Build a DIY Outdoor Table

hey everybody Anthony and Bob Barker are back again and today we're going to be showing you how we made this outdoor table so let's get into the build [Music] so a friend of mine needed a new outdoor table so Bob and I decided we would go ahead and make one for them so since this is going to be outdoors we wanted a wood that was gonna do well and so we chose Cedar although we had a really really difficult time finding decent cedar boards in my area I actually wanted to get some 4x4s some two by fours and some two by sixes but the only ones I was able to find was these two by six deck boards so we're just gonna make that work and we're gonna use this for the entire project so first of course we just chop them down to size and then we're ripping these down and these are going to be uh put together to make the legs so essentially you're going to be making four by fours out of them although it's going to be a little bit shorter so once we got those ripped down the supervisor came and checked my work and once he was satisfied he let me keep on chugging and there is the slowest Kickback ever and we're just cutting the little edges off of this because I want the edges to be square for when we glue these together you don't want those rounded over edges that come naturally with it so after we have those all prepared we're doing really good glue surfaces there and I started off putting the clamps on the side because I didn't want that to wonder a little bit I tried uh throwing a little bit of salt in the edges there because I heard that it might kind of help it from slipping it did a little bit but not too much so once we had the the sides kind of nice and properly aligned we're able to put the clamps on the rest of it to get good pressure along the along the whole thing and then I kind of changed those other side ones back to there and of course cleaning up the squeeze out so we don't have to deal with that as much later and I did get a little overzealous with the clamping it's hard to see on camera but basically this is a soft wood and I put dents in all over the place on this thing but no worries we'll be able to fix that later but as we're doing the next ones I put these little extra pieces of scrap wood in there just to kind of distribute the pressure a little bit more evenly along it that way I won't have to deal with the little extra dents if I get a little bit too much clamping pressure on there no this is a bit extra work I had to do because I didn't have the four by fours um but in the end it's still going to come out nice so here's how we're fixing those dents basically you just get some kind of moisture wetness on those dents and then a wet towel or you know whatever cotton rag you have and then just basically uh steam it with the iron and that just kind of seeps into the wood and plumps it up and then after a couple of times here it was completely flat you couldn't see any the dents at all and of course we did have to repeat this process four times for each one of the legs and then once they're all dried up we take them out and since some of the edges had slight little bumps on there I used this plane to get them flat but you can just do this with a sander it works just as well but I like to practice some of the skills that I'm not quite as good at so I decided this was the way to go and also then I don't have to worry about slightly running over the edges with the sander then once that done we can get the pieces cut out for the end apron and the side stretchers to be honest I'm not even sure if that's the right terms I just know the pieces that I need so if you know if I'm right or what the actual terms are leave me a comment below so I can learn that part so once we have these all ripped down to the right width we're going to be using the bead lock here to for the joinery we're also going to be adding some pocket hole screws later that way we don't have to do clamps and just for a little extra on it as well so with this B lock I found that you just have to have really good clamping pressure on there and be extra careful so it doesn't wander on you and in that case it works out really well as long as you get it set up nice so basically this is a half inch one so you're going to drill both holes on the a setting then switch it over to the B setting and then you draw just the center one and then once that is done then you'll have all three that joined kind of together and I've found that you always have to kind of clean it out a little bit with a chisel and then your bead lock Tenon will fit in there really nicely and then next we're going to be adding those same holes to the legs and of course using a different spacer just so I can account for a little bit of a setback that we want just really for Aesthetics on it and then of course I always test it just to make sure that those go in otherwise you can run into big issues with your glue ups and you can also run into issues even when you do check it which we will see later so there we just got the pocket holes drilled and now we're doing a dry fit just to make sure everything is going to go all well together I always do the dry fit on there because I don't want to get the glue on there and then run into unfortunate surprises so you can see it goes together pretty nicely and before I glue it I am just kind of wiping off all the all sanding off all the pencil marks that I have on there just because it gets in those little corners and it's just a bit of a pain to do once you have it joined together so now we'll go ahead and glue those uh tenons as we put them into the legs and then slather a bunch of glue on the rest of the surfaces and then we're ready to put it together and this globe is going to be a little bit easier since we are using the pocket holes that way we don't have to really deal with clamps for too much of it although I still do put the clamps on as we're doing it but then you're ready to go for the next joint immediately afterwards so we just make sure it's all lined up properly and then I sank in a couple pocket hole screws on each side and that an apron is attached and now we're doing the side stretcher here now before this on my dry fit I'm just double checking to make sure everything is nice and square before I get glue on there in case there's any adjustments I need to try to make but luckily everything was perfectly Square so we can go ahead and glue it all together and then we're going to go ahead and just put this in place and I just put these little uh clamps here on the side just for the alignment on the initial part then I'm going to be using my larger clamps on top to really kind of secure that uh side stretcher in place clean up all of that squeeze out there and then after that we can put another piece of wood here and then use some better clamps to get good pressure on the rest of that piece right there and of course we are repeating this twice for the other side and then once that's fully dried we can put down this little piece here on this on the bottom and we're essentially just doing the same thing gluing it and clamping it in into place now this wouldn't have been necessary with the 4x4 if I had the 4x4 I basically would have just cut a dado into it for that side stretcher there but in the end these joints really came together pretty nicely so no big deal not having the 4x4 we still made it work so after that was dried next up on the list we're going to be putting in the the holes for the feet underneath it now this is a good example of what not to do when you're using the forstner bit so this is a pretty large forstner bit and I didn't have the piece clamped down well and I wasn't really holding the drill and you can see it was just jumping all over on me and once I held it even better it was kind of too late because that a little Center piece was so loose it wasn't really self-centering itself anymore so after a bit of a fighting with it I was able to work in this one I did much better on the clamping and the having two hands on the drill holding it nice and steady and it actually went in well so once we get that drilled out then we're going to do the center holes and that's going to help hold the little bolt that comes on the level or feet that you can see here so that piece gets screwed in and this one just will go inside of that and that'll keep this thing off the ground so it's not directly exposed to the surface underneath so after I did that for all four legs do a little extra sanding here um and then we're going to prepare just to do the round over on the edges and for this one I'm just doing a really small round over but what I realized after I started doing this is I should have did some of these surfaces beforehand because now I can't get into the some of those corners and some of the other pieces I can't get like within a couple inches really of the edge like right there um just because it just won't reach so no big deal I've had to deal with this before we can fix it I usually just do a bit of hand sanding with a block to get started I don't do a very aggressive grit and I just kind of do it slowly a little at a time until I get that kind of piece to match the other round over and then after I get that matched then we kind of just finish it up with a little bit just hand uh sanding with just that and it usually comes together pretty nicely and you can kind of see on this Edge too like how it goes it was much round more rounded there but once you get it in it's much more smooth and in line with the rest of the look of the piece and then this shows the other ones where I couldn't get all the way to The Edge so for these ones since it's a bit bigger I just use my palm sander here just to kind of get a rough estimation of that round over and then I come back and do the same thing as with the other ones a bit of hand sanding sometimes I use the blocks sometimes just with the paper but that'll get it to where it needs to be it's just a little extra work that I added to myself by not doing that beforehand so once I get all the nooks and crannies that I had missed before were able to move on and for here we'll be prepping the aprons as well as a center stretcher and again I'm not even sure if that's the right terminology but that's what I'm rolling with for this so we continued doing the bead locks and right here I narrowly avert disaster you see that piece the arrow is I'm supposed to have that on The Jig and I got the drill all the way down and I was right about to press it and then I realized that it just wasn't right so I am really glad that I did that otherwise I'd have big old drill holes that would have been exposed and had to be covered and then would have been quite frustrating so we got the piece on and made sure we had the proper setback for our bead log holes so those aprons will sit as they're supposed to and then of course repeating this on the other side and we do it on the other piece as well and always testing just to make sure that the bead locks fit in there nicely and in this time we're learning our lesson from the extra sanding and we're going to go ahead and do the sanding and the round over edges before we glue them all together and I'm only doing those randovers on the lower pieces I'm not doing it on the the top of it that's going to be facing the table top it's not really necessary there and just like before we're putting pocket holes on each of the sides of these ones for the aprons but not for the center stretcher so once we have that all prepared it's time for the glue up um so for this one we're doing the same as before I just put glue on all the surfaces I uh smash that into place and I use the screws to hold it and I did do a dry fit beforehand and everything sits really nice and level of course I still check it again afterwards just to make sure that there's nothing unexpected that would happen during the glue up and this part went nice and smooth I wish I could say the same for the rest of it though so once we have that side ready we just kind of move it over here and then I bring in the other side and do a dry fit and this should have been a red flag to me you see how difficult that little Edge was to take off it was like super tight um but for some reason I didn't think anything of it and I just continued and then when I tried to put it in there that's actually as far as it would go like I tried to smash it and smash it and it just wasn't working so I started to go into panic mode I started smacking it with my hand and I got my rubber mallet hit it some more even though it looks like it's tight on camera there there's actually a decent sized Gap there which I just could not let go so I tried to get a little closer with just the screw but that just didn't quite pull it into place at this point I'm kind of running out of options so I just flip the table up on edge try to put it down with my weight it didn't work so I jumped on the table smashed the heck out of it with the mallet tried to pull it down again and then smashed it one more time and finally once uh we did that enough like it actually did close the gap enough to be acceptable there was like just a tiny little sliver on just a part of it but once we got the screws in it actually uh sunk in nice and flat and I was worried I was going to pull it at a square but luckily it did stay square and that was one of the more stressful glue UPS I've had in quite some time so to follow my mistakes here's another one I shouldn't have rounded over that little Center piece because you see the Gap it creates now with a center stretcher so the solution I ended up coming up with was to just cut it down and down set it a little bit that way you don't see the Gap it's below that round over so now we're going to be uh putting in some holes here to for the screws that we're going to use to connect the center stretcher so I was just really careful with lining it up because I want it to look very straight and intentional so I use a small forstner bit on this one as of course much more careful on this to make sure that it went smoothly and I don't know if it works or not but I always kind of go in reverse first just to kind of break the fibers on the surface and then I put it into the regular one to drill the the hole there with a bit and it seems to give a nice clean Edge so once we have those ready we glue up this uh Center uh stretcher make sure that it's nice and square a little tap tap just to get it right exactly where we need it and then I pre-jill and sink screws into the top of each side and then once I'm happy that everything is lined up perfectly then we're going to come back and put two more screws so there's going to be a total of three screws on each one and this is the only place where there is visible screws on this build and the reason I use that forstner bit is because later on I'm going to come back and fill those with plugs so once we have that in place we're going to just be doing these little uh supports on the table so this one just glue and pocket hole screws and that's going to keep that nice securely in place we're also going to use this later to help secure the top as well so we're going to be doing two of them on this one just with three on each side and just carefully measuring the placement of these just to make sure it doesn't pull anything out of square and everything stays uh nice and as we intend it to be then we can move over to the plugs now I've never done this one before and I know it's much easier with a drill press but it took me a few tries to really get a a knack for doing this so basically I was putting way too much pressure at first I found once I'm a little bit more careful with it it actually went a lot smoother and then sometimes I went too deep and then the plug got stuck like here it got stuck I tried to get it out and it shut off into my driveway now to go get it but eventually like I figured just light pressure and it actually went really smooth so now I was able to kind of find the nice pieces in the grain that kind of matched a little bit closely to the the areas that I'm going to put the plugs and we're able to get enough to make this work and I did decide that I want to do the plugs instead of dowels because I wanted the grain to match a little bit better than you would with the end grain that you would see with her dowels so once we had everything prepared we just kind of smeared everything with glue there used our Mallet to smash them into place and it'll kind of we're wiping off all the little excess glue just to kind of help a little bit with the cleanup afterwards and that all fits nice and tight now here I kind of made it difficult on myself just because I was trying to get enable angle where the camera could see it and it just really made it kind of hard but I had the green tape there as well just to kind of help protect the wood from getting scratched as I'm sawing off these uh little pieces of the plugs so it just took me a little bit longer to do but we're able to get them off and you can see I did that kind of shred that tape a little bit but it actually did its job and didn't have much on the wood so after I got those off I just use a chisel just to kind of clean up those tops just a little bit more before I went ahead and grabbed my sander and just got it all nice and smooth and in the end it actually came out really well I'm very pleased with uh how this one came out so once we're done with that the next step is putting some supports uh in the corners of the the table so I just basically cut a 45 degree and set this up just right to the edge of the leg there and then traced out where it would sit flush with the other side so we had that little wedge piece there that we're gonna glue in place and then I'm going to use the clamp here just to kind of hold it and I'll be putting two screws in each side into uh the apron and the end apron and then after we get those ones uh screwed in and of course we are using all outdoor rated screws on this we're going to drill a hole straight through into the leg right at that corner and then we're putting much larger screws straight through into that so that should keep this corner nice and sturdy and stable and of course what you do on one you got to do on all the other four so we just kind of went around individually cutting to to the right size each one of these just in case there was any small imperfections and then screwing those all in place and then coming back with the larger screws in the center and making sure everything is nice and secure so once we're happy with that we can move on to getting ready to attach the top and so I just set everything here and of course the Top's not even cut to its final size there but I just marked out the locations where I'm going to be putting all of these pocket holes um for later and we'll be putting some pocket holes on the supports as well as the ends and that should hold all of our top pieces nice in place and kind of keep them a little bit more even especially since we're not working with the best quality air straightest Lumber here there are little imperfections in these but doing this will kind of keep everything looking nice and smooth and also to help that I'm making these two brackets to go underneath on the edges just to kind of keep those sides kind of nice and even with each other so I'm just going to rip down a piece of the cedar a little bit uh shorter than the length of the finished top and then I cut off a little Edge on it not all the way to the tip just enough just to kind of make a little nicer profile and harder to see and we'll do that on each Edge so then we have those pieces ready and then we'll cut down our top pieces to near their final size but not all the way to their final size we'll trim those later so then I set it up on my workbench with all the spacers in there for the small little space in between each one of these that way you have still have decent drainage and allows for a little bit of movement in between them without messing things up there and then I'm marking out where I want the screws to go on each one of those and then we'll go ahead and just drill them with a countersink in there for once we assemble the table later so after that we can get to sanding everything very thoroughly and making sure the edges are all nice and rounded over and then I did like to hit these little rounded over edges by hand just to make sure it's nice and smooth just because the sander can leave a little bit of rough edges sometimes and for the very end I didn't want a full round over so I just really soften those edges by hand using a block and then afterwards a little bit just general sandpaper by hand just to make them nice so here on this piece when I did my mock-up I saw that there's a little bit of a bow in it so I just got a new toy so it was a great opportunity to bust it out and use it so I set the track so the the edges were nice and flush and that little Center bow kind of stuck out and then as I ran the track saw along it it made it nice and flush so you can see how good they fit together here now I could use my old wood track with my regular circular saw but since I got a new toy I figured I wanted to use it next up we're going to be cutting the top to length now this is easier to do if you do it like once everything is assembled however I wanted to to be able to finish it before I assemble it because I don't want to get in between those uh small little um spaces with the Finish so here we just kind of line it up and just run the track along the edge and so now everything is exactly the same size we'll just have to be careful when we assemble assemble it to keep it that way so then I spread everything out and got it nice and clean and then used a tack cloth and I think I've been watching way too much Keith Johnson lately because all I can think of the whole time I'm doing this is total boat baby so we are using the total boat finish on this one so we're using uh their Marine varnish and it actually went on really nicely this is my first time using it and I was pretty impressed with it it rolled on really nicely I ended up doing five coats total and it didn't take much just to get it to sit nice and smooth and after about 45 minutes or so like in the weather that I had it was nice and dry and able to do another coat so what I ended up doing is just applying it to the bottom surface going through doing all the other ones including the frame and by then it was ready to flip over and do the top and the sides so we just kept on doing this sporadically throughout the day to get all five coats on and it ended up coming out pretty nice so with the top finish now we can actually finally join these all together so I'm laying them out on my table and I just have them just set up a little bit just so less scratching and just a little easier to maneuver and then I am throughout this whole process I am repeatedly checking um to make sure all these boards are aligned up properly and I have my spacers in between each piece and so I screwed just one screw into the end board and I just use a very small amount of pressure with those clamps just so it doesn't move on me but not enough where it's going to be like too much and I won't be able to get those spacers out and then I just do them one at a time two screws in each one of the all these middle boards and basically what this is doing is just kind of holding everything nice and even with each other and that way you kind of don't see the little mine the small little minor bolt bow bows and bulges as some of the pieces of wood have and then once it's all done you can see how those little brackets base don't come all the way to the edge and without profiles you won't even really seeing them like for standing up so they'll pretty much be hidden underneath the surface and each one of these screws I'm pretty I'm kind of uh screwing them down coming up and then back in again I found it just kind of helps sit nice and flush with my support piece doing it that way and after checking uh each one of these boards over and over and getting all the screws in it's finally done so we can take off our little uh spacers and move on to one of the last steps and that's putting some epoxy on the bottom I just use like a five minute epoxy and just kind of uh brushed it on there just to make sure that this is well sealed and doesn't soak up any water and I do want to mention we do have detailed plans uh for sale in case you want to make this a particular table for yourself it makes it nice and easy for you to follow the process that way it can save you a lot of time all right so the last step is actually securing this top to the table using all of those millions of pocket holes that we put in earlier I'm not doing that yet because I'm not going to be able to transport this for about another week or so um to my friend's house and I want to wait until then just because we don't have an open bed truck so it's going to be a little tricky getting there so I think we're gonna put these uh in separately the top and the bottom and then once I get it there then we'll just go ahead and secure it and then it'll be done so that's it with the project I think it came out great really happy with it um and if you like what we're doing go ahead and leave us a comment like subscribe all that stuff and we'll see you guys in the next one [Music]

Channel: Wood Pack DIY

Views: 47,342

Keywords: diy outdoor table, outdoor table diy, how to make an outdoor table, woodworking, diy, woodpack diy, woodpack, patio table, diy outdoor table plans, outdoor table, diy outdoor table top, patio furniture, woodworking project, build plans

Id: gPVKKyaKC3M

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023