Extreme Faux Beam Build

well hey guys thanks for checking out next level carpentry in this video I want to show you the elegant system I came up with for creating some pretty amazing faux beams and it's a system that I've developed over the past few months because I've got a project where I need to build about a 130 lineal feet of faux beams for our new house it's kind of the modern rustic style and so I wanted to use real wood for the beams not the foam ones they're that's a pretty amazing solution for some situations but for this project it needed to be real wood so that I could match the Grain and texture to existing Millwork in the house and I'm not going to tell you that this is an everyday DIY project because it does require some pretty precise Millwork and joinery but it is very doable with even a modest level of skills and tools and I say that because in the past I've done other faux Beam videos where I was making shorter sections of beams and I use specialized clamps to get that done but because of the volume and length of the beams that I'm working on for this project I had to develop a system that got away from using a whole bunch of specialized clamps and the elegant part of it is that it basically involves some special glue blocks and the lowly pocket screws to make this happen with a little more than what you see here on the bench but I'm not going to start out at the beginning with the rough boards because that's rather routine carpentry and Millwork to get the boards to this stage but I will show you the steps that I used to do the final Milling on these boards create these various blocks and pieces that you see here and I'll start off by showing you how I ripped and dadoed these long pieces after flattening thickness planing and straightening roughs on 1 by 12 pecky Cypress boards into pieces three quarters of an inch thick and ten and a half inches wide I ripped a 26 degree angle on one Edge for the 612 ceiling pitch and a 45 and a half degree angle on the other Edge for the long mitered corners on the bottom of the beam notice that I use my exclusive groat tangent ramp roller stands to rip long wide boards like these by myself with ease after ripping those bevels I Orient and stacked the beam face boards to Stage them for plowing dados next using a forest dado King Blade Set to exactly three quarters of an inch wide and 3 16 of an inch deep I adjust the rib fence so the top of the dado is seven and seven eighths inches from the miter's Long Point on the bottom of the beam after plowing the first dado I check it for location width and depth then with everything set up I plow dados and all the beam side pieces using the same setup at the same time for consistency having accurate daedles running full length in each beam side piece is key to success with this extreme faux beam design once I've gone through those gears to make these long pieces I take a side step to make these special clamping and gluing blocks so I'll show you the steps that I used to make these because they need to be very accurate and consistent but accuracy and consistency isn't too tough to get for making a stack of these blocks I'm using half inch thick hdf material for these blocks for these particular Beams I start by ripping strips seven and an eighth inches wide next I cut pieces 7 and 1 16 inches long from those strips this size varies with each project but the sequence and features are the same once I have plenty of blocks for this beam plus a few spares I stack them on their sides in this case the 7 and 1 8 inch edges align them with the rib fence and clamp the stack of blocks together with the Blade Set to 3 16 of an inch high and the rip fence set to exactly three quarters of an inch it takes just seconds to gank cut a notch in both sides of all the blocks safely and accurately when all the blocks are notched I changed the setup by raising the blade very high for this next cut and setting the fence at 3 16 of an inch to The Far Side of the blade using this setup on a good measure of caution I'm able to trim both sides of these glue blocks leaving a three-quarter inch by 3 16 inch lug on both sides of the top edge of each block I confirmed the fit of the glue blocks on the back of a beam face by drawing a square layout line across the face and slipping a block snugly into place with the lug pressed into the dado you can see that there's a small space between the bottom of the block and the beam's bottom which is another key feature of this design the next step is to drill holes for six pocket screws in each of the glue blocks with my Kreg Jig clamped in a vise I position blocks on their edges hooking the lugs on the jig's edge for location and drill two pocket holes in each edge of one face of the blocks I simply use the bottom of the block aligned to the other side of the jig to locate the other two holes on the same face then I flip through the Block's other face and align the block sides with the jig sides to drill two more holes in the bottom edge of the block screws in these holes will hold the bottom of the beam firmly during the final glue up although all six holes are strategically placed the beauty of this design is that precise location isn't really necessary all the steps have you seen up to this point are ones that are required to use this system for beams up to the length of the lumber you can get for instance if you need a 12 foot beam you get 12 foot lumber this is everything you need for the current project I'm working on a couple of the beams are 30 feet long so I've got to do some additional things that involve splicing some boards with splice blocks like this that I made but that gets a little more involved even though the same steps and components are involved so to kind of keep this simple and give an overview I'm going to pause here and just do a dry fit up of a 12 foot section of beam so you can see how all this stuff comes together and then later in the video I'll show you some things that I've kind of learned as I've gone through the process of making these extra long beams and the amazing thing is like I've been saying this job I'm making 30 foot beams but if my shop was a little bit bigger or the job required it I feel comfortable that this method and this process could be used to make beams that are 50 feet long it's just a little more Logistics involved but the design and the procedure that I'm going to show you here on this single length beam are scalable to some pretty amazing stuff should you find yourself in that sort of situation or you need real wood and if the design requires for a full length beam rather than shorter pieces hidden by faux straps to cover of the seams and that's kind of the driving factor in developing this system because the designer and the client didn't want three 10-foot beam sections with a couple straps in the ceiling of their great room they wanted it to look like one solid beam the entire length and methods and tools that I've used previously just aren't scalable to a beam of that length but as you're going to see the system is I apologize for the parts of this that are redundant but I just want to give you a quick overview of the parts I've made to this point so you can see how they come together for the assembly process and basically in a nutshell I've got two beam sides a left and a right each of the sides has a 45 and a half degree miter on one side or bevel on one side in this situation because it's going up to the ceiling of a 612 pitch I've got a 612 bevel cut on the top of the beam so it fits up tight to the ceiling and then I've got a dado plowed the full length of each of these faces the state was exactly 3 8 3 4 of an inch wide and 3 16 of an inch deep it's important that the dado is spaced precisely the same distance from the short point of this miter or this bevel to the location of the Dado as you saw when I was fabricating the blocks there needs to be a little bit of space under the block at the bottom of the beam and speaking of bottom of the beam that's this piece here trying to fall off my table saw here but this is simply a one by basically one by eight with that 45 and a half degree bevel on each side but it's important that the width of this piece is very accurate and very precise it probably didn't show up in any of the videos but rather than have this bevel come to a sharp point you can see that there's a slight flat spot instead of a razor thin point which helps handling these pieces because I'm not dealing with a razor razor thin Edge on the full length of all these pieces it makes it a little bit harder to work with and a little more difficult to get it consistent width in the pieces because that sharp edge can crumble but and I can get away with that and this design because ultimately the corners get hand hewn and rounded so I leave them that way because as you know you got to make it easy on yourself because nobody else is gonna and I guess it goes without saying that all these pieces need to be very flat and very straight if they have a hook or a bow in them it complicates the joinery the grooves and the bevels aren't parallel to the edges they're inconsistent that doesn't work and they also have to be very flat they can't have ripples in them and any twist and any other pieces would carry through and end up resulting in a Twisted beam so that's kind of the overview Beyond DIY carpentry stuff I talked about because before I started shooting video for this I took these boards from a rough inch thick with all kinds of issues got them all clean flat straight and true before I proceeded with the joinery but if you're into making beams of this scale of this level then the capability of getting true and flat boards is within your wheelhouse so with that overview I'm going to do a little bit of layout and show you how this comes together I'll do a couple things to assist in the layout for these blocks and the first one is just to put a clamp on the end here to keep things lined up and keep the ends lined up and the other thing is I've got a just a piece of scrap here that's exactly three quarters of an inch thick I'm just going to drop it down in the dado on one of these pieces that's just kind of a press fit and then I'll use that so that I can square lines across for these blocks now a neat thing about this method is that the spacing between the blocks is pretty arbitrary because of splices I've made on longer beams I've you know been as close as 16 and as far as 24 inches apart so it doesn't really matter as long as there's enough in there for good pressure when the beams being glued up but for the sake of this segment I'm just going to um we'll start at six inches from the end and then go two feet or 18 inches on Center more or less foreign consistent spacing if you had Troublesome boards and you really wanted it to pull up tight you know you could put them 16 inches apart if you got something that's really Cooperative uh two feets plenty but where the distance between the blocks isn't all that important the fact that they're perpendicular to the edges of the board and they line up perfectly across from board to board that is important because it affects how the beam comes together so here you can see why that little board is helpful because I can use it in a framing square to quickly draw layout lines for each of the blocks along the length of this 12 foot beam and those layout lines serve as a guide for screwing the blocks into place using inch and a quarter pocket screws as you'd expect during final assembly I use tight Bond 3 wood glue all along the edge of this to make sure these blocks are held securely in place and to add strength to the final assembly but because this is just a dry fit I'm just using the pocket screws to demonstrate this [Music] the lug on the Block fits snugly in that dado and helps to locate the blocks precisely up and down and then as long as I follow that layout pencil Mark everything is going to be square and true once I've screwed the last of the blocks to one face of the beam I'm able to flip it over and line up the blocks from the first face onto the alignment marks on the inside of the second face and screw them into place I make sure to align the block with the pencil marks from the layout step and then slip the lug into the dado for perfect alignment and then because of space constraints I switched to an angle drill to drive the pocket screws to attach the blocks to the other space of the beam and then I continue on down the beam lining up the lugs in the dado and the blocks and the lines and then finish screwing the blocks to join the beam faces firmly together and perfectly parallel each other and this end block is a good example of how slick this system works because once the lug drops into the dado and I line up with the pencil Mark I know that the assembly is perfect as I approach the end of the beam I want to make sure that the beam is flat as I go along because this method makes for a very strong beam but if the beam is curved when the screws are driven it's going to stay curved especially if the beam is glued but that's not too tough to achieve and I'll be able to finish the rest of the screws and the rest of the blocks to complete this part of the dry fit assembly [Music] well I hope you can take my word for it that it doesn't take long to put 16 screws in the blocks to attach these two faces to each other and once that's done you can see what this assembly looks like and it's got a little spring to it here but the edges are perfectly parallel because of the spacing of the blocks and those dados and I can just flip the thing upside down here and you can see that already this beam is just absolutely stiff as can be there's no flex in it this way so it's ready for the next step which is to put the bottom in place and even though this is just an elaborate dry fit you can see what this setup looks like these pieces are held parallel to each other by the blocks that are screwed and eventually glued in there's two matching bevels or facing bevels there and then the bottom piece has matching bevels to that and the next step in the assembly is just pretty straightforward If This Were a final glue up I'd take my type on glue and put heavy beads of glue along these surfaces kind of brush it out to make it even and then fitting the beam is merely a matter of taking the bottom panel sending it on top and dropping it into place just like that and you can see in this handheld shot how the corners fit together keep in mind that I make these miters at 45 and a half degrees so that the outside points fit nice and tight when they're glued and held in place with screws and there's a little Quirk joint in the corner because I didn't cut the pieces to a razor sharp bevel and looking inside the beam you can see the last feature of the blocks in their design and that there's just a little bit of space between the bottom panel of the beam and the bottom edge of the blocks and that allows the screws to draw that piece tight into place when they're driven so that the miters are drawn up tight before the bottom of the Beam contacts the bottom of the block just like now in an actual glue up situation I need to hold this piece in place while I roll the beam over so I can drive those screws I'll just throw a couple of clamps on here to keep it in place and keep it from making a big gluey mess things would come apart but all I need to do is flip this thing over like so and you know keep in mind this beam this is 12 feet long it would be just as easy if this was 16 feet long even though the sides are a little over 10 inches tall and the bottom is eight inches wide it's all very manageable with one person in a small shop and by using a bit extension and a magnetic tip I can just slip this down inside the beam and drive screws into those pocket holes in the bottom of the glue blocks just like that and driving those screws applies pressure to the mitered glue joints there so that no clamps are necessary at this stage of the build kind of sweet and ironically at this stage of the build the trickiest part for me Isn't assembling beam of positioning the camera in such a manner that I can drive the screws and you can see what I'm doing but as a rule I start with blocks near the center of the beam and work my way towards the ends and I'm also careful to equalize the screw pressure and not drive the screw on one side too much before driving the other screw and that keeps the bottom centered up between the sides and sometimes it's a good idea to skip a block or two while screwing the bottom in to make sure the bottom stays centered up between the sides because if it starts to go off a little bit from one block to the next it's hard to straighten it back out and you could build a bow into the beam so to help avoid that I just skip a block now and then to make sure everything's lined up and all the while I'm using my fingers on the outside corners to shift the beam bottom back and forth to make sure it stays centered up because that's important for keeping the game straight As the screws are driven and the glue goes and you can see the process in action as I drive screws at the other end of the beams where you can see the mitered corners shift around as I make those adjustments and drive the screws and I know I'm doing a good job when everything is tight around the block and the space between the bottom of the beam and the bottom of the block is a nice even Gap and with that the dry fit is complete and other than a bit of mess this is really no different than it goes on the final glue up at this stage of course I'd go and clean up runny glue from inside and outside the beam just to neaten things up but for the most part that's a done deal from this angle on the end you can see that that beam is Arrow straight from one end to the other and not a single clamp is required and not only is the beam straight and true it's Square to its Corners because those blocks inside are what set the squareness of the beam so there's no twist in it not only is the beam straight and true but even though this is just dry fit with screws no glue this is just rigid stiff as can be and stay straight like that and even though this beam is 10 inches tall eight inches wide and 12 feet long this old nail Bender can pick it up and take it to the job site but it's not ready to go out to the job site yet because I've got a lot of work to do on this splicing these pieces and making this beam 30 feet long but let me give you a close-up shot of these miters for any doubters in the audience the miters are nice and tight on the ends and they're drawn up snug and clean all the way along the length of the beam and keep in mind this is done with a handful of pocket screws and not a single clamp so you can see that the design is scalable to beams that are much larger and much longer than this without busting a bid budget purchasing a bunch of clamps to get the job done so for anyone that's able to buy boards long enough to do the beams in a single piece this is pretty much the end of the road if I only needed a 12 foot beam for this project I would just let the glue dry long enough so that working on it didn't stress any of the glue joints few hours possibly overnight and then I go about the finishing process to make the beam look like this and for anyone interested in doing a aged rustic finish like this I've done a number of videos showing the steps that I use to get to that point and I'll put a link over here so you can check that out if that's the direction you're headed but this process works just the same if this was going to be a Beam made of solid Cherry with a stained and varnished finish it's pretty much the same steps to get to this stage but as it is I've got to disassemble this and get into the splicing work to make the beam longer and I'll fire up the camera again when I've got something to show you about that process Oh but before I tear this beam down to work on those places there's one more thing I wanted to show you about this design and that is how the design of the blocks and the configuration of the beam allow for a good deal of flexibility in the method for attaching the beams to the ceiling and the key part of that design is that the tops of these blocks is recessed down below the top edges of the beam and that allows me to make blocks or strips that are attached to the ceiling that in turn hold the beam to the ceiling in this case this is going into a cathedral ceiling with a 612 pitch so I've made blocks with a 612 pitch cut into them and I can just screw through the bottom of the blocks up into the roof trusses with lag screws with enough strength to hold that in position Forever and Always and then when the beams installed the beam will just slip over the ends of these blocks and then it can be attached with trim screws coming up at an angle through the faces of the beam into those blocks to hold everything forever and always and that will give a nice tight fit to the sheetrock on the ceiling in the room pretty much like that and in a situation where the ceiling is just flat these could be just square blocks that serve the same purpose those are screwed to joists or cords in the trusses or else a long strip that's the width of this space can be screwed to the ceiling the beam slipped over it and then the screws driven in to the sides or ends of those blocks to hold the beam in place so that you never have to worry about it crashing down on the sofa or the dining room table another benefit of this empty Hollow feature here is that if there's wiring for accent lighting or a ceiling fan that hangs from the beam Etc it can just weave through this empty space in the beam so there's some flexibility in the design depending on the installation there too as you can see it's another day because there's another t-shirt and I got to get to work tearing this beam apart and working on splices but I want to stop for a minute to ask you to consider subscribing to Next Level carpentry if you haven't already so that you can be the first to be notified when new videos like this show up on YouTube and while you're at it if you like this kind of video with original in-depth content go ahead and hit the thumbs up button so that YouTube knows there's stuff going on here at Next Level carpentry and speaking of t-shirts ones like this are available through links in the video description where you can purchase these things on Spring along with various plans and posters Etc from The Next Level carpentry channel so check that out if there's something you see and something you want there's also links in the video description to my favorite suppliers or purchases through links there provide a little bit of support from the channel through ad fees etc for posting the links and those are there for you if you need one of those items and you can't find it locally and before I get back to work I want to give a big shout out to patrons of Next Level carpentry who help support the channel through patronage at patreon there's a growing list of patrons there who support the Channel with monetary donations but as patrons they also have access to a growing library of in-depth video content from here at the next level carpentry shop and out on various job sites from time to time recent videos in the patron only Library show some interesting in-depth stuff about these beams that goes beyond what I'm showing here in this video and I hear comments from those patrons that tell me that they find Great Value in those Patron only videos so if that's something thing you're motivated for and interested in check out the link to patreon in the video description and I'll quit yattering and get back to it [Music] now I'll tackle the challenge of creating any beams longer than the lumber you can buy and that challenge is to make a convincing board that's as long as the beam that you're going to make which in this case is 30 feet long so to do that I've got these three pieces of pecky Cypress that are prepared like I showed earlier in the video and they're still about 12 feet long so I've got almost 36 linear feet of material so I've got a little flexibility of exactly where I cut the splices because I can trim off almost six feet of waste to get a nice grain match and to make that bottom board as convincing as possible I've laid out these pieces ahead of time and picked which end looks best next to which end I've kind of labeled them here and I've decided that these two ends should blend together quite nicely with the properly cut miter joint so I'll bring you in close to show you that process which is basically the same as I'll use on all the other joints on the bottom and faces of this 30 foot beam and I've got this crazy long work surface set up here that starts with a bench on that end carries over the table saw and ends up down here with one of my roller stands which serve to create a fairly flat surface to work on while I'm cutting and fitting this joint the camera is looking at this upside down but you can see I've labeled these two ends a that end of the beam will be at the front of the great room so this is the first joint that shows up and I've got these grain patterns here with a knot and this grain pattern and these are separate boards obviously probably from different trees but I found these features on these ends of these two boards that should blend together nicely if I cut the miter where these pencil lines are you can see how this grain pattern here should flow nicely into that one so that's my goal is to cut here and here to make this fit together and I'll make the cuts at 45 degrees to maximize the gluing surface and I'll cut the Long Point on this side and the short point on this side because the main viewing angle in the great room is this direction so you'll be looking past the joint instead of into the joint and I use the same overview and thought process to locate and cut each of the splices in each of these pieces you can certainly use more sophisticated methods then I'll use here for cutting these miters but I'll show you that this can be done pretty quickly and pretty simply with basic tools I've just got my little Makita saw here where I can drop the angle to 45 degrees make sure the blade depth is where it needs to be and then use a steady hand and a large speed square to cut that 45 degree bevel on the end of the board somewhere in the neighborhood of my pencil Mark and because I find it easier to cut doubles like this with the Long Point facing up I transfer the mark on the other board to the back side of the piece and cut the miter from that face and then reorient the boards to check the fit of the miter and I think you'll agree that that is a pretty sweet matchup considering the randomness of the boards that I'm working with once I'm satisfied with the grain match up I take a razor sharp block plane to clean up the cuts made with that little saw and it doesn't take long to get a perfect fit that'll be strong and disappear after glue it once I've got the bevels playing perfectly smooth I reorient the boards and check the fit of the miter again before I glue up this time using a four foot level as a straight edge to make sure the miter cuts are perfectly perpendicular to the edges of the boards so that the joint fits when the boards are perfectly straight in alignment and This Test shows me that the fit needs a little bit of adjustment because one side of the joint overlaps so I'll make a little adjustment using that sharp block plane to perfect the fit and the path to a perfect fit like this might be a bit shorter if you've got a top of the line sliding compound miter saw but I thought you might enjoy a little insight into the old school way joints like this will fit on job sites back in the day and I'll say now as I said back then I'll buy that once I'm satisfied with the fit on the front I flip both pieces and attach them with a splice block I'm using this half inch Russian Birch for splice blocks because it's thin it's stiff and it's strong and it doesn't add too much bulk to the beam I make the splice block about a quarter inch narrower than the board on the back between the short points of the miter and then you can see I've drawn kind of reference Marks here to Center the block up on the board and I put a center Mark here that'll line up with the miter on the back of the boards and once I do that I'm using a little carbide tip Snappy bit to pre-drill and countersink hole that attaches the splice block first to the board with the miter short Point facing up then I drive some one-inch Torx Drive screws through the block and into the board to hold it in place as I said I attached the splice block to the board with the short point of the miter facing up on the back side and that helps fit the miter because the board with the Long Point can be jammed up underneath the splice block for a nice tight fit with the two boards in place I double check the alignment Mark and use the four foot level to make sure the board Edge is perfectly straight and everything looks copacetic at this point when I go to glue this joint together for good I want to make sure I can get pressure on this board against this board before I drive the screws so I just screw down a temporary clamping block here by piloting for screws as before and then attaching the block with those same torque Drive screws once that block is secured I use a 36 inch long squeeze clamp on the clamping block and splice block and put a little bit of pressure on it to tighten up that moisture joint on the face of the boards and you can see the effect of the pressure here as it forces the Long Point of the miter into the notch underneath the splice block with pressure applied I use the four foot level one more time to make sure the edge is straight undo a little bit of tapping to align the bevels on each side of the bottom boards and this step in the process highlights the importance of good consistent Milling to make sure that these bottom boards are the exact same width so that there's not a step in the board at the joint once everything's in place and I'm satisfied with the fit I drill and drive screws into the opposite end of the splice block to hold the joints firmly in place and once the splice block is screwed firmly in place I can flip the board over and inspect the fruits of my labor and with a little bit of glue and some clamping pressure that joint is going to be excellent on the bottom face of this beam and that right there is how I go about creating a 24 foot long 1x8 for the bottom of the beam and all I need to do to make this 30 feet long is to do another splice on the other end to get a good grain match up on the joint and then trim the ends to the 30 foot overall length that I need for the beam when it's done and I don't know about you but I've yet to see 28 foot long one by eights available in any big box store or lumber yard in my part of the country oh yeah and keep in mind that this board is pecky Cypress which makes it more valuable and rarer still and helps justify the time and effort it takes to make boards like this for beams like these after going through all the gears again I've now created a one by eight piece of pecky Cypress that's 30 feet long and it handles pretty much like a single board because of those splice blocks on the back this isn't glued up yet I've got to do all the test fitting and everything for the whole bean get all the splices done and then I'll glue those all at the same time but I think that's kind of an unusual piece of wood right there and as I said earlier this process would work with beams uh you know 50 feet long 48 feet long if you had 3 16 Footers and enough area to work I think with another pair of hands it would be manageable to make a beam like this in that 50 foot range which it's kind of cool if you ask me but I'm going to keep going on the splices work on the splices for the beam faces get all that set up and I'll come back to the camera when I glue up one of these joints just so you can see what that looks like we can see that it's still a burgundy shirt day here in the shop while I'm working on these Beams I spent a couple hours cutting and fitting all the faces in the bottom of the beam and finished fitting and dialing in all eight of the face splices so there's two in the bottom and three on each side and I've already glued up five of the eight joints but I wanted you to see what this process looks like as I'm making these 30 foot long one by tens of pecky Cypress and because there's a fair amount of stress on the face while I'm working with it until it's assembled into the beam which is pretty structurally rigid I want to make sure these joints are really strong and so I've come up with something that I call a hybrid glue joint and it involves using tight Man 3 glue and JB Weld on the same joint and I'll bring the camera into the middle joint of the back face of the beam to show you what I'm talking about and this is what the back of the joint looks like after I cut and fit the face pieces here and to get this hybrid joint what I do is use epoxy on the miter and then use type on three for the splice block and because I've got to leave all these pieces stacked up as that JB Weld cures which takes you know a good eight to ten hours in a 72 Degree shop I flip the piece over first and use a piece of thick sturdy clear packing tape on the face of the beam so that any glue squeeze out doesn't glue this face to the one drying underneath it so that piece of tape will catch any glue squeeze out as I go through this glue up process for this project I'm using the JB Weld steel reinforced epoxy and I can get away with that because the weathered finish on the beams is gray itself so any glue joint on the face side isn't going to show through the gray stain if I was using a regular stained finish I would probably switch to a clear epoxy for this project but I know this stuff is super strong and so as long as I can get away with the color I'm going to but to JB Weld for anybody that's used it is simple foreign just squeeze out a good sized pile there and use a putty knife to mix it to an even gray consistency you'll see that I'm using this Plexiglas mixing paddle Works nice I've had this thing for decades actually so it's super handy for this kind of work and I'm using a sharp putty knife to get thorough mixing quite quickly because it doesn't leave any of the unmixed epoxy stuck to the board because it's straight and sharp and mixes everything that I dispensed doesn't take long at all to mix it up and on previous Beams I used an epoxy called pc7 it's in some ways it's stronger than JB Weld in my opinion but it's pretty thick and this JB Weld isn't much thicker than the tight Bond glue it doesn't run like tight Bond wood on this joint but it also squeezes out when I put pressure on the joint and I'm just putting it you know plenty of it on here I don't care if it squeezes out the other side I want to make sure the joint is full and I got that tape there to kind of catch everything and once I've got that smeared on one side of the joint I'll switch the angle of the camera so you can see this a little bit better but I've got a generous coat layer of that JB Weld steel reinforced epoxy on there I'm just going to kind of press this in so that the two faces meet they meet face to face I like the coverage I'm getting on this side of the joint you can't see this too good but I just want to make sure it's all covered which it's doing real nicely and this JB Weld is going to penetrate into the end grain and make a nice strong connection on these two mitered faces and that's looking pretty hunky-dory I'll clean up a little bit of that squeeze out on this side just because I can but the next step is to put one of these splice blocks on this is about six inches wide 20 inches long I'm just going to center it up here on the middle this is where it'll get screwed down and I've already pre-fit all of this stuff when I did The Joint just to make sure everything fit good and I numbered everything so I know everything's going to go where I want it and I can just glue this up put some strips of glue in here and this just makes sure that I get a very good positive connection between that splice block and the face boards themselves and the splice block adds a lot of strength but the one kind of strength that would really have trouble handling is if this board got flipped over and bent if this if this joint here is under tension because the board bends it's got a likelihood of braking and I don't want that so even though I'm using all this glue and these screws I do have to be careful handling the board even after the glue is cured and I'm using this little one inch Torx Drive screws to hold the splice block down I make sure to drive the screws down good so that so that I get glue squeeze out on there and I know this block is tight to the face of that board because ultimately it's the strength of the block on the face of the board that adds the strength to this joint I can check the fit of things right here make sure that the board is in alignment I don't want it to have a kink in it like this when everything's glued up so I get it closely aligned there and then I take this clamp like I used in the setup process and I use this to apply pressure to the Joint so this comes together and you can see the glue squeeze out there you should be able to got a little bit of epoxy to clean up everything's feeling good but I'll go down and Eyeball this to make sure that there's not a kink in this connection it was just a slight kink in there and you can see this glue squeezed out when I straightened it out but you can also see how this clamp is forcing this long point of this piece up into the short point of the other piece under this block so that's an extra strong joint because epoxy actually has Gap filling properties [Applause] but the less of a gap it has to fill the stronger the joint is going to be and that's what that joint needs to look like I'll clean this glue squeeze up in a little bit but another thing I'm doing on these beams because the faces are so wide and I can't glue over this dado I'm putting a little temporary piece on the top of the beam here that'll help hold everything in alignment as the epoxy sets but then I'll remove the block for the final installation of the beam because they'll probably be a a bracket screwed to the roof truss somewhere in here so this one doesn't get glued down it just gets screwed in place for strength as the epoxy cures overnight and once everything is screwed into place I can take off the clamp and remove this little clamping block here because it would just be in the way later during beam assembly and you can see in this panning shot that this beam face is Arrow straight and judging by the glue squeeze out under the clamping block and in the miter I know that this is going to be a super strong joint once the epoxy and tight Bond 3 cure and because the beam is 30 feet long and the shop is 30 feet 6 inches long every time I set up the camera and move into the shot I've got a duck under my 30 foot long workbench but I'm going to finish out burgundy shirt Day by gluing up the last two joints in the face of the beam everything sets up overnight and I'll come back tomorrow with a clean shirt and a new outlook on life and shoot a little video as I assemble this 30 foot long faux beam now that these hybrid glue joints have had a chance to set up overnight it's been almost 24 hours I can show you something that I'm pretty much guessing you've never seen before and what it is a 1 by 10 by 30 foot piece of pecky Cypress you can see how this pretty much acts as a solid piece because of those glue joints and splice blocks on there and now that the glue is set up I can flip these pieces over [Applause] and do a little bit of work on the joints to remove that epoxy and I'll show you what that's like to get an idea of what you can expect from this process if you ever happen to be doing a similar project and what you're looking at here is the face side of one of the hybrid glue joints and I can just peel off this clear packing tape that I used to protect surfaces from getting glued together with that JB Weld but it's set up nice and solid and all I need to do to dress these up is just use an 80 grit belt on a belt sander kind of remove the epoxy and do any leveling that's required with the two pieces of wood come together [Music] and that's pretty much all it takes to clean the excess glue off that joint and remember these beams get a dark gray faux finish so the little bit of epoxy that shows there isn't a problem if this beam was going to get stained and lacquered I could have used clear epoxy and that seam would hide quite nicely as well and I'll do another joint down here just so you can see the process again and realize that this is repeatable and scalable for making Uber long boards for making Uber long faux bees and it takes a bit longer to Belt sand away the excess epoxy on this joint because there's some unevenness in the boards from previous wood stabilization efforts but you can see here where the epoxy shows from this wood and that epoxy was used to kind of give some structural Integrity to this whole section of the board in an effort to preserve length on the board and the character of The Grain on this pecky Cyprus and now after that bit of belt sanding you can see what a 30 foot long 1x10 looks like when the seams are cleaned up and it gets even better later on when I do the texture to blend the peckiness from one board to the other at those seams now that all that splicing work is done I can go about building the beam using the steps that I did before and you can see these little wings here I just screwed some scraps to my 2 by 12 workbench that bench is 24 feet long and now it's 30 inches wide and I can just tip my boards over onto those extensions and putting the bottom of the beam over here that's the one by eight and I've got these pieces of beam oriented so it'll just all assemble the way it is I don't have to pick these up and flip anything in for m but I can flip this 30 foot 1 by 10 over onto the ears on this side of that work surface and I already got everything lined up and they laid out for the assembly blocks already so that I can proceed with gluing those and screwing them into place to put the two sides of the beam together like I did previously with that single 12 foot section once everything is laid out and set up I just distribute glue blocks along the 30 foot length of the beams and then starting at one end I glue and screw them into place on those layout marks on a technical note I modified two of the blocks by shortening them a half inch on the bottom so that they don't interfere with the splice blocks on the bottom panel when I assemble the bead and I'm able to make quick work of installing these blocks as I did before on the dry fit once I've got the system down so it doesn't take long to get them all glued and screwed into place you hear me use the term scalable a lot on the steam build and I hope it's clear to see that doing the actual glue up on this 30-foot beam doesn't require a whole lot more effort than it took to do the dry fit on that 12 foot beam earlier in the video as expected it didn't take a crazy amount of time to put all the blocks on one face of the beam so that now I can flip this over and screw it together like I did before on the other one with a couple of changes because I'm here working alone I don't want this glue to get smeared all over the place so I've clamped some blocks four of them along the length of the beam and just temporarily clamping those here I and I've got everything set up so I can put the glue on this face down here tip this over and then I'll be driving the screws down so that's what the setup looks like this is the biggest longest beam I've done this way to date and so uh I'm just going to get into it here and uh wish me luck [Music] so far I'm into about a half a bottle of that tight Pond glue for this project and uh I think kind of maybe those Folks at tight bond out of me Pat me on the back or something don't you using their glue on a job like this all right now it is time to flip him over here here we go [Music] so far so good let's drop this guy down and see what we get something [Music] [Music] [Music] I guess there's a few shortcomings to building a 30-foot beam in a shop that's 36 feet or 30 feet 6 inches long but it can be done in my estimation this part of the assembly is very scalable as well just these few temporary blocks in here allow me to work on this long beam all by myself and I'm not sweating any of the layout or anything I'm just going by the marks driving screws where the block goes the little lug holds it in the dado so everything is self-aligning basically and just works out very nice and I can pull this last uh spacer block here so the whole beam can kind of drop where it drop down in where it belongs foreign got that nice snug fit of those lugs down in that that long dado so it brings everything into alignment as I go through the process and I didn't really plan to show so much of this assembly but I don't want anybody saying oh yeah I brought in the extra helpers as soon as the camera was shut off now this is All Me by my lonesome chips not here today I think he had a little too much Thanksgiving and he's not working these days [Music] getting that second side glued up and screwed into place was actually much less trouble than I anticipated and after only about 10 minutes I've got both sides of the beams glued and screwed together and I'll reiterate that the surface I have for assembling this beam is pretty flat over its 30 feet of length so that I'm not building a bow into the beam with all these screws and glue so now with these 30 foot sides all assembled glued up I'm ready for the last nerve-wracking step which is going to be to glue the bottom into place and in this case because the beam is so long and I've got to drive the screws in I'm going to have to flip the beam this way onto the bottom once everything's glued up rather than drop the the bottom in upside down clamp it and flip it over I think that's just too much of a deal so my next challenge is to figure out how to do 60 feet of glue joints on here quick enough that the glue doesn't skin over or just run off and to leave plenty on the surfaces so that the joints are full when I flip this beam over so once again wish me luck well I'm not really sure what kind of video I'm going to get of this process what I've decided that is that I'm going to glue up both surfaces of the miters one into the other so that is 120 lineal feet of glue joint and normally I would just put a heavy bead on one side and squish it together but with this that extra glue will just run off in the time it takes me to do the rest of the joint so I am just going to attempt to do this process with a glue brush and the glue get a good coat smeared on each of those hopefully it doesn't all run off and I can flip this thing over and get it done so uh I don't know if the camera might die halfway through this but I can't stop to uh do anything about it once that process happens so uh wish me luck again this is the third time right and uh we'll see what we get on video of this 30 foot beam glue up I want to make sure the long points of these miters are glued I'm gonna get my rhythm down here for this part and incidentally I looked around town today for one of those uh rolling glue bottle dispenser things nobody had one I've never needed one before so I wasn't prepared but I got to thinking about this part of the job and I thought boy this might go a lot better if I had one of those but you gotta fight the battle with the Army you have not the Army you wish you had so just gonna do this up here and see where I get this is fresh type on glue I want it to be thin so that it spreads easily but unfortunately that thinness means it's also runny so I'm working against those two factors here the whole time as I go off camera incidentally I've got the furnace shut off in the shop I don't want any hot warm air blowing on this glues I don't want the skin over in the process so that's working all right it's about a little a little less than 70 degrees in the shop so it gives me more open time on this glue but it's mostly about the time the running time of the glue how long it has to run I'm more work concerned about it running off the surface than I am having it skin over because of that and here I am back in the camera on the home stretch about 12 feet to go out of that 120 so far I'm not regretting this but we'll see all this glue on the outside the beams no big deal because I've got a bunch of heavy heavy texturing and weathering to do on that so that all gets brushed away and I pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to have a fair amount of cleanup of glue to do on the shop floor and the benches here but assuming I can pull this off that's a small price to pay I started off with a full bottle of glue that just pretty much ran out mostly be some thick stuff at the bottom of that bottle quit running out at the end there but I have more glue for exactly this time when this sort of thing happens don't want to be looking for glue so I think I'll go back and kind of touch everything up make sure everything is still to my satisfaction which it is a little glue here and there now that it's had time to kind of sit there and soak in and think about a little bit just want to make sure that that's all coated it is glue is still tacky plenty of life left in it I'm just kind of getting this top Edge a little bit here once I flip the beam over any glue that's run down will run back into the joint so that's not a bad thing and that is as good as it's going to get so here goes last message step got to make sure the ends of the beam are lined up because I'm not going to be able to slide it once it tips there it is so I switched the angle of the camera there just so you can kind of see this process doing a little bit of wiggling here get those miters to kind of squeeze in next to each other there looks pretty darn good a beam is Barrel straight going this way and that'll only get better as I screw this bottom in I'll get my extension here and get some screws going I'll start in the middle again work my way towards the ends just like I did before I'm I'm lining up the bottom panel as I tighten the screws something like that at some point you'll probably be able to see in the camera the squeeze out I'm getting on that joint which is a marvelous thing it feels nice and even I'm just going to skip a few blocks here kind of get an overall tightening and alignment make sure everything is good you can't see it in the camera but that really does shift it back and forth to get things lined up and just like I showed you in the dry fit down at the bottom of that block just a little bit of space under there because I don't want the blocks to be tight to the bottom before the glue joints are tight and that is exactly what I'm getting having a little bit of trouble right here getting the bottom of the beam to Center up it's apparently a sixteenth of an inch different but a case where I'm aiming for Perfection and I'll settle for the best I can do well I'm pleased with that I've got a guide screws in all the way along it's very straight everything's nice I don't think that bottom centering issue will be a deal down there so I'm just going to go back and fill in all these screws and uh get that bottom all drawn up tight and then maybe then breathe a saw every leaf [Music] and this panning shot inside the beam you can see there's good glue squeeze out all along the inside of those Corner miters so I know the joint will be strong and if there's any open spots in the glue joint on the outside corners of the beam when I flip it over I can always inject a little bit of glue in there from the outside to fill up gaps if there are any but it's reassuring to see all the glue squeeze out on the inside because it makes me confident that I've got a good strong joint it'll be necessary for transporting and installing this crazy long beam foreign but I'm very pleased with the way it came out I've got good glue squeeze out on the joint all the way along Inside and Out near as I can tell and you can see a few clamps down here and I had a little bit of an issue with getting that bottom panel to Center up down there and part of it was caused because uh the pocket hole screws blew out the bottom on a couple of those the modified blocks so I didn't get the up pressure I needed so I just added a few clamps on there just to make sure that that got good and snug as it dries but uh All Things Considered if it wasn't for that um that's 120 lineal feet of glue joint on a beam well I guess it's 60 lineal feet two sides but 60 lineal feet of glue joints and if it wasn't for that it would be zero clamps just those pocket screws so I am really pleased with the way the system works out or worked out on this project so far but I get to let this dry overnight and go download some video and uh see where I end up at on this project tomorrow well here I am another day and another t-shirt and this beam has had time to dry overnight so I can remove the clamps from this one little section for the bottom there and show you how a 30 foot beam looks when it's all glued up and assembled and I think you'll be kind of impressed when you see how those 30 foot long floppy pieces of one by turn into this faux beam foreign as you've seen it's kind of tricky to work on a 30-foot beam and shoot video in a small shop but one thing that I don't have here is smoke and mirrors so I'll just hike down to the far end of the beam here with the camera clear at that end of the shop and show you what this looks like I had to crack this beam loose in a couple spots a couple little dabs of glue got on those blocks underneath there but for the most part that's me with a 30 foot faux Beam made with the dado and glue block process that you saw demonstrated here this is the wrong position I can't pick this thing up in the middle from here I could do it more like a squat but it's uh it's very rigid over the 30 foot length it does have the ability to twist a little bit which I think will only help when it comes time to install this in the great room of a beautiful new home I'm going to slide this over here and flop it on its side so you can see what that looks like which is something like that and it gives you a look at the bottom of the beam for the first time where everything's all glued in and it gives you an idea of what's possible in making a big faux beam like this if this was a solid Timber this whole scope of the project would be different it would have to be installed as the house was being built because it would take a forklift to lift it but as it is I'm able to retrofit this beam into the house that's already in its finished stages and the people are living in there so it's kind of a remarkable thing in my humble opinion now they make foam faux beams this size and this length which are wonderful they would be a whole lot easier to maneuver and lift but the downside there is you don't get the real wood texture you don't get the fact that it's real wood and you're able to choose only from the selection of colors and textures that they're able to make this is completely custom from Ground Zero for the wood species the stain color the texture style and the size and proportion of the beam so there's a lot of benefits to doing it this way if the foam faux beam option isn't a good one for the project you're looking at but let me give you a panning shot of the beam at this stage just so you can see what it's like this end of the beam goes to the back of the house it's actually quite visible in the great room here's the first Face Place on this side and as you'll see I staggered those splices they're about five feet apart here's the first place on the bottom and I've matched up that the grain once this is textured that that transition will be quite nice I've got to do work on this peckiness on the side of the beam as I did in the other video so you can see what this looks like as it gets textured out and blend that those pecky features together there's a little bit of pecky detail on the bottom of the beam another splice this is I think this is the one I featured earlier in the video the grain just flows really nicely other than the color there it's a little different this will just completely go away once it's textured and stained and I've got another face splice way down here at this end to glue this five foot piece on here and I'll dip the camera down so you can see the straightness of the beam I think you can get an idea of what it looks like there and I guess this is my version of the big reveal once the beam is all glued up I can't say move that bus or something crazy like that but I can't say roll that beam so you can see what this looks like on the other side if I can get it shifted around here I'm going to make sure to keep it centered on this work surface so the whole thing doesn't flip over that would be a dangerous disaster at this point but that's what the other side looks like here and I've got to get to work doing all the texturing steps that you see in that other video starting with using the graph carving disc and an angle grinder to knock the corners down then a restorer tool Etc but as far as the beam goes the design and features of this faux beam building process that's pretty much what you see is what you get and I hope you'll leave questions in the comments if there's things about this build that didn't make sense that I missed or that you don't understand and I guess I won't know until the job's all done what the linear foot cost of beams like this is and I'm pretty sure it's more than the foam faux beams but like I said just a little bit ago you can get a lot more for your money doing it this way if it's an important thing and all that is to say faux beams like this made of pecky Cypress aren't an inexpensive option but I really do think that it's a high value option so I'm to get to work with all my texturing tools to finish this up and hopefully get it delivered in the next couple of days but I'll wrap this up by saying as always until next time thanks for watching well hey I gotta say it's always fun when I noticed that at least a couple people are sticking around to the end of the end of the end just to see what's going on in the shop here but despite your persistence this really isn't the end of the end of the end yet I thought you might get a kick out of seeing what a mess this process generates I've just finished up the texturing on all 30 feet of all three sides of this beam and I thought you just might get a kick out of seeing what the shop looks like at this stage of the game because it is a mess there's quite a layer of dust on the floor on pretty much everything around here because that restorer tool really tears out the soft grain especially on this pecky Cypress which is exactly what I want because it gives an awesome weather texture to the beam and if you check out the other video I linked earlier I go a lot more off into the Weeds on what it takes to texture and weather a beam like this but now that I've showed you what this shop looks like when it's at it's messiest I'm going to get everything cleaned up and apply a few coats of stain and I'll fire up the camera again at the end of the end of the end of the end of the end and uh show you what this beam looks like when it's ready for delivery and installation so then until the end of the end of the end of the end of the end then I'll be back foreign [Music] as the world's quietest dust collector huh can hardly even hear it that'll work [Music] and then now I'm ready to bring out that the stay in the machine if anyone wants to accuse me of an inability to wrap up a video I guess I'm guilty as charged but I wanted to stop at this stage I've got the shop pretty well cleaned up I'm about ready to put a coat of classic gray Minwax stain on this beam but I wanted to show you the miters on the bottom of the beam before I put that heavy gray stain on there just in case there's any doubters hanging around here at this late stage of the video who would want to accuse me of using caulk or putty to fill those miters in to hide them if they doubt the capability of pocket screws and tight Bond three glue for gluing up a 30-foot beam so let me give you a close-up and see if you can spot the miter this end of the beam is definitely one of the best sections on it but I'm standing right here and I know there's a miter there and I'm pretty sure it's right there but I think you'll admit that is pretty well hidden and the giveaway is the direction of the grain not any kind of a gap on that miter here's one of the seams in the face after it's done texturing and yes you can see this gray glue line but that'll go away with the stain there are other places on the beam like right here where the grain direction is a pretty obvious giveaway on a close-up like this but when this beam is 12 feet off the ground off the floor that's going to be pretty convincing that it's a solid beam here's another section there's a miter running right through there guys there's a splice and in all fairness I'll take you down here to the end of the beam where this is probably one of the more obvious sections right here because the wood grain and the color is different here the miter it's got a big pecky hole in it right here you can see the miter pretty clearly at this stage because of the color of the wood and because of the texture of the grain but none of that is because there's a gap on that miter and these are all sections that were essentially clamped with pocket hole screws and nothing more so I hope you'll agree that this method of using those clamping blocks and this sequence for prepping assembling gluing up and finishing this beam yields a pretty convincing result for producing a 30 foot faux beam out of real wood well I don't know if this is the moment you've been waiting for but I can tell you it's definitely the moment I've been waiting for because this 30 foot long extreme full beam is now 100 complete and ready for delivery this job's been hanging over my head long enough as it is and now it's literally hanging over my head because I was unable to schedule delivery for this 30 foot long piece until tomorrow but it gives me an opportunity to show you a couple things about this finished beam and the first one is how strong it is because it's suspended all 30 feet of it in the shop from two points I've got one strap here hooked to a sky hook to hold this end of the beam and then there's only one other strap clear down at this end of the beam there's a good 18 feet in between those straps and it's held up there just fine suspended from the two Sky hooks in the next level carpentry shop ceiling and not only is the beam strong enough to be suspended by two points it's really not that heavy foreign as you can see there I can lift it all by myself because of the relatively thin boards that make it up and the lightweight blocks that hold it all together and I think it's great you stuck around long enough to see that performance of this beam so let me give you a quick close-up of what the Finish looks like now that it's all textured and I've applied the four-step stain process to give it this aged weathered look it's difficult to get a good camera angle and adequate lighting to do justice to the finish of this beam as it's hanging here in the shop but I'll tell you that I'm quite pleased with the way the texture and the grain flow from one end of the beam to the other where tight glue joints deep weathering and creative texturing provide a pretty convincing look that this is a solid beam and not a faux Beam made of 11 separate pieces of wood well I hope you found it worth your while to stick around to the end of the end of the end of the end of the end of this long Next Level carpentry video to get one last look at this extreme full beam before it gets shipped out and delivered tomorrow and I look forward to catching up with all you die hards at the end of the next the next level carpentry video take care

Channel: Next Level Carpentry

Views: 317,999

Keywords:

Id: pf_tG1hQGtg

Length: 72min 17sec (4337 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022