Cedar Hot Tub

hi welcome back my name is Nancy and I'm gonna show you how I built the cedar wood hot tub this hot tub is three and a half feet tall it's five feet in diameter it's got a floor 55 stage that go all the way around and tell together by the stainless steel metal bands it also has a plumbing system with jets a heater ozonator and a filter hooked up to a 240 volt GFCI breaker let's get started for this project I purchased 2x8 cedar wood from a lumber supplier I got vertical grain nearly perfect wood with no knots which is expensive but worth it the wood alone cost almost two thousand dollars I start by cleaning off one side with my longer hand plane I'll use this as a reference face for cutting on the table saw at the lumberyard I found a bunch of boards at 7 foot lengths as well as some 11 footers I'd already decided to make my hot tub three and a half feet tall before going to check what was available but luckily having seven footers made it easy to cut many three and a half foot staves without wasting material if you're gonna build a hot tub I highly recommend checking to see what lengths of wood are available to you and designing around that the floor of my hot tub is a little less than five feet in diameter I built the floor out of the same cedar wood starting with some longer center pieces then I determine the shorter lengths by using a tape measure to draw a circle leaving a little extra space to account for the tongue and groove between each board at this point the boards are still rough so I need to play in the face of smooth into a consistent thickness I run the board's through my thickness planer fYI the vacuum fills up with shavings really quickly so you got to keep emptying the bucket [Music] Here I am marking out the order of the boards and which side is tongue and which side is the groove I cut the groove out first with the data stack on my table saw next I need to cut out the tongue on the other side so it perfectly fits using the dado stack again I cut each tongue by sneaking up on the final width incremental II making sure not to over cut and checking to see how it fits if the fit is tight but doable I use ratchet straps to squeeze the board's together sometimes the fit is too tight in which case I would have to stand down the tongue a little bit I'm getting ready to take the floor from my shop to the house where it will be assembled I can only fit half the circle in my car so I bundle each half to go here's the lower deck of our house or we'll have the hot tub originally we wanted to buy a plastic spa but no one could deliver it to our house because we live on a steep hill accessible only by a narrow zigzag path with lots of obstacles in the way so building it piece by piece seemed the next best option i clamped together the pieces and weigh them down as they begin to bow upward using stainless steel screws I begin to attach straps to the bottom of the floor keeping everything well within the circle that I just drew then I'll a four by four pressure treated runners that will serve as the main base for the floor again I make sure to cut be short enough to stay a couple inches within the circle I screw these in from the side and at an angle with stainless steel screws before I flip everything over I stand on the imperfections of the seams between the floorboards Here I am finding the center and drawing the circle in preparation for cutting using a jigsaw I cut along the line to make a circle [Music] since my jigsaw blade has a tendency to flex my cuts don't always go straight up and down so I used my router and flush trim bit to clean up any part that sticks out it takes me two passes because my bit is too short back in the shop I'm getting ready to cut a bunch of stays I have to make fifty four plus a few extra I start by planning the board smooth the staves will each be cut like a trapezoid with edges that are about three point three three degrees in from a 90 degree angle I use Google Sketchup to determine the number of staves and the angles many different combinations of angles and number of staves will work Here I am putting a few scrap pieces and measuring the final angle against a printout of a three point three three degree angle I cut an angle off the far edge of each piece from each two by eight I will get two staves then I measure the outside width to about three and a half inches and set up my fence and featherboard so that I can have more hands-free to make it many cuts consistently [Music] [Music] these are the finished ones with two edges cut and here are the rest with one angled side and one straight side I repeat this process again and end up with 56 pieces since I only rough cut these two lengths I have to set up a system to cut all these to consistently I clamped on my chop saw vanilla stop block now is the time to cut the notch where the vertical piece locks onto the floor he is my crosscut sled and Davos axe to cut the notch about an inch deep for half way I don't actually know how thick the floor is because the floor assembly is somewhere else I use a scrap piece destiny but I cut the rest of the pieces a little undersized for now [Music] at the job site I measure the thickness of the floor and cut the last piece out of the notch using a marker for consistency [Applause] [Music] I draw a couple of smaller circles which I will use to line up the inside faces and the staves as I'm putting them in I want to tap them mostly in but not all the way leaving a small gap so I can squeeze it all in at the end I cut and assemble only a few at a time if the pieces are a little tight I might try to cut on board if they're too loose I'm saving for another spot that's slightly thicker sometimes they were a little too tight and I tried forcing them in and would break off a piece about 1/4 way through I've heard it splashing the edge down with a hammer you can thoroughly squish it to make assembly easier I'm hoping the edge swells back up with water finally I'm at the end and there's a hole big enough for one and a fraction of a stave so I go and cut to smaller pieces to fill the gap [Applause] before I assemble the benches inside and make a drain hole for a PVC pipe and cap and because it's a nice day we decided to all the wood and feel a sense of accomplishment we mix two parts boiled linseed oil with one part turpentine and brush it on I won't go into much detail about the benches because I was kind of winging it with cheaper decking and scrap wood I [Music] had these stainless steel bands custom made by a local welder and really happy with the way they turned out their circumference is nearly 16 feet for a 5 foot diameter tub and it had to measure the exact length with a string and subtract just a little but not too much to give the bolts a little play about several 6-inch full thread 5/16 inch stainless steel bolts and washers it took long bolts and a lot of muscle to wrestle these ends together but the two of us managed to make it work finally I get to the plumbing but I won't go into detail here either but one bit that I struggled with was finding fittings for a thick body tub versus a thin body plastic tub this Pentair long body fitting did the trick [Applause] my hot tub has three Jets and two suctions about a spa pack from spa guts calm that comes with a heater pump and controls I've hooked up a filter and an ozonator at the bottom of the filter have a hose that will be used to drain the tub most of the way so that I can access the plug in the floor now it's time to fill the tub and turn on the power for the first few hours the tub leaked in streams after a couple of days of swelling it was more like drips but I got impatient so when I had the opportunity I applied marine epoxy through a syringe at the bottom edge of the tub now there are virtually no drips the last lucky break was that we had an easy time finding a cover in stock locally because our tub diameter ended up being a standard 5 foot round number in case you were wondering the hot tub is 102 degrees and very nice to soak in next I'll build the stairs and a privacy fence thank you so much for watching my video

Channel: Nancy Quan Builds

Views: 1,778,067

Rating: 4.9037776 out of 5

Keywords: hot tub, hottub, wood tub, cedar tubs

Id: WlVN8s-Uvi8

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019