Dragon Desk

sometimes you just can't improve on what nature did perfectly however sometimes you can although sometimes you can try and make it much worse that is more yellow than I was expecting my name's Cam and I can't draw if it doesn't involve a ruler it is a shape that I am incapable of creating but for this build I wanted a really unique design so I decided to get out of my comfort zone and try to draw something without a straight line line so made a handful of sketches and I really did my best to convince myself that these were just a little Avant guard but after looking at them for long enough I realized that a Jackson poock painting would probably make a better jumping off point for a piece of furniture so I reached out to a friend of mine that does not need a ruler to make a cool design he can do anything including straight lines although he does have a hard time cutting straight lines if you saw his last video turn it off sorry if that's too soon Chris but I asked Chris from Force Furniture if he could help me create a design and he came up with this and I think this is a fantastic design now I just have to figure out how to cut it out and make it look exactly like the way he designed it which wasn't too hard but it was a little bit tricky without using a CNC I probably should clarify that I'm not actually building the table out of this/ Quin thick MDF what I'm building here is a template and building a template is going to enable me to take a little bit more time shaping it to hopefully as close to Chris's drawing as possible and then I'll copy that shape directly on onto the wood slab and it'll be hopefully a perfect copy most of it was pretty straightforward Chris gave me a drawing with a bunch of different angles and distances that I was able to refer to the big sweep there I made with those fiberglass rods that are actually called fish sticks cuz they're used for fishing electrical wires these Corners I had to play around a little bit with some coffee mugs and just different shapes to get as close to the drawing as possible and I just kind of smoothed everything out with a hand sander and was actually surprised at how well all this went because i' never done anything like this before as exciting as Quin MDF is I think you'll like the slab of wood that I'm going to use even more this particular slab of wood is a $3,000 slab of mapa Burl which yes it's different than maple Burl this is actually a type of popper tree and this one was salvaged by a local company called Hamilton Le Supply and I had two slabs from the same tree there was one problem here is this whole area that's a little bit lighter was basically rotted they said that it sat out in the rain a little bit too long so this is really really soft the wood in general is incredibly soft but this part was really concerning and since I wanted to try to add color to it I wanted to make sure that this doesn't just soak it up like a gram cracker and so I pulled some dye out just a random color and I saw it it wasn't terrible it wasn't ideal but I think it's going to be workable I have always struggled with design and I'm not just figting humility here I genuinely believe I'm pretty terrible at it but I also don't believe that it's impossible for me to get better so I work at it I study it I look for inspiration elsewhere follow a ton of different design pages on social media and I recently came upon this guy who is immensely talented and tragically named we'll just call him Paul but Paul had some of the coolest most original designs that I've ever seen and I really want to know how does a guy like Paul come up with this inspiration what does great design take and I didn't think he'd respond to me on social media so I did was kind of as a joke I asked chat GTP I was like Hey respond as if you're Paul and tell me the elements that it takes to create great design and not really expecting much and they came up with this list and I read through I'm like that's actually a pretty great list so I am going to do my best to use this list in this project and future projects to help me create better designs now I have to say that my favorite point on that list is the collaboration bullet point because initially I thought that using Chris for the design was kind of cheating but apparently I am just a great designer because we did collaborate on it we sat down on a video call he gave me a bunch of shapes we kind of moved the lines around I'd say wider shorter longer smoother things like that and eventually the two of us collaboratively came up with this design together as great designers do I just wish I knew about this when I was in school because I can't tell you how many times I collaborated on a final exam wasn't always consensual but I could have just told the teacher that I am just taking design inspiration it's not actually cheating it's like the moth in uh uh sounds to the lamps you don't get the reference some some of the viewers [Music] will Scott never understands my movie references because he hasn't seen any movies so hopefully one of you out there actually appreciates it and anyway the first point on that what makes great design list was purpose does your design actually serve a function and I'm thrilled to say this does have a purpose first off it's going to become a desk but I think it has an even greater purpose than that because it's going to become a desk that belongs to one of you guys out there because I'm giving it away in the end and everything about this giveaway is free it's free to enter shipping will be free everything is free so don't let anybody scam you in the comments saying that you've won something and all you have to do is pay for shipping because that happens all the time and it's really really sad actually so if you see it happening feel free to help people out because I will never ask for any money from anybody for one of these giveaways also this is going to be the biggest giveaway I've ever done there's a ton of other stuff I don't want to spoil all the details now but there is a link in the description if you want all those details on this giveaway it's close fortunately for me that list on great design did not say anything about craftsmanship so you can safely disregard the fact that that board was cut 6 in is short and all of the excessive use of caulk because I am still in design mode here I haven't quite switched gears into Craftsman mode but to fill this crack I'm using kind of a faster curing epoxy than the Deep epoxy this stuff cures in about a day and to get that black color I tinted it with charcoal which is actually really great because it doesn't dissolve in the epoxy and it won't soak into the wood and this wood is not only very light but it's also incredibly soft which is the absolute worst combination when it comes to potentially staining the wood so in the end though I think this charcoal and the faster curing epoxy did a really good job at preventing any of that color bleed initially I was tempted just to sand and scrape this epoxy level but because the epoxy is so hard and this wood is so soft I decided it was going to be worth it head up to creative woodworking use their big wide belt sander which will ensure the epoxy the wood everything stays absolutely flat and will give a much better result because I don't care how careful I am if I tried to do this by hand I would always get kind of a humped area where that is and the wood would get kind of eaten away a little bit faster so I think it was worth the trip if you haven't gathered already this table is going to be pretty heavily inspired from the guitar industry and this next bit that I'm going to attempt to incorporate was not part of the original design but the more I got looking at this big long sweep it really reminded me of the side of a Fender guitar and I don't know if you're a guitar person or not but on the back of the guitar there's like a little body relief that's carved in that thought could be actually really cool on on a desk I've never seen it done before quite like this and might actually serve a slight function as well which I believe is on my checklist of things that make great design so this is how I came up with the way to cut this relief I just made a bunch of measurements going down an eighth of an inch or I think a 16th of an inch at a time now I'm just going to kind of loosely connect them with this Precision ruler that I found in my kindling bin if someone doesn't care for a piece of furniture that I make there's essentially an unlimited number of ways that they can express their feelings about that particular piece and sometimes I'm a little impressed or at least slightly amused with what people come up with and the flip side of that though is if somebody does like a piece that I make there's really only a few versions of compliments that I can get first one is that's lovely I'd love something like that in my home and I would say that something like a walnut table would fall into this Camp the flip side to that one is oh that's really cool I've never seen anything like it but I definitely wouldn't put that in my house and this is where I would say something like that blue end table I built a few months back would fall into that camp and the next one I don't know that is actually a compliment but it's kind of an overlap with the first one and it's something to the effect of yeah that was cool the first 20 times I saw it and I get it it'd be something like the black epoxy and walnut table like I built you know 40 or 50 times already the Holy Grail though the one we're always striving for is the oh my god I've never seen anything like that and I would love that in my house which I don't know that I've ever actually made anything that would fall into this camp but that's what we're always striving for and honestly if I look at this piece and what I'm envisioning it's probably going to be in that second camp where yeah that's cool but I probably wouldn't want it in my house the router bit that I'm going to be using on the bottom of the table is the largest roundover bit that I own this is a 7/8 in bit it's a pretty big one and if you want to know what that is in metric I don't know what it is in metric you probably have to look it up it's probably something impossibly simple like two or something easy like that because everything in metric just has to be easier but in America we like to prove to our grade schoolers that the math they're learning now they will need for the rest of their lives and kind of surprised that American keyboards don't come in cursive on that note but I guess that's the price we pay for indoor air conditioning being the [Applause] standard after editing my last video Scott came to me with an interesting question he said how many total audio takes do you think that it took you to complete the voiceover for that last video and I know that it's a lot of takes a lot of people out there think that I'm better at this voiceover than I am but trust me it's a lot of work so I said I don't know 300 takes and he said 750 total takes and that did not surprise me at all and you're hearing that right which meant I had to stand at a desk for about 10 hours just to do the voiceover and took about 750 individual takes to get a complete voiceover for one of my videos which makes for a very long day and why I love having a sit stand desk cuz I'll sit do a little editing then I'll stand up for the voiceover section and just back and forth for that entire 10 hours and if you're curious the last sponsored video I did was almost two years ago and it was flexi spot because I don't take many sponsors and if I do it has to be a product I actually use after I get as many of those cracks and little Burl pits filled with the glue sticks as I can I give it a light sand and see what's left and what's left is generally a lot more holes so this is the next stage in filling those holes these are little wax fill sticks which are basically exactly like they sound they're fill sticks made of wax kind of like a crayon so I hit it with a torch and these do a really good job at filling the almost impossibly small holes but again you need to make sure you're using like a clear coat finish over the top of this and you can see how many of these holes I had left there but I was determined to finish it with this one fill stick do you need another fill stick you got some left here it's getting a little stubby we we you have other ones in the drawer I also have this one just don't want you to burn yourself how would I burn myself I'm thinking about it angle away you got in my head I was doing fine until you said that ow you sure you don't want to stop it I'm so close to being done see think I made a fill sticks now I should elaborate on why the giveaway I'm doing in this video is the biggest giveaway I've ever done like I mentioned I'm giving this desk away but I'm also going to be giving away five of the 10 tabletops from my last video my last video I built 10 tabletops out of denim and epoxy and I'm giving away five of those also everybody who enters just for entering will get instant access to my epoxy table guide book something I normally charge like 15 bucks for so everybody that enters will get free access to that again there's a link in the description this next process of bleaching the wood prior to the color has me pretty excited but also a little nervous because the guitar maker that's helped me out with coloring these woods and the past specifically told me he does not do this and he does not recommend it however I'm going to go against his advice and I'm going to try it anyway I think this is on my checklist of great design Innovation right or that's what we'll call it but here's my theory this wood has a really Brown tone as you can see and in the past I've had this problem when you add color to Brown it just kind of turns a muddy version of that color so my idea is if I can strip that brown out of it and then when I start layering and adding those colors I will only get the true true color n none of that kind of Muddy brown but this is all kind of that think about it logic that I've used in the past and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't however what does work is this wood bleach this is pretty cool and way to see this side by side it is shocking how much lighter and this only took a few minutes for that to be applied and then dry so now all I got to do is make sure that this logic actually applies and works when I add the color [Music] I still didn't know what color I was going to apply or how that color would actually look on a real mapa samples so I built a bunch of miniature mappa table samples and yes those are out of the same wood and yes they are actually done to scale from there I made a bunch of different dieses out of trans tint dieses and this is just regular old tap water from there I did the first coat kind of heavy I've learned that if you do it heavy and then kind of sand it back feather in the additional colors you can get some cool effects but I wasn't loving anything I'd come up with so far and Scott was helping me through this we were kind of choosing some colors together but I don't think that he was really loving anything I know I wasn't it really wasn't the effect that I was going for I would come back add another layer and just kind of keep Feathering these in there's a little bit of purple and gold which turned out pretty weird but eventually I came up with something all right after you left I kept building the color we have kind of a orange and black here built some lacquer on it so we have a nice Sheen uh want a little LSU theme I like it uh I don't think you actually do I think you're just being polite um because I don't like it uh this is a lot a little too similar to the end table we did yeah so here's what we got this is called Dragon's breath I think is the term okay I like that I did several different iterations like wearing the bleach and all this but they're all essentially dark red to red to orange to yellow and so I think this is uh I think this is our look what do you think I think I agree I that look sick way better right yeah a lot more variation yeah and we don't want to be associated with SEC purple's a first time we've got SC to cut and I agree the bleaching process did a pretty aggressive job at raising the grain kind of like when you get a piece of wood wet and it turns fuzzy after it dries so I had to do a pretty thorough sanding job to make sure everything was nice and smooth and as I got ready for the actual die job I realized that Scott really didn't trust my process how confident are you that yellow is the way to go are you asking because you are not confident that yellow is the way to go it it just looked a little bright on some of our samples it did look bright I think as long as I don't go too heavy and we kind of follow what we did with the samples I think it's going to look really nice that is more yellow than I was expecting I can positively say that there was some emotion being evoked when I saw this yellow go on and I don't know that it was good emotion but I do know that emotion is on my checklist of things that make great design so we can check that one off of this build but even though the yellow was the same process I did on the samples I was kind of second guessing it so on the top I decided to do a different process and what I'm doing here is I'm going to add this orange and because it's been bleached and hopefully it gets that really true orange color I'm going to sand most all of it off near the center of it and all that's going to be left is the orange in those deeper pits so in theory I'll get kind of the pure yellow and the pure orange with no none of that muddy brown but again this is all kind of that think about it logic this whole dying process seemed like it was two steps forward two steps back sometimes two steps forward three steps back because I liked the way that yellow and orange looked then I added this and it looked terrible again and I don't think anybody could say it better than Scott did here kind of looks like you told a kindergarten to fingerpaint the [Music] Sun that was pretty well said by Scott but if I was a kindergartener who was finger painting the sun I might be offended now so direct any of that anger towards Scott and normally when you're dying a piece of wood especially a harder wood like Maple if you don't like the way it looks you can just keep sanding till you remove the color the problem is this one is so soft and so porous I'm not so sure that I'll be able to remove the color if I apply it wrong so especially on those tips on those kind of horn pieces that's where the really rotted pieces still remained and I was really nervous adding any color to that section but I just kept going kept trying to feather it in I added a little bit of water here and I found that the water really helped that transition between the colors based on all the guitars that I've looked at and the samples that I made I knew knew that I wanted a really dark Edge I feel like the pieces that had that almost black perimeter were the most striking but again this is where it's the most risky because if I put this on too heavy or it doesn't look good in general it may not sand out and I know that generally my projects turn out pretty well sometimes they don't but for the most part it looks like I know what I'm doing but I can assure you I actually don't people talk about in the comments that this is like Bob Ross sometimes and I think like oh wow you totally knew what you were doing and you saved it as I'm doing this now I don't know that I'm going to save it like I think I will but it's it also looks like to me and I get nervous every time I do this how's it look to you um very bright uh yeah okay fair enough all right back to sanding we we we got this as usual Scott silence spoke volumes but it really just reaffirmed what I already knew in that it didn't look good and there's no guarantee I'm going to pull this off at this rate and not trying to be overly dramatic I generally feel like if you keep pushing through a project you'll find a way to make it work and I still am confident I can find a way but as I'm sanding it off and adding more that red it just wasn't looking right so I decided to try this this is just a sanding block I think that power sander was removing a little bit too much color so using the hand sander is going to enable me to really control how much of it I'm removing and that way I can maybe not take off all the red I'll just kind of remove a bit of it help control that gradient from the orange to the red and this was actually Scott's idea here he said that adding the red might have been too much so we just added this orange over the red and that's the same orange you see below it but when it was layered over that kind of half sanded red it was starting to look really cool and this is where I was thinking okay we can actually pull this off this might actually look good the last thing I noticed didn't look quite right was that straight strip there where we kind of curve around the edges and so what I did is I used the hand sander again to just give kind of a radius to it so it goes up to just a small tip there a small point at the end and again hopefully if I do this with enough control and enough restraint don't say too aggressive it'll look good again adding just orange here so the orange over the dark red over the red was really really starting to bring this home and I think I just about had it here if you weren't aware of this already the 20 minute Mark of a video is generally considered to be the kind of third dat equivalent when it comes to whether or not to escalate a relationship to the next level so if you are considering subscribing the 20 minute Mark or 21 minute Mark might be a good time however if you're a little bit more oldfashioned and you want to take a little bit slower I want to make sure this is consensual I don't want to pressure you into doing anything you don't want to do so you take as long as you need if you want to subscribe if it's meant to happen it'll happen but just know I'm here for you and I am ready when you are this is how I'm addressing the really soft nature of this map of burl you can see those tips there that's where the rotted wood was and that is absorbing even more of this epoxy so I'm just kind of traveling it on letting it absorb hitting it with the torch which Heats it up thins it out and makes it absorb even more epoxy and I just kept doing this until it wouldn't absorb anymore and even though this is going to have a really hard clear C coat over the top it's kind of like if you were to clear coat a Saltine that Saltine would have the hard clear coat but if you drop something on it it would Dent or break the saltine and the same thing would go here if I put that clear coat on and you drop something on it it would still Dent that softwood underneath so this should give a good solid base for that clear coat in the end I did two more coats of that epoxy just to make sure that this squishy mappa absorbed as much as it possibly could I tried to tral off as much as I could but there was still a few drips on the edge these make me a little nervous because you risk sanding through the color if you get through that epoxy into the color it's kind of hard to repair it and really make it look natural so as gently as I could I got it nice and sanded to smooth as possible because I'm going to be spraying a 2K acrylic and I don't know a lot about spraying if you've seen me spray in the past you know I'm pretty terrible at it but like everything I'm working on getting better the 2K acrylic is cool because it's a two-part finish kind of like an epoxy where you add the activator and it cures much faster and this is just the sanding sealer but it's dry to the touch in like 15 minutes which is good because if you look on the day I chose to spray there's a lot of stuff blowing around so I can't spare any excess time of this sitting around being wet and again like I said I'm not great at it but I'm working on slowly getting better I knew that I was going to have some more holes to fill even before I started spraying but I wanted to give myself a little bit more of a safety net so I added two coats of that sanding sealer and now I can one really clearly see all of those little pits that need to be filled and two I have a slight protective barrier between my scraper and my sander and that color because again if I go a little bit too heavy-handed I can scratch right through that color and I can't really repair it so having the sanding sealer on there should give me enough of a buffer to protect me from totally ruining it at this stage I know I said earlier in the video that the likely best case outcome for a project like this is a project that someone says oh yeah that's cool but I never want that in my house and I'm as critical as anybody when it comes to actually putting something in my house but I spent a lot of hours staring at this cuz there was so many imperfections that needed to be filled there were so many coats that I did here that I started to Wonder Could This actually be something that at least I personally might want in my house and I'm not there yet but I was really really liking how this was shaping up I was finally to the top coat stage past the sanding sealer and onto the last coat and this is not a sponsored product the one I'm using here is a 2K acrylic by a company called rener I'll link everything I use in the video in the description but nothing sponsored unless I say it's sponsored and this is the activator that I put in I find that a food scale does a really good job at measuring everything out and a little bit of water just a splash of water is something I've been told makes a huge difference but I don't recommend doing it in an oilbased finish make sure you're using a water-based finish if you want to do that final thing that I do is just a wipe down with a tack cloth my friend showed me this that paints cars makes a big difference and again don't copy my style for applying the finish I am still learning how to use this but I found that having the thinned out water version with this makes it go on a lot thicker and a lot smoother really lays flat and you can see it looks kind of purple as it's going on and that's just because it has kind of a blue tint until it dries and it won't look like this in the end don't worry the last thing I did did before attaching it to the table base is ensure that whoever ends up winning this is set up for Success so did a quick application of N3 Nano just to make sure it's safe from spills stains scratches kids uncles in-laws out on parole whatever it'll be safe day flexi spot asked me to help promote their most stable table base that they have ever offered the E7 plus it can lift over 400 lb and that was the table base that was originally going to go with this table top however once I got it on there I realized that it was a little too blocky and I reached out to flexi spot and said hey can I put the other table base on there the same one that I have on my desk so they sent me the modern version of that they said yeah we have a table base for everybody which is great so if you want super heavyduty can't budget with a tank get the E7 plus if you want something a little bit sleeker like I have the E7 Pro or the E7 is a great choice all of them come with a 15-year warranty you can add all kinds of accessories like I have on mine I have monitors I have cameras I have lights and they are offering a brand a sale at flexispot there is a code Blacktail 50 if you want $50 off your order of $500 or more head to flexispot outcom if you've seen my videos in the past you know that I'm never shy about giving my real opinion on a project I build if I don't like the way it turned out I'll just say I don't like the way it turned out I never think that I'm going to trick somebody into enjoying a video more just by saying look how amazing this looks if it doesn't actually look amazing you guys have eyes you can see the projects too that said I freaking love this piece I didn't think I would I would actually put this in my house and I never thought I'd say that when this project started but I don't know if I'm alone there so let me know would you actually put a piece like this in your house too or is it just me my name's Cam and I can't draw i i as exciting luckily that list on luckily that list luckily that Lu fortunately that list on great design didn't say anything about great craftsmanship craftsmanship if you haven't gathered already this sake if you haven't gathered already this sake

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 1,256,210

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Id: dL7nZC9FQOQ

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024