Building a Bent Lamination Hanging Lamp, Chandelier Thing | #RocklerBentWoodChallenge

today we're taking a ride on the woodworking rollercoaster and making this bent laminated hanging lamp chandelier thing on four-eyes as most of you probably know the modern maker podcast is hosting their third Rockler challenge and for this one they decided to go with bent wood for the subject I have always loved incorporating curves into my furniture and I've often achieved this look by layering plywood instead of actually bending the wood but over the past year or two I have experimented a bit with bent lamination so I figured I would use this opportunity to experiment a little bit more because I was going with bent lamination the first step was to cut a bunch of thin strips so here you can see I started by reselling a board with my table saw I needed each piece to be about ten feet long around five inches wide and fairly thin to achieve the curves that I wanted so I cut them to about 1/16 of an inch thick right off my saw then used my drum sander to get them down to right about 1/32 [Music] I decided to go with this method for a couple reasons first of all my bandsaw is pretty small so it would have been difficult and kind of taken forever to achieve this it was also a really ugly walnut board with a lot of SAP wood so it wasn't too concerned about losing the extra material when using the thicker blade in my table saw so with all the strips cut and ready to go I moved on to working on the clamping form Chris and I came up with a pretty good strategy for clamping up the entire piece we figured breaking up the form into three sections would make it easier to get it all together and we also figured that two sets of hands would be better than one so at this point I packed everything up and headed down to his shop to get some help the first step once I was there was to cut all of the form parts on the x-carve luckily I had asked my ex car of a Greg to email Chris's x-carve Craig and let him know all of the things that needed to be cut so with everything ready to go and all of the SVG files loaded into ezel Craig could cut one of each part for the form [Music] of course Craig did a great job and the parts came out perfect if you want to learn more about the Inventables x-carve or easel check out the links to both of those in the description now with one of each part cut on the CNC machine we could be in the process of building up the form layer by layer and this started by laying out all of the parts so we could maximize what we could get from our material we then we're able to get a pretty good system going with Chris rough cutting all the parts in groups then handing them off to me so that I could cut each individual part close to the line using the bandsaw [Music] if we go back to my first analogy of this build being a roller coaster this kind of felt like the long climb up the first hill long and laborious and we didn't really know for sure what we had ahead of us but the last bit of the climb was to then attach a rough cut part to our CNC cut part then to use a flush trim bit to duplicate them we then just repeated this process for each part until the entire form was thick enough for the glue up [Music] at this point I would say we were at the top of the hill ready to take that first drop we did an initial dry-fit test run with the walnut strips and everything looked pretty good so we got everything ready for the big glue up and we decided to go with epoxy as the glue to give us some extra open time [Music] not a huge surprise but the gulab became a pretty stressful pretty quickly this must have been the corkscrew loop part of the roller coaster it was pretty hot that day and the epoxy was curing a lot quicker than we thought it would so the anxiety was turned up a bit and right at this point we did a number on the outside strip and cracked it pretty good which was a bummer but we pulled ourselves together and pushed through and got everything clamped up [Music] the waiting game before we could unclamp it and see if everything stayed together was difficult and before I show you if it worked out let me tell you about something that isn't difficult and that is cooking meals with hellofresh I hate to say it but if there are two things in life that I really don't enjoy it's going to the grocery store and cooking so the best part about using hellofresh is that trips to the grocery store are already taken care of and cooking meals at home are now a reality regardless of your skill in the kitchen on top of that hello fresh has a wide variety of delicious options to help anyone break out of their usual routine with over 20 seasonal chef's curated recipes to choose from each week including calorie smart and vegetarian options there is always something for everyone and if you're ever feeling indecisive hellofresh makes it easy to change your delivery days or meal preferences or even skip a week whenever needed hello fresh is now from $6.99 per serving so if you want to get the most meal for your moola I wish I came up with that one check out hellofresh and get started with eight free meals which is $80 off your first month by going to hellofresh comm and entering the promo code for eyes 80 a checkout all right thanks hello fresh let's get back to the build so after impatiently waiting for the epoxy to cure we finally unclamp the form and thankfully everything looked pretty good given how the glue of what the edges needed a little cleanup and both ends needed to be trimmed [Music] so with the main portion looking good the last couple things to fabricate were the two hoop frames that would hold the actual light fixtures as well as hold together the circular bends at each end once again team x-carve Greg and Craig came in clutch and cut these out with ease [Music] I then spray-painted each one to give the piece a little pop of color then glued them into place [Music] with that I headed back up to my shop to put the finishing touches on everything and the first thing I did was spray on a few coats of finish I then could wire up the two light fixtures as well as a switch then get the whole thing hung and we were pretty much done [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so there you go a hanging light fixture chandelier thing I'm really happy with how it came out though as you saw there are a few spots that could have been a little bit cleaner but at the end of the day it was a great learning experience and that is all part of the design and prototype process I did keep the forms so that I could potentially try this again at some point and get it up to the quality that I would feel comfortable selling to someone but for now I think this first one is gonna stay hanging in my shop all right thank you as always for watching I really appreciate it hope you enjoyed this one check out all the links in the description for everything I talked about and of course until next time if you're ever looking for a thrill and want to test out your nerves hop on that bent lamination roller coaster and start making some curves you [Music]

Channel: Chris Salomone

Views: 96,095

Rating: 4.8544235 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, wood working, bent wood, bent lamination, bending wood, modern lamp, modern light, lamp, DIY lamp, DIY Chandelier, how to make a lamp, RocklerBentwoodChallenge

Id: Q9wo1Mau_b0

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019