i set these little counterweights in here these little balance weights to press down that stencil whatever it may need to be pressed just like that they seem to work pretty well and now we're going to paint we're going to hold back our paint roughly about a foot from it and we're not just going to hammer down when we spray we want to get it in little spurts and you'll see what i mean just like this and i usually typically like to start in one corner work my way down and then come back around so right here is where you'll see it now the reason why we do it in spurts is because if we really just hammered down on this paint you would get a lot of puddling going on in the corners of these stars and that's not a good look either but just quick little little shots just like that and you're going to have a good look right there now once we have it sprayed just like we did right now we want to back away from the thing not touch it for at least about a half an hour let that paint dry if you start fidgeting with this stencil right now the way it is you're gonna have smears and everything else else on your union you're not gonna like it you're gonna spend a bunch of time trying to fix that stuff or you're gonna probably just sand it down and redo it which is a real pain in the butt trust me i've done it so just walk away from this thing now let it dry and then come back to it and we'll finish our last step this last step is is my favorite step of every flag it really brings it to life it's the coolest part and then and that's putting the finish onto it so so we have the stars painted on completely dry there was a little bit of blurriness not bad at all and to tell you the truth i kind of like that that's a cool look it gives it that kind of that rustic that old glory that worn and torn flag kind of look when you do have just a little bit of blur in there it's i think it's a cool thing but it's not as cool as our next step that we see right here sitting off to my left that we do and that is putting on the polyurethane finish and what we like to use is we like to use an oil-based clear gloss and this will take typically three to four coats once again we're going to be using a foam brush we've mixed this can very well you want to make sure you're always mixing your can before you do this to get everything in there the way it should be that everything sets up the way it should be i'm telling you this is my favorite part of every flag is putting on the finish and watching this thing really come to life i mean it looks good the way it is now this kind of is what really puts it up over the top all right so we have a nice little layer of poly on there we'll go ahead it don't matter if it drips on there at all but we'll just start applying it on like you see here and as you as as you might have noticed there up against them white stars you've seen a little bit of yellow an oil based poly will give you a yellow tint like you see right there but if you work it enough you will be able to get that that yellow out of there some people might like that yellow and you might not want to work it out i tend to to not want the yellow in there so much even though it does give you a uh you could call it a smoky look to it it's not it's not bad to have in here i just don't i don't want too much of it in there and like i said we we really did let our stars dry here if you didn't let your stars dry then you'd be seeing streaking right now this polyurethane would pull out that that paint if it wasn't completely dry and yeah you just kind of you really work everything in there and you'll you'll see some unevenness in here you don't want uh you don't want to leave dry parts in here so get in there with the corner of your brush like you are here if there is some uneven parts in there which those uneven parts are are what i like about these flags is it really gives it that that 3d effect that that extra i don't know that extra look that that if these were done perfect it wouldn't have it so i'm gonna add one more coat and then we are gonna get the ends we're gonna pull that out we're gonna get this and get our ends over here and you can see not eve they're not all even that's okay i like that that's a cool look every other one's maybe a little bit it's not perfect on the end it kind of gives it that wave look i mean if it was real drastic we'd cut it but this ain't bad we'll uh we'll get our ends here and we are using an interior poly here sometimes we get exterior poly uh bids in where we people want to hang these outside and that's fine if we do exterior then we'll come back and we'll poly the back we'll probably all the sides just to get that extra protection because when people hang them outside we don't want moisture getting inside and another thing it does is it protects it from the sunlight it's a uv poly and just look at that bad boy look how it came alive like that that is a beautiful beautiful piece of work right there and that's exactly how we make these things it's not as hard as you might think to me i don't think it gets much better in this 17 inches by about nine and a half inches it's uh it's a beautiful thing beautiful flag and we're proud to do this sort of stuff over here at cedar scents now you have everything you need to make one of our small original edition flags i hope you enjoyed this video if you if you did let us know share in the comments below if you have any questions about anything that you've seen i know one of the steps we kind of went we kind of skipped through a little bit hope that wasn't too confusing for you but if you have anything let us know in the comments below we will answer everything you have out there if you've seen all this and you're like man i don't have the tools i don't have the time i don't i still like these flags then all you have to do is ch head on over to our website at www.cedardashsense.com and you can find flags this size and even this size back here that are 62 inch by 32 inch xls and we actually have flags in between that you know we have mediums and larges we have six different editions that we make it's not only just the original edition we also have five other ones that really look cool they go with any part of your home that you that you could have we also can personalize and customize these things we do a lot of really cool stuff on cdersense.com you should check it out just take a look at it and like i said if you ever have any questions you ever have any concerns just let us know contact us put it in the below and here's one more thing you guys we are giving away this knowledge for free we're lit so many people were like why would you make videos telling everybody how to make your secret flags you know why it's because we have so many people that ask how you make these flags and it's not about making a sale here it's about getting the red white and blue and the stars and stripes up on everybody's wall in america and that's what we would rather have i don't care if it's made by me i don't care if it's made by somebody else down the block and i don't care if you make it yourself so if you can spread that patriotism get this up into your house into your household have the kids look at it explain to them why we stand for the flag why we are proud to be americans dude i don't care how you get it i don't care how that is on your wall it's just it's something that that we believe in we we spread a culture of patriotism over here at cedar sense we want everybody to have a flag up in their house and i just think these are really really really really cool ways to have flags going so thank you very much let's get this video out here as much as we can let's hit the subscribe button if you're watching this on youtube if you're watching on facebook share it let people know about it and if you're looking to if you want to just see some of our work that we have you want to check out some of our different editions go to cedar dash sense.com and check us out anytime thank you very much i am michael vale we are making more of these videos we're going to be explaining all the secrets we're letting the cat out of the bag so stay tuned keep watching us and thank you very much god bless and be proud to be an american because we certainly are over here the land of the three and the home of the brave thank you very much bye

Channel: Cedar Sense

Views: 33,700

Keywords: how to make a wood flag, how to build a wood flag, how to make a wooden flag, how to build a wooden flag, wood flag, wooden american flag, american flag, DIY wood flag, DIY wooden flag, DIY wooden american flag, DIY wood american flag, wood old glory, old glory, how to construct a wooden flag, the best wood flag, the best american flag, the best flag, the best flag in america, how the american flag is made, how the american flag was made, save money, save $$$, how-to make

Id: iFCBFtV-waw

Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022