93 - DIY Wooden Architectural Knee Braces, or Wood Corbels

[Music] hi everyone my name is James welcome to King's fine woodworking today I'm going to share with you how I built these architectural knee braces my cousin owns a decking company and he needed these to stephane up a roof structure that he was building in a backyard for a project and these both adds structural strength and ornamental detail to the project so the first thing we did is we went to the big-box store and got some 4x6 Douglas fir so for the next step here I am making a template and I'm making a template out of Baltic birch plywood Baltic birch is really the best for this because there are no voids in the sight of it and I'm gonna be using this template in conjunction with my router in order to cut a perfect copy of this pattern and when the bearing from the router rolls along the template if the template that just nice and smooth and without voids it'll transfer that nice smooth look up to the cut piece of wood it's important to take your time for a cut like this if we're making a template that's going to act as a pattern in order to cut all of the pieces exactly the same so I'm going to take my time and cut just outside of the pencil line and I'm going to sand it down to the pencil line with my Sanders and make every effort to make this as perfect of a piece as I can get and here I'll just take my time and send it right down to the line exactly and also to make sure that we have a nice continuous round contour even though this is an outdoor project that is a little bit closer to construction than it is to find woodworking the principles are exactly the same there are many times in woodworking when we need to make a template or a pattern from which to cut many other pieces and the procedure that we follow here is identical that's the reason I wanted to make a video of this process once the template is perfect I will trace it onto the piece of woods that I'm going to cut and and then I'm going to take and cut the two 45s off first and those need to be exact so I'm going to go right to the line on these those are the two corners the two edges that are going to made up with the structure once that's done we'll take it over to the bandsaw and we will cut the excess of the tail away now here I want it to be perfect so I'm gonna get it perfect on the router table with a router bit so what I want to do here is just cut it down so we only have somewhere between a 16th and an eighth of an inch of extra I could have more extra than that but that just makes for more work at the router table so I want to get as close as I can to the line here but I don't actually want to cut the line while doing this where I cut into the line I've changed the shape and I can no longer have a perfectly shaped piece once again since this is an outdoor project that's not necessarily critical but if it were an indoor project or a piece of fine furniture that would be a big deal all right so now that we have that that that rough cut I'm going to put down some two-sided tape and this is how we're going to stick the template on once it's on in the right position we need to just press down firmly this two-sided tape becomes strong when you put it under pressure and then the next step is to take it over to the router table now this is a pattern cutting bit this is a real beast of a bit a lot bigger than you might ordinarily see and we have a great big one because we do do a lot of professional or industrial woodworking and so we have an oversized drum here but any pattern cutting bit will really work you might also notice that the piece of wood that we are cutting is taller than the bit so I can't actually cut the whole thing to become the right size at the same time I'm gonna have to cut it in two steps first the bottom and then I'll have to flip around and do the top and I'll show you how I do that and you should be able to see the bearing at the bottom which is writing along the piece of plywood the plywood template and that's what's guiding the bit the cutter head itself to make a perfectly shaped piece from the pattern [Music] all right with the first half complete I'm going to have to switch router bits and make the transition to cutting the other side the first time we used a pattern cutting bit that has a bearing on the bottom and the next time we use going to use a flush trim bit which has the bearing on the top now I've switched the bearing here in this case the bearing is going to ride along the flush surface or right flush along the surface that I have already cut you should be able to see that here the template up top is no longer coming into play and I really didn't cut this as close as I should have so I'm going really slow to get this cut down to the edge of the wood where it needs to be and then I'll proceed to just follow this pattern all the way around and this flush trim bit is going to trim it flush flush to the existing cut that I have all the way around and typically if you're going to ever do a very deep cut you would need both you'll need a template bit and a flush trim bit in order to accomplish it I'd like to take a moment to say thank you to all of our supporters on patreon you guys Rock you really helped us out and support us when you need it most or with videos so whenever I get suggestions from you guys we tend to make those as quick as we can and get them out and this is one of those projects where so we just wanted to see more outdoor stuff and outdoor projects really porches and patios and so I thought we'd throw this in here for you guys again thanks for all your support [Music] all right so that's done we'll take a look at it I generally like to feel the curves make sure they're smooth and that I don't have to go back over anything again and then we'll peel up our template for our future use and get the tape off and then we'll go ahead and sand the piece down this piece is done up to this stage and that's the basic shaping now since it's an outdoor project we're gonna sand this with a fairly rough grit it is getting painted for the customer's request so there's not gonna be any fine or detail sanding going on here just enough for me to smooth these contours and if there's any little hint of a line between the upper and lower cut which sometimes there is on soft woods we'll make that disappear with the sandpaper I also like to give a shout-out and say hi to the members of our Kings fine woodworking community on Facebook if you're on Facebook and you're interested you can join our group it's a great place to share projects that you're working on and to get questions answered they're woodworkers they're with every different level of expertise and I'll put a link to that in the description below all right so I'm just gonna take a moment to show you one other way that you might do this without taking the time to draw the lines in and that's if we just take the template directly I put double-sided tape on it and just tape the template directly to the wood before we even draw a line I'm using the steel squares there to make sure that I don't bring the front of this accidentally the front of the template accidentally past the front of the wood and once I know it's in the right position I'll just press this down firmly and remember this double-sided tape needs pressure in order to make sure that it secures fully now I'll just leave the template on in this case and I'll be careful when I cut the corners off to go right up next to the edge of it but not quite touch it and I'm going to do something very similar here with the bandsaw I'm just going to go ahead and take my cuts I'm gonna be very careful about it and just try to stay about an eighth of an inch away from the edge of the template so you can see this speeds it up a little bit you don't have to take the time to draw a line pull the template off and cut it then put the template back on we do it kind of all in one procedure but this does come with some risk if you aren't careful when you cut and you accidentally cut into the template well then your templates ruined and if you needed to make eight or ten pieces and they all had to be exactly the same then you'd have a problem so I would recommend if you get some fine woodworking and you're working indoors on a project that you you need to have perfect you do it the first way that I did it and very carefully set it on there trace it cut it too big and then tape your template on after the fact since this particular project didn't have to be exact I went ahead and taped it on and then did the cuts after the fact to save just a little bit of time and the rest of the procedure after that's exactly the same and then in this case I went ahead and did all of the cuts with one router bit I think we did nine of these pieces total and then I did all of the cuts with the second router bit so I only had a single router bit change in order to complete the rest of these and then after that of course we followed up with sanding [Music] and here's a quick of what they all look like when they were done I think we actually need eight total I just made one extra in case we messed one up out on the site easier to do it now next we're gonna drill some recess holes for some bolts these knee braces are both ornamental and they're going to be structural so we're gonna put a five inch long ledger lock lag bolt I think four of them total too high in too low in each knee brace for strength and so this is really just the the pre drill for the bolt head itself this is a 5/8 inch hole which is just a little bit bigger than the head washer combination that's on the ledger lock and you see I've got my fence and a little stop block set up so that my knee brace can't move left or right and I've got a little 2x2 board there preventing it from going too far forward that kind of locks it in on three sides and make sure that it doesn't move around when we drill this in with the Forstner bit pretty straightforward just drilled one side flip the board around drilled the other and I followed that same procedure and did all nine of them the same way then once that was done we switched bits while all of the fences and everything were in the same spot exactly so this bit is lined up in the dead center and this is the diameter of the shank of the bolt itself that's going to go through there and I'm just clearing out that material with this and we'll do the same thing here as well we'll flip the knee brace around and do both sides and then proceed through all of them once this series of holes has been completed the procedure is pretty simple I can I do want to get two bolts on each side so we're just going to move that yellow 2x2 board there forward about two inches and that's going to allow us to slide the knee brace in about two inches further so that we can hit a second hole and you can see how that works there and once again we're just going to follow the same procedure again we'll drill a hole there flip it around drill a hole on the other side this hole did have to go a little bit deeper because the two bolts are the same length and that way I get the same amount of bite on both ones as they go into the posts or the beams on that patio cover but that's it just the same procedure here on all nine and then we switched back to the five sixteenths inch bit in order to drill the hole for the bolt clearance itself so once this goes into place and all of those bolts are done and installed we're going to have the holes there and this projects going to get painted so I'm going to go ahead and cut some plugs this is a 5/8 inch plug cutter and it's going to just create a plug with face grain exposed and to be exactly five-eighths of an inch they'll fit perfectly in those Forstner bit holes and there we have the completed series of nine with all of the holes drilled and we're ready to run these out to his job site so they can get installed so this is my cousin Steven and the red shirt up on the ladder there and our friend Jim the two of them make up one of the crews for my cousin my other cousins company it's Stevens older brother Dale that owns the company and they're very popular they do huge decks and outdoor patios and outdoor living environments all throughout Washington and Oregon and California and Colorado and some of the projects they do are quarter-million dollars and up just really fantastic stuff so anyways basically Jim is positioning this here exactly where he wants it and Steven is putting it in he's using a ledger lock screw it's a structural screw and engineered screw that's designed to replace a lag bolt that holds a ledger onto a house for a deck so that's a very strong screw and they're getting a pair of these high and a pair of these low all the way around so it's gonna add considerably to the structural integrity of this patio cover this is actually just a free-standing cover out in the yard of one of the customers and Jim is taking the time to make sure that both of them come to the same altitude even though they are cut perfectly the same length he just wants to make sure that at the bottom where it's gonna be a little bit more visible that they end up being at the same height and they'll just proceed to install this one just like they did the first one if you're ever doing an outdoor project the cool thing about these ledger locks is they don't actually have to be pre-drilled you can dress drive them directly into whatever surface you're putting them into and they're not going to split the wood with the installation complete it's time to plug those holes so we'll take the plugs that I've cut and we'll pop them free from the block of wood that I cut them in usually just a thin screwdriver works you bend it sideways and it'll just snap the grain down low and you have access to those plugs for outdoor use the quickest way to install these is to use CA glue and accelerator we just put some CA around the bottom section of the plug spray the accelerator right into the hole and then quickly push the plug home and within about 2 or 3 seconds the piece will cure it'll set up and it's permanent just go around all of the different holes and do this exact same procedure and this is what happens if you don't push the plug in quite fast enough sometimes it'll start to cure before you get it fully seated but that's ok it'll still get a good solid grip right there and everything will be just fine and luckily the back of Stephens head is protected with those safety glasses in the event that any of that CA glue will fall back there with CA glue and accelerator the plugs set up almost immediately so right away you can go ahead and trim them off and he's just using a standard Japanese pull saw here he's gonna cut them off you can cut them off a little bit bigger than flush especially if it's a softwood because it takes almost no time for the sander to sand them down to nice and flush he's gonna use a pretty aggressive grit here so it goes nice and quick and having a cordless sander for a touch-up job really speeds things up too I'll be putting some links in the description below for all of the hand tools and router bits and things like that with that we used for the project just in case you're interested you can go there and check those out and I'd like to say thank you to everybody who does buy things from Amazon through our Amazon links that really helps support our channel Amazon gives our channel a small Commission for everything that gets sold through there so we really appreciate that thanks a lot [Music] and that's looking pretty good there I think this thing's just about ready for paint so this is what it all looks like after all four of them are done I know they're gonna put a ceiling on the inside of this it's like a tongue-and-groove cedar but this was just my involvement in the project was these knee braces so I thought I might bring you along and show you what we did there and that's really it for today's project thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Kings Fine Woodworking

Views: 100,664

Rating: 4.9267607 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, wood, how to, DIY, make, maker, build, architectural, architectural knee braces, architectural knee brace, knee braces, knee brace, corbel, corbels, bracing, decks, deck, patio cover, gazebo, knee bracing, pattern cutting, router pattern cutting, douglas fir, do it yourself, timber framing, post and beam construction, wood corbel, post and beam, impact driver, wood knee brace, wood corbels, wooden corbels, wooden knee braces, outdoor patio

Id: W4L46Wc0neY

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 05 2019