The Best Thing I've Ever Made

hey this is cam with blacktail studio and this week i make a pretty big table then i make it really big stay tuned first off big thanks to nikon for sponsoring this week's video and you guys should also be thanking nikon because they don't even want some annoying ad read where i stare at the camera and talk about how great nikon is for 60 seconds they just said hey we want to give you some gear we want you to make a cool video we want you to show how it works show what you like about it and i said absolutely so this will be my first video shot in almost 100 youtube videos not done on my iphone so there was a bit of a learning curve learning how to be a real youtuber for once but this entire video was shot with the nikon z62 and i am really excited to show you guys what i learned the wood that i'm working with is locally salvaged oregon black walnut that i got up at gobi walnut in northwest portland oregon and they're pretty much the world's foremost supplier of these big walnut slabs and these are my favorite style of slabs these are a book match which means when you open them up like a book they form kind of a mirror image of each other because they sat right next to each other in the tree they are a really cool style they measured about 144 inches by 25 inches for each slab and i had some people in my last video they said hey so many of your viewers are international can you give metric numbers when you talk about these inches and i first thing i was like no man i can't do metric who knows how to do that kind of math i thought about it and i realized i do carry around a tiny computer in my pocket that can do that math so anywhere you see inches i tried to include the metric numbers as well a lot of you probably know that normally when you're doing a glue up you run your boards through a jointer and this gives you that nice perfectly flat perfectly 90 degree surface that you're looking for in a glue up what you might not know is the festool track saw actually cuts a perfect enough 90 and a sharp enough line that you can do a glue up right off the saw which is pretty awesome for me in this case because there is no way i can negotiate these giant slabs on a jointer by myself and probably not even with help and also i don't need your judgment on my high water pants my wife mocks me and asks why i buy such short pants and i keep telling her that i am still growing and she tells me that 39 year old men do not continue to grow but that is my excuse and so i don't need to hear it from you guys in the comments because i already hear it from her i'm gonna be using the jointer to make some clamping calls and all a call really is is a flat piece of wood or a flat board i'm using two by fours from home depot which are shockingly expensive as of may 2021 they are going to do the trick for this and i will be able to use them again later clamping call out of a 2x4 like this is really only good for about one use since it can start to move pretty quick the dominoes that i'm going to be using are 12 millimeter by 140 millimeter dominoes which are big stout dominoes and i am using a lot of them and when i say a lot of them i mean probably too many of them and my thought process behind this was one of these slabs was very flat the other one was just a little bit wavy and so i was going to use these dominoes to really help line everything up and keep both slabs very flat and in the end this worked but i think i could have accomplished the same thing with maybe half as many dominoes and this many dominoes also presented some other challenges that you will see here in just a second this many dominoes made for an awfully sporty glue up there was really just not enough clamping power for me to push this in at least very easily i was able to get it eventually but it's something else to think about i probably didn't need this long of dominoes i certainly didn't need that many dominoes but i'd come this far and there was no going back at this point and i was able to get it just make sure you have your glue out you have your clamps handy everything right in front because you don't want to be scrambling for extra clamps in the middle of one of these glues because you only have you know a few minutes to get everything together and tight and you can see before i got it all the way snug i put these clamping calls which again they're just flat pieces of wood and this is going to really assist in keeping the table very very flat during this glue up process because especially with these pipe clamps is they don't pull perfectly parallel and when i clamp really hard they can actually bow that wood so the calls are going to keep everything flat you'll see here we actually did pretty good when we pulled this out of the clamps i was actually pleasantly surprised and this table you might be wondering on the thickness is it started off as eight quarter which is really pretty thin for a table this size so i didn't have any thickness to spare and a little teaser i have a few tricks on how to keep your table its maximum thickness that i'll share with you a little bit later you're probably noticing this footage looks much sharper than you're used to for one of my videos and that is the 4k footage out of this nikon z62 is extraordinarily sharp and it shoots 4k i believe up to 60 frames per second this is 24 frames per second which someone told me is the cinematic effect so you guys tell me is this cinematic enough for you anyway i am just touching up some knot holes there with that tabletop epoxy it was ready to work with in about 24 hours after that and now i can get started on these extension leaves i'm sure somebody has done an extension leaf similar to this i had never seen it done exactly this way and i don't want to take credit and act like i created this style because there is nothing new in woodworking everything has been done before but i learned everything through this process through my own mistakes and it was kind of a cool process and what i wanted was this extension leaf to look like a continuation of the table without really taking anything away from the table when it's not in use so i didn't want a bunch of weird brackets or screws in the end of it and so the first thing i need to do was make a second book match and this is pretty straightforward and it didn't use nearly as many dominoes this time i think i only used three on this particular set and i was just going to glue up this offcut from the end of the slab and form a second book match this was probably the most difficult project i've taken on in the last 12 months or so and i don't know if it's because of that but this is actually the piece that i am most proud of this is my favorite project of anything i've ever built and that's saying a lot i built a lot of things so this project was a lot of fun but man it was a challenge and i know right now it doesn't look very good so i hope you're willing to stick with me while this table comes to life because a lot of times people will tell me that i remind them of the bob ross of woodworking and i remember watching bob ross and i was constantly looking at some brush stroke he made and thinking oh he ruined it it looked so good up to that point and then five brush strokes later you're like oh yeah no he definitely needed to do that that was amazing so i hope you guys will bear with me while this comes to life i know it doesn't look like much yet but it is really really a cool project and something i'm really proud of in the end if you decide to try one of these book match tables remember your symmetry because one of these slabs is about 25 inches wide from the center point the other one was only 23 and a half so i cut them both down to 23 inches from the dead center so that way we have a symmetrical 46 inch wide table and something that would be easier to mess up than you think because if you had just an inch off of one slab it could look absolutely ridiculous and you wouldn't know why the table didn't look good until you did your measurements so always think of the symmetry if i am known for one thing on youtube apparently it is for awkwardly flipping tables or should probably say awkwardly not flipping tables and this is some of my finest work see i didn't even try right there and decided that i had to go into stall mode looking at my phone nobody was calling nobody was texting but still felt like i had to stall even though i worked by myself anyway we got up to the point of no return where this is definitely the scariest part because it's got to come down somehow anyway we eventually got it down and now i get to tackle all of these low spots and this is something i've never done before again something i probably didn't invent but it was kind of a cool method to get rid of all those low spots without using any thickness of the table i was pretty fortunate that i still had all of these offcuts from earlier because i had all these patches i had to make and this wood was going to match the table perfectly because it's from the same table and there's a rule in woodworking or at least there should be a rule in woodworking that you do not throw away any wood following seven years after a project and that might sound a little excessive to some of you but when you have that one project five years later and you're able to pull out that rubbermaid tub full of offcuts and you have the one piece that matches perfectly you will thank me and your family and your wife they might hate me but all that really matters is that you had the one piece for that one time that you needed it what exactly i'm doing here might not make sense to some of you out there just yet and basically what i'm doing is i am fixing kind of cheating my way to fixing those low spots that the band saw cut there and why you've never seen me do this before is because normally i buy thicker slabs normally i start out with two and a half inch or three inch thick slabs for a table like this these ones started out at just barely two inches so i wanted to finish the table an inch and three quarters so i really didn't have much wiggle room after planing off those other low spots so all i'm essentially doing is making a bunch of little patchwork inlays and these are on the underside so you're never really going to see them all you're going to see about a 16 to maybe an eighth inch at the thickest on the edges of this table and if i did a good job matching the wood grain you really won't see them at all i would consider a ton of hand clamps and absolute essential woodworking tools i have a lot of tools you don't really need like this electric hand planer i bought it like six years ago thought i'd use it all the time used it like three times in six years however hand clamps everybody needs a ton of them so get yourself a bunch of those f clamps the deep throat ones the short ones the parallel clamps if you can afford them pipe clamps are a great alternative to some of those more expensive clamps just get as many clamps as you think you need times that by two and then keep buying clamps until you just run out of space so that's the exact number of how many clamps every woodworker should have before i got started working with these slabs they were what you call a skip plane which just means they were surfaced on both sides but not so far that they removed every single low spot you can still see that low spot there the long skinny one in the middle of the table and this was by design since we were really trying to maximize our table thickness we didn't want to remove too much too early and this final sanding pass was going to remove a little bit more wood so what we did was leave some of those low spots so we could hopefully maximize our thickness with this very final sanding pass and here we only removed maybe an eighth of an inch or so and got to right where we needed i get so many questions about this shop that i go to in portland and if you've ever seen one of my videos you've already seen me up here at creative woodworking in northeast portland but the question i get most the time is people from around the country that are like hey how do i find a creative woodworking in my town and first off there might not be one in your town there was actually some guys from seattle in the shop that saw one of my videos and drove down from seattle to have their pieces processed which i know quite a few people from seattle that actually drive down just to use this shop because it saves that much time but if you live in st louis or new york or south carolina all i would suggest is call around some cabinet shops because they're going to have a lot of these tools and they might want a little bit of extra money and if they don't want to let you use their tools they will likely know who does have a shop that might rent time out to you so call around some cabinet shops other woodworkers you know social media all that stuff and you might be able to find a creative woodworking in your town now we get to see how i did on the patchwork and this isn't going to be my finest hour this was just done with a router if i was really want to be precise i would have used a router with a little bit more chisel work but this is actually pretty good especially from the side when you're really only gonna see about a sixteenth of an inch the center part this is something that i really wanna hide from you guys but since i don't hide anything i have to show you everything i would never do this on a client's table but for my own table i would have lost you know almost an eighth or a quarter inch off this which was just not an option it is the underside you're never going to see it still for a client i would have just insisted on having thicker slabs there's no way i would have taken this on for a client's project with such thin slabs however it was a table for me and i knew that i was going to be comfortable with that one low spot on the underside of the table and i am embarrassed to show you guys it's probably going to get some hate comments out there about how i halfway did that but that was really my only option the dust extraction on this router is actually pretty incredible because of this little plastic shroud that goes around the bit however if you try to remove it before the bit stops spinning you're in for kind of an expensive mistake although now i have a dust shroud that i can use to actually see the router bit when i'm using it and the extraction still works pretty well one of the things i pride myself on here is that i read and respond to essentially every single question you guys ask in the comments below and it's actually gotten to the point when it comes to these c channels that my iphone knows how to respond to a question because i have answered this question so many times that someone asks what do the c channels do when i write the word helps my iphone assumes i'm about to say keep it flat so that's essentially what the c channels do is they help keep the table flat they're not going to fix a warp table they're not going to keep green slabs flat but if you have a table that is nice and dry and it's flat to begin with you put the c channels in there it's going to assist in keeping it flat i watch a lot of youtube and i don't know that there's anything more frustrating than when i find a video on a topic that i'm really excited to watch and the first thing the guy says is hey don't forget to subscribe don't forget to like always be sure to comment that whole spiel and i'm thinking you haven't shown me anything i don't know you i don't know why i would want to subscribe i don't know why i would want to like this you haven't given me any content so i try to do things a little bit different i try to wait till i have hopefully earned your subscription and then it's just a reminder because sometimes someone will say hey don't forget to like this video right after something really cool and i'm like oh yeah i will like this video so if you do think that i've earned your subscription i would appreciate it if you would hit that subscribe button it does help my page out i really appreciate it if you don't think i've earned it i just appreciate the view and if you really really think i've earned it hit that like button these bow ties are another topic that i get a ton of questions on and first off people want to know how to make them and a couple years ago one of my very early videos i made a video on how to make this bowtie jig and it's not a jig that i invented i saw it somewhere online and couldn't find a video on how to make it so i made a quick and easy video on how to cut these bow ties with a simple jig that takes you about 10 minutes and zero dollars to make i'll link that in the video description below the bandsaw method isn't quite as precise as like a cnc and i've seen some guys do some really nice ones on table saws actually but the main question i get is what do they actually do are they decorative why do you inlay them why do you have two of them there and the fact that i have two of them there is completely decorative i just like the look of a pair of bow ties for some reason one bow tie would have completely sufficed and essentially what they do is this crack coming in from the end grain i find those ones especially suspect meaning that they could maybe you know 10 years down the line open up slightly and inlaying this wedged shape bow tie is going to prevent that crack from separating any further so that's all they do is they prevent the cracks from splitting even further if you've never done any inlay work before you might be thinking that it looks super intimidating and like something you could never pull off and i actually promise you that you can do inlay work if you really want to because it really only takes two things it takes sharp tools and it takes some patience it doesn't even take expensive tools so if you have cheap chisels they can get essentially just as sharp as these chisels that i have here they just might need to be resharpened a little bit more often or pull out that leather strap like you see me using here from time to time so now that you know that you can use cheap tools the next thing it takes is patience and i hear people say like oh i just don't i don't have the patience for that i am not the type of person that can can work that slowly and i look at it this way it's like the people that say oh i can never be a long-haul truck driver because i can't sit in a car that long until that person has to move cross-country and then they have no choice but to sit in a car for that long so if you just think of it like this is the job like it's not going to take five minutes it's just gonna take an hour and that's how long the drive is that's how long this job is it's really not that bad and then mix in a couple tips from the videos like mine or other great youtube videos out there it's really not that hard a couple tips for me a little bit of patience and some sharp tools and i promise you can do inlay work i always cut my inlays slightly thicker than the slot that they're going in so if they were completely bottomed out they're going to sit slightly proud because you don't want them to below the level of your table and even though these were a little bit thicker than the slots that i cut they actually didn't go all the way down i started to get a little bit nervous because they were getting really really snug and it's not going to hurt anything that these sit you know 16th of an inch off the bottom of this inlay they are still going to provide that sheer strength preventing that crack from opening and here's another one my favorite tips is using a little bit of dust mixed in with that wood glue and that's going to fill any of those tiny tiny little micro imperfections that your chisel might have missed your hole's never really going to be perfect or at least with me it's never going to be absolutely perfect so filling any of those micro gaps with wood glue and a mix of the dust is going to make it look really natural and essentially like a laser cut inlay some of you that are really smart might have already figured this out and if you're looking at this extension wing you might be wondering how can he have an extension leaf on each end of the table that's continuous grain if he only cut that piece off of one end of the table and you're totally right this is actually only going to be continuous grain on one end of the table and this is because there was a definite best part of the table the best 108 inches the best nine feet of the table was from one end and i didn't know that i was gonna be able to pull this off in the end it actually worked really cool and i hope you guys stick around to see how well this works but when i started this i didn't know that it was going to work and so i wanted to make sure the focus was to have one perfect great dining table and if i pulled off the extension wings great so i did have to fudge the other end it actually looked kind of cool in the end but i hope you guys will stick around to let me know what you think of each end of this continuous grain extension wings through this process i learned more and more about this nikon z62 like apparently it has dual processors unlike most digital cameras that only have one processor this has two which means it's really really fast also if you're wondering i'm using the 24 to 70 lens which is where you get that really cool dramatic blurry background but really extraordinarily sharp foreground this next bit is all about me making things more difficult than they have to be i could have done just a nice 90 degree butt joint on these extension leaves it would have been fine but here's what i wanted i wanted to kind of click together like a puzzle piece and i've never seen this done before again i'm sure people have done it and done it better than me however i had to teach myself how to do this using essentially hand powered tools where i couldn't use a cnc for this and i spent a lot of time on this this one cut probably spent about an hour on getting it just right you can see here i used the fixed focus point on the nikon and let that saw come into focus instead of the motion tracking as i got close i didn't want to cut too far so i hand sawed it came back with the chisel i just i wanted this to be perfect and i got a little spoiler for you is i messed it up and you'll see here in just a second how i messed it up some of you if you're really smart might have already realized how i messed it up but i spent so much time making sure i got it just perfect i was gonna fine-tune a little bit more as i was walking up i realized what i did can you see what i did i made the cut the wrong way the c channel should be on the same side so it doesn't fit together it fits together like opposite puzzle pieces so i kind of bit my tongue a little bit went and took a walk around the shop and came back and did it the right way but now i get to really show off the nikon features you see the motion tracking there i'm using some dynamic zoom with the editing makes it look like a slider starting to get a little bit fancy i hope you guys don't think i'm getting too fancy but i had a lot of fun getting this cut the right way and using some of the cool features of the nikon to do it and one of the questions someone asked me early on they said man using a nice camera makes me nervous in a dusty shop and it's completely weather sealed and dust sealed so there are no issues using it in my dusty shop now we get to get into the mechanics of how these leaf extensions actually work and you'll see some extra threaded inserts in the table and that was from the mark 1 design which was a thinner lower profile aluminum extrusion that just wasn't strong enough in the end so i switched the design to this 15 series aluminum extrusion which i think is going to be plenty strong enough for big uncle eddie to throw his elbows up on the table and not sag at all and so i drilled these holes and these holes are going to do a really good job of indexing it so they can only go in in the correct place so you'll see here i marked my holes with that made sure that it was perfectly perpendicular to that table marked the next hole and now these kind of flat headed furniture bolts are going to ride in the t-slots and if it sits perfectly parallel it's only going to slide in excuse me perfectly perpendicular it can only go in perfectly if did i use the word perfect too much anyway drilling those holes before really indexes it so they can only go in in the correct place and i hope that makes sense and i'll have some better videos of how these actually work here in a little bit something else i had to consider during this construction process is the expansion and contraction of this big wood table seasonally and the leaf should expand at a similar rate also those bolts are really undersized for those t-slots so there's plenty of wiggle room to account for any seasonal expansion and contraction and then since those holes are drilled directly on top of the bolts i can tighten them down and they get extraordinarily tight so they are very snug but still enough room to account for any seasonal wood movement at this point i was pretty inspired with the progress it was actually starting to look really nice and some of you might be a little disappointed with that seam i'm actually really pleased with it it's never going to look like machined aluminum that just clicks together and that seam disappears it's wood and it's a guy like me making the cuts without using a cnc so that's i don't know about as good as i could do i could maybe do a little bit better on some of the other ones but all in all i am really happy with it and now there was just about 10 hours or so of sanding left on this table top and i will spare you guys that entire montage with just about a i don't know a seven second montage of the sanding and one thing i will never skip is the finishing montage because this is the fun part this is my favorite part where you really get to see that grain come to life this is rubio monaco that i'm using it's a finish i've been using for quite a while i'm not sponsored by them or anything but it works really really well however here is the part that i've been kind of hiding from some of you guys because i had to fill in these low spots with patchwork over here and the patchwork is something that can be really cool i didn't want to do it on the whole table so i used it as kind of an opportunity to practice it and something that would make that non-continuous grain section a little bit more artistic and again it's not something that i think fits perfectly with the table but it did a good job of accomplishing what i needed to accomplish i've always tried to show you guys how i fill these tiny little micro pits in the epoxy using the ca glue and activator however my iphone could never really get close enough whereas this nikon can crop zoom a crazy amount because it's a 24.5 megapixel camera so it can zoom in so far and actually show you guys the detail of what i'm doing for once i did a quick pass with my eighth inch roundover bit and my cordless trim router and i know i wasn't going to show you guys a bunch about sanding but i felt like i should show you this one last tip because i don't think i mentioned it before on my final sanding pass i like to switch to a soft pad on my festool sander put on this merka abernet abranet mesh sandpaper i do feel like i get a much better final finish and i'm using 180 grit here to finish and here i had a friend david allen designs he showed up just in time to help me do some table flipping and a little bit of table finishing and again i am using rubio monaco really durable really beautiful finish that goes on very easily it can be reapplied in place again i'm not sponsored by them i'm still waiting you guys should probably send them several dozen emails and let them know that they should sponsor me because i do so much promotion of their product but i do just genuinely like the product and i haven't found a better one yet so i am applying the finish here you basically just buff it on and wipe it off and here's how it looks and this is there's no filter in it there's no special effects i don't know how to color grade yet so this is straight out of the nikon camera it looks pretty incredible this camera also has in-camera stabilization so you can actually get nice smooth shots on a handheld camera like that if you've seen my videos before you probably know at the end of my videos i have a little call to action where i say hey if you mentioned this word i'll know you made it all the way to the end of the video and i'll answer all of your questions in the comments first i've said that too many times that i feel like i can't even count at this point however there's always someone that's like hey i just skipped to the end of the video and now i know the word how are you going to monitor these people and i got those people right where i want them because this week we're gonna have two words it's gonna be a secret word for all of you people that are watching and the meat of the video then i'll do a fake word at the end of the video to see who's actually paying attention so this week start your question or comment with just my name cam and i've done that one before so it'll be unassuming to the people that actually just skipped ahead to the end of the video so any questions you have start your comment with my name cam and i'll know you made it all the way to the end of the video this base was custom fabricated by a really cool company wicked woods northwest they are a sawmill and a fabrication shop and i was very difficult to deal with on this one because i needed to be so specific and they said that's what they want they only want people to come to them for the really specific one-off bespoke project so big thanks to wicked woods for just absolutely nailing this base and now it was up to me to nail this stretcher nick saban the coach of alabama says that they don't practice until they get it right they practice until they can't get it wrong and i love that motto and that's a really good lesson for woodworking is don't do it until you can get it right one time because then that next step might be the one where you get it wrong and so i did the same thing for these practice cuts i did i don't know maybe 15 practice cuts and by the end i could actually still get it wrong but i was getting it right more than i was getting it wrong so i eventually had to try it on the stretcher and in the end it actually worked for anybody willing to help i need a little bit of focus group help from my viewers and you've probably noticed if you're still with a video that this is a really long video this is over 30 minutes long and i genuinely don't like videos that are longer than they have to be but i feel like videos should be as long as they need to be and i've got a working theory and that's that five years ago nobody watched youtube on their television it was only on your phone you wanted things that are like a minute long or two minutes long and now i watch it for entertainment i go in my home gym i'll put on youtube now instead of tv and that's something you would have never seen a few years ago so i think that it's okay i look for a video you know that's 15 20 30 minutes long however i would like to know from you guys if you like this longer content because i feel like if i would have made it shorter i would have had to cut out some really important stuff and you wouldn't have understood how this build came together so let me know in the comments if you support the long content or if maybe i should keep it under you know 15 minutes or so this piece of walnut had some of the most unique figuring i've ever seen on a piece of walnut so i just absolutely had to have it and i think deep down inside i knew all along that you wouldn't actually see this especially when you get chairs around a table and it's dark with the shadow being cast directly over the stretcher but i did like it and here's what i want to show you on the table bases they actually incorporated some leg levels that i thought was really cool in the end i didn't end up needing them because the floor was flat enough but it is nice to know that i could throw a leg leveler in there if i actually needed it that base was extraordinarily heavy it was made from solid 3 8 inch thick steel plate so i had to enlist the help of a friend also if you're moving tables around kind of shortly after they've been finished within a day or two it's a good idea to use some rubber gloves or nitrile gloves like we are using here and this is big jam he wasn't even getting warmed up but i got pretty burned out by the time we got to our front door so i had to go up vertical see the nice blurry background thanks to that 2.8 lens pretty cool and now i had to make sure that it fit and i knew that it was going to fit but it actually made me a little bit nervous for a second but here's the real moment of truth that's actually pretty cool i'm i'm really proud with how that turned out i hope you guys like it that's how level it sits it can support the weight of our arms no problem it'll handle any amount of dinner that you can throw at it and this is this is my favorite project i've ever done i'm not afraid to say it i think there's certain things that could be improved on but all in all i really couldn't be happier with how this turned out all right some of you may or may not know that i like to give a little bit of credit to people that make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comment with the number that you think is the perfect length in minutes for a video since this was such a long video and that way i will know you guys made it all the way to the end of the video and i will answer all of your questions and comments first as always thank you so much please subscribe for more videos just like this one

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 6,125,224

Keywords: black walnut, diy projects, furniture portland oregon, how to woodworking, live edge furniture, reclaimed table, resin table top, super clear epoxy, walnut dining table, woodworking, wood, butcher block, butcher block island, walnut slab, extending dining table, expanding dining table, extendable table, modern extendable dining table, wood table, small woodworking shop, extending table diy, small space table, table leaf extensions, diy live edge, contemporary dining table

Id: vRasdg_Vm_0

Length: 30min 14sec (1814 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021