Five Years of Woodworking Projects

hey this is cam with Blacktail studio and this is my first ever woodworking Anthology and yes I looked up the definition of the word Anthology to make sure that it applied here but this is a compilation of my all-time favorite woodworking projects and people have told me in the past that they sometimes use my videos to help them fall asleep at night and although I don't know that that's a compliment if I'm going to do anything I'm going to do it all the way so this is the video that will get you deep into REM sleep if that's your thing and these projects range in timeline from a few months ago to a few years ago so you really get to see the evolution of my woodworking skill my camera work and even my voiceover I hope you enjoy people often ask me what do you do with all of that leftover wood do you burn it can I have it and the answer sometimes is yes to both but generally I try to keep it and repurpose it later and both of these pieces came off the same slab that I made oh just probably a couple months ago and they were really pretty wood and you can see it's actually a really thick stock so I thought I could actually do something with it so I took this long little bit narrower piece and I'm going to cut it into two mediumsized chunks glue them together and this is going to be kind of the main stem of a round table base that I'm making I think Walnut varies in color more than any other wood whereas if you got a white oak slab you could pretty much match it with another white oak slab relatively closely whereas something like this Walnut varies in color from like a light brown to a dark brown to this really kind of almost deep red with some almost black streaks in it once it gets finished and because of this it's really important when you're building a project to build it all from the same tree if at all possible because I don't like staining things and stain always just kind of to mute the colors so if I'm just going to highlight the natural colors they all need to be from the same tree and especially for the shaft section both of these definitely needed to match and even the base that I used is from the same slab so everything is going to match just perfectly there are two main camps in The Woodworking world when it comes to doing glue-ups one side says you only add glue to one piece and then add the other piece dry the other side is like I'm doing there and adding glue to both pieces and I don't feel super passionate about it part of me feels like one piece might almost get like an air pocket or a dry spot I don't know if I'm being that sensitive I would love to know the counterargument to why not add glue to both sides so if you do feel strongly about it let me know your opinions on adding glue to one or both as a woodworking YouTuber I get a lot of questions and they're usually something in the vein of who do you think you are or maybe what gives you the nerve but occasionally I get constructive questions and probably the most frequent constructive question that I get is related to my finishing process and I'm very very proud of my finishing process it's taken me a long time I don't want to say too perfect cuz I'm always working on making it better but I am very confident in that process at this point and because I get so many questions on it and because it's such a lengthy process I eventually decided to make my own free finishing Workshop it's very similar to my paid epoxy Workshop but this one's completely free and there's no bait and switch there's no come in and get the first chapter then I'll charge you for the other chapters all of it is completely free and it will remain free forever once you sign up I may end up charging for it eventually that was my original plan I was going to have a paid finishing Workshop but I thought I would just rather give this one away it's like an hour and a half long and it takes you through every step to get an essentially perfect finish even in a Dusty shop because it's not much of a process if you need a big fancy spray booth or something like that so if you want some details on that free finishing Workshop there's a link in the description I really like having a 12-in miter saw but I feel like no matter how big of a tool we get we always Max it out and we always need one just a little bit bigger and that's what the problem was here is that 12-in MIT saw couldn't quite cut through this stock so I had to come back with my router table and my flush trim bit and just nip off that last little bit the design that I'm going for is based on a couple of end tables that I built in a video a couple months ago and for that video I wanted to spend less than $100 and then make $1,000 profit not using any of my social media and for that I hand sculpted a couple of end tables and I think in the end I was able to make about $950 and it was a really cool video and even just got a comment from someone saying that they liked the idea and they were inspired by it so they copied the design made their own Etsy listing and they were able to make a similar sale and I think they said it was 8 days so really proud of that cuz I think woodworking should be more accessible than some of these you know super expensive slabs that you see me use in other videos so if you want to see that video I'll leave a link in the video description as well for the sculpted tables I've built in the past I've attached the stem to the base with epoxy and just a domino and that is really really strong but this is going to be kind of a full-size dining table or at least a full-size breakfast table so I wanted something even stronger than that so I'm doing kind of an oversized mortise andant joint and to do that I needed to make a little jig and that's all I'm doing here was just cutting it's not even a perfect square it's just barely off of being a square so just a perfectly 90° kind of rectangle that I'm attaching with double side tape and I'm going to be using my router with a brass bushing jig to cut the notch here and this will all make sense in just a little bit but using this jig enables me to make perfect 90s and I could go about as deep as the router bit would go which was around 2 in or so after I got the mortise cut I could take the same jig over to my stem and cut the same recess there just making sure that I have the grain lined up the way I want it to go because I do want those vertical stripes to go the same direction on both the base and the stem so really critical that I didn't forget that there but the cool thing about this is it will be a perfect fit just need to cut a Tenon now that matches it just exactly and since as I mentioned before it's not a perfect square I have to make a couple cuts and just really slowly dial this in and this Walnut here isn't from the same tree it actually doesn't matter I probably that it's even Walnut at all but you see I got the first one cut and then that one was still a little bit too big and this was quite a few more tries than that I probably spent about a half an hour there taking a little bit out at a time after I got both sides fitting just very snug I took it over to my router table and since I cut the uh mortise with a/ in router bit I used my quar inch round over there to round over each corner and in theory all of these are going to just slide right in because if I used a half-inch router bit should work with a/ qu in round over bit in theory and as you can see I actually got pretty lucky and that ended up working in the end but it was quite snug and I had a little bit of a problem not getting getting it in but the problem was getting it out and this made me feel a little bit better about using this as far as strength goes but it was actually a little bit frustrating working this out the glue that I'm going to be using for this is like a marine epoxy it's different than the Deep por epoxy you see me use in some of my tables and the reason I'm going with epoxy is it does a better job at holding this long grain to the end grain and normally I really like just plain wood glue but for this Bond I think epoxy is going to be a little bit better in one of my past videos I was doing essentially the same thing I was having to come up with a way to clamp this stem to the base and I did it by stretching a 2x4 over the top and running clamps to either side and I thought that I was pretty clever and someone commented like yeah there's a name for that that's called Bridge clamping and I didn't know there was an actual name for it but it does work well for something like this one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of doing these carved bases is even though this base was pled flat before I got started by the end there's almost always some little warping and twisting and it doesn't sit perfectly flat and it's really frustrating and I finally came up with a solution for it and that's what this little Notch is here and you'll have to wait to see how I actually use this Notch but this is going to enable me to keep the base perfectly flat normally this is about the time when I would do my best to find a way to ask you for a subscription without annoying you but this time we're going to do things a little bit different I've never asked you guys to share a video before but this time I think it's a little bit different as I mentioned earlier 100% of the proceeds of this one are going to be going to make a wish so I think this is a really good cause and if we can get enough people to share this I think we could potentially raise a good amount of money all we really need is two people that really like this as anybody who's done an auction knows it only takes two so if we can get this in front of as many people as we can I think it could really help Drive the bidding up and even if the auction is already over by the time you watch this maybe you're watching it a year year later the better these types of videos do the more of them I'll be able to do so I would still love it if you could share it save the subscription subscribe on the next video if you like it but this one if you're willing to share Facebook a link an email however you can I would love it if you could help get the word out about this fundraiser if you're a woodworker looking to kind of separate yourself from what's already out there I highly recommend trying some of this power carving there's not a lot of people out there my first several projects weren't very good and I finally am actually rather proud of the last several projects I've been able to make and if you want some advice start at the base there that transition at the very bottom in the middle is where I start all my tables now because if you try to start from the outside in by the time you get to that Center section you might not like that transition whereas if you start from the in and work outwards you can really kind of control how the flow looks and for this I'm using primarily these cutell discs and this is the cutell extreme disc here they have been a longtime supporter of my channel and this is the blue extreme disc and they're made from tungsten carbide they don't ever really get dull they do a really great job of smoothing it out they do make a lot of dust so you need your eye protection you need a respirator for sure I like to wear gloves gloves and woodworking are kind of a controversial issue because people think that they can get caught in the machine but really I don't think an angle grinder is powerful enough to suck your glove in and hurt your hand and here I'm actually trying a flap disc this is like a metal working disc and some people in my last video told me I should try it and it actually did work really well but the slap disc just for one was like $10 and they do wear out I don't know relatively quickly whereas those cuts all discs are about 60 bucks and they essentially last really forever more or less most of the time I can get all the rough power carving done in just one day or even just one afternoon this table was actually a little bit too big so it stretched into the second day and that's what I'm doing here is getting it set up on day two if you're wondering what that Vice is that I'm using there that's called a jaw horse and that was actually a suggestion from someone in the comments of one of my last video I was doing the carving on that log and it was flopping all around and they just said hey why don't you get a jaw horse and I'd heard of them but I was kind of skeptical of the three-leg design but it actually works really well and I was able to do basically all the power carving with that jaw horse and if you're wondering what tool that is there that is the arotech turbo plane and it doesn't leave a particularly smooth finish but it does a really good job of removing a lot of material in a hurry as you can see there so I did the very rough carving with the turbo plane and then I switched back over to the cuts all for the finer smoothing out and you don't need this many Cuts saww Wheels I really like the original Cuts saww fine disc this is one of their more concave ones in a medium grit but start with just one they're like 60 bucks most Woodworkers probably have an angle grinder so you can really really get started power carving with just one $60 Cuts all disc and from there you can kind of add discs as needed after I got all the loose debris blown in the general direction of my neighbor's house I was ready to go back inside and start smoothing out some of those lumps and for this stage I really like using a Spoke shave and if you've never used a Spoke shave you really don't need to be intimidated there's no real way to mess it up if you have it set too deep it'll just catch on the wood and won't really shave anything off so just play around with the setting until it starts removing little shavings and it's actually pretty fun tool to use and it does a really good job at smoothing out all those high spots if you're Wonder ing that chunk behind me is a giant piece of old growth Redwood For an upcoming project that costs like $4,500 from GL veneer and I'm actually really curious what this piece actually sells for because price is always a very contentious issue with anything that I make at this stage I'm actually still shaping pretty heavily I'm using 40 grit sandpaper on my Rotex sander and if you've never used a Rotex it's kind of like a hybrid between an angle grinder and a sander with the 40 grit it can move a lot of material really quick so I can still continue to shape it and here I'm ready to start doing the little recess on the underside and this is going to make it easier for the table to sit flat and it's the same reason why you see bowls and plates with a little ring around them because it's much easier for that small ring to sit flat than the entire surface having to be perfectly flat and this time I'm doing a little different I caught a little flak people said that it was kind of ugly that I did underneath so I like this textured pattern and this is a arbortech ball gouge and so I'm going to just carve out this textured pattern on the entire Underside and this way it'll look pretty cool I get to practice my texturing and it will provide that recess that will allow that outer ring to sit perfectly flat I mentioned earlier that this piece started out flat but I knew from past experience by the time I got done doing all the work on it that there was going to be some variation some little warp or twist or cup and that Center section in theory was going to enable me to correct this and here's what I came up with I had that little Center section recessed put that block of plywood in there there I ran a screw into that piece of MDF so as I rotate it on that screw it will slowly take off the low spots and i' never done this before I've never seen this done before and I wasn't entirely sure it was going to work I've had problems in the past when I've tried to get a little too clever but I went really slow I had really sharp bit and I slowly rotated around and as I went I realized it was actually working and I was thrilled because this was going to make it so it was going to be perfectly flat which is always such a challenge the only problem was after I got done and got the entire ring the same height that Center section now was actually sticking out whereas it used to be recessed since I'd already textured that Center section it was going to be really hard to track the progress of where I needed to still remove material and to make that a little bit easier I did an automotive trick and that was actually to use spray paint so I could track my progress and you probably noticed earlier with that arbortech it caused a lot of chip out that I had to clean up and this is the cut saw ballnose Burr and this doesn't chip out at all the only problem is my die grinder isn't nearly as powerful as an angle grinder so it took a little bit longer so the cuts salt is much smoother much nicer no chip out but the ARP prot is nice because you're able to attach it to an angle grinder eventually I'll just get a more powerful die grinder and that should solve that problem and there I still had a few high points so I used the cuts all fine disc smooth them out made sure everything was flat with my level and now I was ready to move on one of my alltime favorite magazine ads reads if your Harvey prober chair wobbles straighten your floor and while I don't know that mine is good as a harvey prober it's still pretty freaking good I was actually pretty surprised by how few imperfections and little defects that I had to clean up in this piece but there's always some and there is one small natural crack there that I'm filling with CA glue and activator and it's ready to sand in just a few seconds there was also one small crack right in the middle of the shaft that I was able to use more of that that CA glue in activator and again you can sand it in like 10 seconds and I'll show you just how invisible that CA glue makes it just takes a few passes with that and you can see it start to go away and then it's basically disappeared so all in all pretty clean piece unlike a lot of YouTubers I generally think it's a better practice to under promise and overd deliver when it comes to saying how amazing a project was or how pretty Something Turned out and at the risk of that and as pretty as this wood is here it really doesn't compare to the wood on the top that I have coming up it's a really special piece I've actually had it for a few years i' been waiting for it just the right project that said I love this base I love those black streaks how they kind of continue all the way up the shaft there it's a really remarkable piece this textured Underside I don't know that I would go through the trouble of doing it again it was kind of a lot of work but in the end it was kind of cool and something a little bit different and if you're wondering the finish I'm using is called rubyo Monaco you basically just wipe it on wipe it off it does provide excellent protection and you can still feel all the wood grain it's not like any plasticky layer there and people are always asking me do you sign your work will you sign your work and it always seemed kind of pretentious I thought why would anybody want my signature but for this one I signed and dated it figured why not and then added a little finish on top I'm sure some of the haters out there will say that this top is a little too small to actually serve breakfast or dinner on but I think that it brings everybody closer together I love the design let me know in the comments what you think of this top okay that was a joke let me show you the real top all right that little practical joke probably cost me some viewers so anybody still watching I'll take you to see the real top for this and this one goes goes back quite a ways you have to go all the way back to like my 12th Instagram post to see this slab and this is a really really pretty slab but I actually bought it on Craigslist it was cut down in the 60s and a guy had it in his barn with a bunch of other wood from the tree and I wanted to practice my bow ties so I did and they were okay but I learned pretty quick that they weren't really the standard of what I was trying to do so I kind of just leaned it up in a room for quite a while and I never really knew what to do with it until now so now I finally get to turn this top in into the top for this round table and you see it does have a couple issues there I have some threaded inserts that I put in before and that chainsaw Mark so I'm going to have to be able to fix both of those the method that I'm going to use to fix that chainsaw mark is really similar to the mortise antenna that you saw me do earlier this is just a random piece of plywood that I have that I have a number of pre-cut rectangles for this type of work and I found one that just fit over that chainsaw Mark used my brass bushing and a/2 in router bit you can see I didn't get down quite far enough so I just kept going till I had the entire chainsaw Mark removed on the inside of that Circle then I needed some wood that matched it so I cut a little piece off there took it over to my table saw lined It Up made a kind of a sketchy dangerous cut that you're not supposed to make got it just the size I needed also wasn't going to need it that thick so I took it over to the band saw ripped it down to a more manageable size and instead of doing the roundover trick that I did before I'm actually going to Chisel these out with my corner chisel here for just a nice sharp Square Edge the reason I'm using wood glue here instead of epoxy is first off we're going long grain to long grain instead of end grain to Long Grain and the wood glue tends to look a little better the epoxy tends to leave a little bit of a dark line which you actually can see on that table base so when you don't have to use it I don't recommend using epoxy for these wood to wood joints if you've seen my videos before you know that I am not afraid to show a mistake so when I do an inlay like this a patch job they don't always turn out how you're expecting and sometimes you get it sanded down you go wow that looks really bad so there's always a little bit of a question mark of what it's actually going to look like and this one here I'm actually quite pleased with even for the top of a table but this is actually going to be on the underside of a table so I feel very confident that nobody will ever notice that one there are a lot of ways to cut a circle there's tons of DIY jigs you can get this one is just one that I bought and one thing you'll notice the fesol is so good at the dust collection when it's not hooked up it actually piles all the dust there right on top whereas a normal router just throws it everywhere so it's actually kind of frustrating when you're trying to freehand route with a Fest because you can't actually see what you're routing because it piles all the dust right on top of it but it is nice that when the desk collection is hooked up it does remove most all of it and here's how I have to cut the rest of the circle is I didn't want to cut all the way through with that router bit cuz it could blow out and Splinter on the other side so I used my jigsaw cut kind of close to the line and then got that flush trim bit again and now I'm just going to go through and clean up all of that remaining wood riding against that first router cut line once I get this cleaned up into a perfect circle or at least a perfect circle minus just that little kiss of a Live Edge that I decided to leave in there I I'm going to be using a 1in roundover on the bottom and a/ qu inch roundover on top and this is something I've been doing on a lot of my round tables I think it's a little more interesting to have different round overs on the bottom versus the top than having the same radius on the bottom and the top just had to do a little bit of manual cleanup there and then as I start this finish process as I'm getting closer there's always more imperfections that need filled so more CA glue more activator and just wanted this to be as absolutely nice as I could get it and it's really not a ton more work to spend a couple more minutes filling these imperfections after I got all these imperfections filled I had just a little bit of sanding and by that I mean around five or 6 hours which I'll spare you having to watch all that and we can get right to the fun part which is the finishing and if you're wondering what those slots are I actually added some lowprofile C channels to this table which don't actually make it stronger or anything like that all they do is keep it from warping or cupping just that little bit of just kind of twisting that these big wide slabs like to do those C channels are going to kind of snug everything up and make sure it stays perfectly flat for a very very long time you could see it some on the underside but when I add the Finish to the top here is when you really get to see the figure in this wood come alive and if you're wondering what those little 3D ripples are that's wood figuring this particular type of figuring is called curl and it's an amazing effect it looks beautiful it's actually totally flat it looks like ridges but everything is perfectly flat and wood like this is normally reserved for like really high-end guitars you'll see it a lot with like the you know $10,000 guitars I actually got teased by some guitar guys on my Instagram page for using wood like this on a big table because they can make I don't know so many guitars out of a table like this and probably make a lot more money than a regular TBL maker I had the wood and there was no way I was going to cut this up into little chunks and that is what that figuring is called and so I love it somebody on Facebook or something was saying that it looked cracked but I assure you it's a highly desirable trait in these wood slabs for attaching the top to the base I'm going to be using something that's very heavy duty and also very low profile so you don't notice it and since I'm not a metal worker I bought that disc of/ qu in steel off of eBay and then took it over to my drill press and try to pretend that I was a metal worker for just a couple minutes and all I did was drill a number of holes use my counter syn so I could flush mount some bolts in there I think I added five to attach this plate to the stem of the table base and then I have 2 four five six that are going to attach to the main tabletop and I'll show you how that attaches here in just a second no matter how much you over engineer something if you put the build on YouTube people will say that it is dangerously under engineered and it is going to snap like a twig people will probably say these threaded inserts are going to pop out and I assure you each one of these has holding power into the hundreds if not thousands of pounds they will also probably comment on the stem of this table base saying it's it's going to snap instantly and it's probably three times the diameter of a baseball bat and it's laminated with two pieces and I don't know if you've ever tried to break laminated wood or a baseball bat but it's not that easy so I assure you nothing is going to break nothing is going to snap it is plenty engineered like I mentioned at the start of the video the bidding on this table is closed don't try to find a link and bid on it we ended up selling this for $133,000 which is a number I was thrilled with this is one of my all-time favorite projects but that was even more money than I was expecting so thanks to everybody especially the guy who actually paid that $113,000 and again 100% of those funds went to make a wish I did not keep a single penny I even paid for shipping out of my own pocket cuz I didn't want any confusion about where this money was going and also that patch from the underside here it is from the side if you can't see it I'm not going to point it out and if charity tables aren't your thing this next video is for you because this was a fireplace mantle and I ended up keeping all this money for myself this video is actually a couple years in the making it started in a small town called Pilot Rock Oregon where they had a sawmill and some logs laying around and I had them Mill up some rectangular chunks for me for some projects I was doing back then this log in particular was split into two pieces over at GOI Walnut I used their big industrial Banda I thought it would rip right through it turns out this Walnut pinched the blade really bad really messed up this band saw I had a heck of a time getting it off there eventually we used the their big Makita like an 18-in blade to split this thing in half and I built a mantle for a client a couple years ago and this is the two pieces that came out built a mantle for this one client and then a couple years later he goes hey do you still have the other half of that piece I want the same type of mantle for my personal house it is now the end of November and some of you are probably wondering why I am still wearing flip-flops in the shop and some of you are probably wondering why am I wearing flip flops at all in the shop and I don't have an answer to the second part of that question but the first part is these builds take months and months to film so it was pretty warm when I filmed this and second you see there why I wear more protection on my hands than my feet a lot of times because I am constantly crushing my hands and yes if you're wearing gloves around woodworking machines you need to be very careful they're not generally recommended but I should also mention that I have pretty much transition to some pretty heavy duty boots which I will get into a little bit later in the video the client who commissioned this particular piece from me is actually one of my best clients he has ordered a number of pieces from me over the years because he's kind of a high-end contractor so I have built pieces for his personal residents as well as pieces for several of his clients the other half of this log in fact became a fireplace mantle for one of his clients who had also commissioned a 10-ft black epoxy and walnut dining table I was a little uneasy about the idea of doing a wood and epoxy fireplace mantle when he had first reached out about that original fireplace we talked about it in depth I told him that the heat and humidity fluctuations could be a bit much and potentially the wood Andor epoxy could crack over time and he told me that the temperature fluctuations weren't going to be as much as I thought in the end he accepted the risk of any potential cracks in the wood and or epoxy fast forward a couple years that mantle is still in perfect shape he really liked the look he has similar tables in his house with that black epoxy and walnut so he commissioned this other half of that Walnut log to be used as his fireplace mantle if you're confused about anything you've seen so far all I've done is sealed the entire slab with a clear tabletop epoxy to prevent any color bleeding or staining then I sealed everything with with a gorilla tape to make sure there are no leaks and then I did one Thin poure of more tabletop epoxy in the black to kind of seal up all that tape to again guarantee no leaks the epoxy that I'm going to use to fill all these cracks that Serpentine through the center of the table is the liquid glass deep epoxy this is the same epoxy that I use in my traditional epoxy tables and it's going to work really well at a couple aspects of this it's very thin so it's going to hunt and soak through every little nook and cranny and fill all the these cracks that go way way deep inside this slab however the problem is this epoxy doesn't set up for about 24 hours or so and so if there's any potential for leaking this thing's going to find its way out and not that that's any foreshadowing but there might be a small leak or two after I get this all filled up because it goes in I thought I had it sealed pretty well with that tape and that first pour of the faster curing epoxy but in the end it just wasn't enough and I came back like an an hour later and it had spilled everywhere and I'm kind of the guy that realizes a truck is a truck and a shop is a shop and it's going to get scratches and Spills so I wasn't that worried about this I didn't love wasting the epoxy you can see the painters plastic I put down didn't do a lot and at this point this is the one where most people would be like okay just let it be I'll come back and fix it later not me I doubled down I used this epoxy that had set up before that was actually probably about 18 hours worth of setting up and I just dumped it in there I was like if I'm going to make a mess I'm going to make a Real mess and hopefully I can at least get it sealed this is about 48 hours later and although it doesn't look great this is actually a huge win for me this means I have successfully sealed all the cracks so I can at least fill them up and I'm going to do that by scuffing them up with this nylon wheel here to get a good Bond come back with some tabletop epoxy no longer going to use that deep por epoxy going to do a couple shallow pores of this tabletop epoxy with black tinted dye just like the Deep por epoxy and it's going to take a little bit more than I had expected but in the end this is easy I can just do a quarin poure come back a couple hours later do another quarter inch poure until I get it completely topped off so it really wasn't so bad most YouTube pages will ask for your subscription right at the start of a video before they actually give you anything and traditionally I like to wait till I show a cool tip or a trick and then on the heels of that I'll ask hoping that you might feel that I've actually earned your subscription instead of just donating it to me and this time I'll do it on the heels of this total epoxy blowout and failure hoping that I just get those sympathy subscriptions and yes it does make a big difference to me no we don't actually get paid for subscriptions but now that I'm doing this fulltime it is a big deal and yes I do have to ask so if you think that I've earned it I would love it if you hit that subscribe button I had pools of epoxy all over this slab that were going to really make squaring it up difficult because it might Rock and tip while it's going through a plan or so before I did anything I just kind of leveled out all these pools of epoxy and first off I should have a mask on go ahead and comment cuz I know you're going to anyway but yes I have a mask on on here but I should have had one on the whole time and now that I got all those high spots kind of pled and sanded down now I can start the actual process of squaring it up I'm going to start by making one cut with my tracks saww and if you're curious the blades with fewer teeth are generally the rip blades that go with the grain the ones with more teeth are generally for either a combination or running across the Grain and that's as detailed as I'm going to get on which blade to choose for your saw but that's why I'm running this kind of low tooth count blade for ripping this deep cut here I thought a lot about it and I probably could have taken this chunk of wood up to creative woodworking the industrial shop that I use up in southeast Portland and I bet in about an hour to an hour and a half I could have done everything that took me probably a day and a half in my shop and I'm not complaining I have a very capable shop but it's just not as good as this particular industrial shop they have 20-in jointers and huge planers and a table saw with a 22-in blade on it so they could have made all these Cuts all these passes in absolutely no time probably been more accurate with a nicer finish but since I was doing this for a video I decided to use the shop that I do have and like I said it's a totally capable shop just gets a little awkward with me crab walking around with this giant chunk of Walnut what I'm using here is my first ever DIY jointer sled and a jointer sled essentially turns a planer functionally into a jointer and this is a pretty down and dirty basic one if you don't know you can't just plane a bowed piece of wood and have it come out flat because if you send a curved piece of wood through a planer you get a thinner curved piece of wood so what you need to do is come up with some kind of jointer sled so it doesn't Rock and twist as it feeds through your planer and it actually worked pretty well it wasn't great I can do some things to improve on it but now that I have one perfectly flat side now I can use the planer and bring that other side down so it runs perfectly flat and parallel to the Bottom now some of you might already be furiously commenting that that first cut I made on the tracksaw couldn't actually be perpendicular to the top or the bottom because I made it before the top and the bottom was perfectly flat so yes I do have to come back and make another pass with the track saww however the tracksaw wasn't deep enough to cut the entire thickness of this so here's what I came up with to make sure I have a perfectly consistent surface the whole way across and this is using my flush trim bit which is a really slick little bit and I'm showing you without the dust collection here first just so you can see how good the dust collection does work on this router and this isn't my favorite tool but this dust collection on this is actually pretty slick so I hooked it on there just a regular old Festival vacuum hooked up to it it doesn't 100% of the chips but it makes a massive massive difference so if you like a dust free shop I do recommend this router now that the top bottom and one side are all perfectly flat and perpendicular to each other we can cut it to its final Dimensions using the table saw and we talked a little bit about blade Choice with that track saw earlier but I wanted to elaborate on it for the table saw here because I remember being really intimidated when I used to go to Like Home Depot and I said I need a taable saw blade and nothing's labeled taable saw they only give the tooth count and and so I'm like why don't they just tell you what's for a chop saw and what's for a table saw is really intimidating so I'll do a quick down and dirty like 30 second lesson on it and I'm using a rip blade which is for cutting with the grain and this is a 24 tooth blade which is a great tooth count for a rip blade if you want to do with the grain and across the grain a 40 to with a 10-in saw blade is a great choice and if you want a purely Crosscut only a 60 to is a good blade for that I do have the full curf blades which are the E8 in blades they're quite a bit better than those thin ones you get if you're just wanting to kind of rough cut things those thin curve blades are fine but for me I like the 24 the 40 and the 6 to depending on which Cuts I'm making to get its final size the last thing I had to do was make a couple cross cuts and for this I put the 40 to blade back on as a CMT blade really pretty good affordable blade and then did the same trick with my rter and the flush trim bit after it got cut to its final size I had about another 6 days of touch-ups because I needed to touch each side up and I needed G gravity as an assistant so I had to touch up one side rotate it touch up another side including both ends so I spent a ton of time doing all those little touch-ups after the days and days of touch-ups and waiting for it to cure I was ready to flatten it out with my belt sander it does gum up the Sandpaper pretty bad so here's a little trick use that little eraser tool that they normally use for drum Sanders to clean that epoxy off your belts and it doesn't just work for belt Sanders works for regular Sanders as well all right now we are actually ready to mount this thing to the floating shelf bracket that I have and this is a pretty standard one I ordered it on Etsy it uses 1in tubes I'm going to be drilling my holes with a 1 and 116th inch bit and I'll explain why in just a minute but normally I feel like I'm the guy that has access to a ton of tools whether they're at my shop or that industrial shop in Portland and this is one time that I felt like I was really dangerously under tooled for this project so I'll probably get some comments from you guys about why didn't you do this or why don't you do that or why don't you just buy this tool and like a lot of you out there I just had to use the tools that I had and they're pretty good I mean not everybody has a drill press and it was hard to get lined up exactly perfectly perpendicular to this slab but in the end I was able to use what I had and I feel like that's what most of us do with our projects is I love having a tool for every job but this is one time that I'm probably didn't quite have the right tools for this job the reason I'm using a slightly larger drill bit than my rod size is that I know no matter how perfect I try to make this this hole isn't going to be absolutely perpendicular and my marks might be off just by a hair and so if I had tried to drill a absolutely perfect 1in hole for this 1in Rod to fit in almost certainly wouldn't fit and if it did fit it would probably get stuck and not come out so giving myself about a 1/16th of an inch bit of wiggle room on each of my holes is going to make it still snug enough that it'll be held on by friction but enough wiggle room that it can come on and off another issue I ran into is that I only have about a 3 and 1 half inch or so depth on my drill press so I had to drill the Rest by hand and I could have kept raising the table with that augur bit inside the hole which probably would have been easier cuz this about broke my wrist 40 times so I didn't love this method if I was doing it again I might consider actually doing that all on the drill press but you see just how deep I have to go so I would have had to keep raising that drill press table a little bit at a time as I drilled that hole and in the end we got the job done also you might be wondering why I'm not using like a spade bit with an impact driver those holes don't get drilled perfectly straight that spade bit can actually hunt kind of left and right these augur bits are pretty much guaranteed to go in perfectly straight the way this fireplace is going to go together is they're going to first install the mantle and then they're going to surround the entire mantle and of course the whole fireplace with the stone facade so you won't really actually see that mounting plate on the back which may lead you to wonder why am I going to the trouble of recessing this mounting plate when you're not going to see it anyway cuz it's going to have you know 2 Ines of stone in front of it you would never see the quarter-inch mounting plate and the quick answer is it's a really good client and he likes nice Stu stuff so I'm just going to do it the cleanest possible way and I didn't even bother with asking him whether or not he cared if I recess this I just thought it would look a little bit better and be a little bit cleaner and you know what this is a $4,000 chunk of wood so why not make it as good as I can but yeah in the end probably not going to see it not a big deal but just trying to take care of my client one of the last things I need to do structurally before I get to finishing is add some Dutchman joints to the cracks on the ends of this mantle and these are always hilariously controversial because I get tons of comments from people that tell me if their table showed up with a bow tie in it they wouldn't pay for it and I ruined that table by adding bow tie joints and first off I always ask my clients they 100% of the time always ask for them before I put them in and while I love the feedback I need that feedback in my life I'm not positive these clients and designers of million-dollar homes are combing the YouTube comments looking for inspiration when I traced this first bow tie I made the biggest mistake you can make when doing this and that is removing it without one side being marked on there because it is going to be so hard to line it up again and get that line to line up perfectly with the other one so we'll see how that one turns out but that is about the biggest mistake you can make make sure you get all the sides before you remove it from that double-sided tape if you've never tried an inlay and you wanted to I highly recommend it it's a lot of fun all you really need to do is need to hog out that Center area I like a router with a spiral bit just a straight quarter inch bit I've seen people do the entire process with chisels or hogging that Center area out with just a drill and a forcer bit after that you just need some really sharp chisels and these are some really sharp chisels these are Japanese chisels these are kind of like a fancy Damascus one you don't need any this fancy I just like really cool chisels I'm a sucker for the Japanese ones they get crazy sharp but the Japanese ones are really brittle which is why you see me using this American chisel here to kind of hog out the material on the corner and I feel like this could fit into a number of stereotypes for the Japanese versus American Woodworkers the Japanese chisels are all about sharp and precision and the American ones are all about just hogging out and kind of sloppy work so that's why you don't want to use the Japanese ones for that corner because they are brittle and you can break them the American ones are a little bit more robust but not quite as sharp also I damaged that spot right there so we'll see if we can fix it when we do the inlay but I did let that chisel get away from me just a little bit after you get your negative cut you're ready to drop in your inlay and for this I recommend using wood glue I've used epoxy in the past but just like once or twice and it caused a really dark line around the entire perimeter it leaves like a wet line so no matter how tight your inlay is that epoxy will always look like it has a wet line around the perimeter and then to fill any micro imperfections I use a combination of Walnut and Elm dust and this just kind of breaks up that solid color of using just Walnut or just Elm or something like that I generally let these set overnight before coming and smoothing them out and I've used a number of methods to smooth these out in the past I've used belt Sanders before now I kind of like this block plan I've been us using it for a while and it seems to be about the best method you just bring it down about as close as you can get it to the wood and then I'll finish it off with something like my Rotex sander or just a regular orbital sander the sanding process that included countless touch-ups was kind of like the six days of epoxy touch-ups meaning I won't Force you guys to watch every single step that went into all the sanding filling a tiny imperfection sanding it some more filling another imperfection sanding it some more so I'll kind of give you the down and dirty version meaning I like this pencil grid cuz helps me track where I've sanded and where I haven't sanded but I sanded it from 100 up to 180 and this is a new sandpaper to me this is a crazy sandpaper it is awesome it was recommended on another YouTube video I saw I believe it's cat's Moses gave it a shot and this isn't sponsored it's made by 3M but 3m's too big to even care about me so they wouldn't sponsor me but it's a really really remarkable sandpaper it doesn't clog it gives the best pattern I've ever seen I've never actually felt this passionate about about a sandpaper before and again I got to stress it's not sponsored or anything like that I will include a link in the description but no this is like the first big change in sandpaper that I've ever experienced highly recommend it the finish I'm using here is called Rubio Monaco and they make a ton of different colors so I will link the specific one I'm using here in the video description along with links to everything else you've seen in the video also in the video description and you should know those are affiliate links which just means I get a tiny percentage of anything that sells and it's not a ton of money but at the end of the year it can actually make a big difference so if you're thinking about buying something I do appreciate it if you click through those links this finish is remarkably easy to apply you basically just wipe it on until it's completely saturated make sure you wipe off all excess which is why I have this handy little light here which is a pretty cool little photography light stick make sure I got it all buffed off the next day I come back and I sand the entire thing with this maroon pad and I got a little spoiler here is I do two coats I get it just almost absolutely perfect and then I find a flaw which I'll show you here in just a second but I got everything sanded with that maroon pad came back did my second coat and this is where it really starts to come alive this is where it just looks beautiful and I was pretty happy up to this point and then I looked down and there was these tiny little holes and they're right on the front and they're not huge but I think the theme of this is trying to justify the value to the client and that's why I charge the prices I charge cuz I go through and I make sure everything's right so had to fill this with this black CA glue and unfortunately you can't just like Bondo this on there and smooth it out I had to go back after touching these up and sand the entire piece and do two more coats so basically had to repeat my entire finish process so started with I think actually 240 grit here just so I didn't have to run through all my grits got those bits sanded out went through the entire process again and then I was ready for another two coats of the Rubio at this point I was a little frustrated but I wasn't nearly as frustrated as I would be is if I made a mistake a second time so I made extra special care to look closely make sure there was no more imperfections also this Rubio wasn't quite cured so it kind of gummed up that sandpaper so you can use that same eraser trick on an orbital sander to clean that off if it gets kind of gummy or stuck in there from there you just add more Rubio you've seen this process before you basically just wipe it on wipe it off so I will spare you having to watch both coats go on but I did add another two coats sanding lightly with that maroon pad in between what started as a dirty dingy block of wood in Pilot Rock Oregon has turned into a slightly shinier block of wood in Western Oregon and route to Upstate New York where my client lives and I'd love to know what you guys think of this is it cool just to fill a bunch of voids with epoxy put some finish on it and call it a fireplace mantle would you put this in your own house which brings me to my next build which is for my own house and my wife was needing a desk this is during Co so we needed a professional large desk and this is that build I love building desks if not for any other reason is that they are about as big of an item as I can comfortably move around myself I start getting to like an 8ft dining table they get to be pretty cumbersome and I have to get friends or rig up my ceiling Wes just to turn a table over so I was pretty excited about getting this desk build started for my wife and since this was going to be a single slab rectangular desk shape it wasn't going to be the most complicated to get started I just needed to make sure I got my full 30X 60 measurement that I was going for in the end this slab ended up being incredibly beautiful but with the really curly really figured wood to get some really interesting cracks and I wasn't sure about doing that brass resin that you sh saw there at the start but in the end that ended up being a perfect solution for these really interesting cracks throughout the whole desk for your benefit I generally edit down a lot of the cutting so it looks like I make one pass with my tracks saww and generally it takes about I don't know three four sometimes five passes to cut through a they slab like this so don't think that something's wrong with your soft it takes you a little bit more than just the one pass that you see me make if you watch my last video I had a really deep chamfer that I cut on an epoxy table and originally I wanted to use a router bit but I couldn't find a router bit big enough to make a tall chamfer like this so I found that if I overlap my track I could go essentially as thick as my blade will go so it was a really good much cheaper than finding you know $150 router bit to get that deep chamfer like that you might think that it's going to be hard to get all the cuts to line up perfectly but as long as you overlap the same amount which I just used my Carpenter Square I think it was like a quarin overlap that I did on all sides each of your cuts are going to line up perfectly as you can see right there and then on the corners I went added a 45° cut at a 45° angle I actually saw it on a picture frame once and thought it looked pretty cool so I added it to this desk once I had these Cuts made I was ready to start on the cracks in the middle of the table and these were a little a little bit of a point of contention between the wife and I I wanted to do some Patchwork she really isn't a fan of patchwor so we kind of went back and forth with all the different things I talked about doing like brass bow ties or wood bow ties and she doesn't really care for bow ties as much and since this was going to be her desk we had to come up with something that she was going to like and that I was capable of doing and so when I discovered doing this brass resin um it was kind of like a Eureka moment for the two of us because of something we both really loved so sometimes a little bit of contention is good cuz it forces you to get outside your Fort Zone outside think outside the box to come up with something pretty cool that I actually can't wait to do more of I did about 100 sample pieces of this brass resin before I got going and I'll share with you what I learned cuz it's actually not quite as easy as it looks also include links to all the products I used and one of the things if you've done worked with pigments and epoxy before is you need to forget everything you've learned about that is you need a ton of this brass resin in there and I think this is actually the bronze resin so at least a 50/50 mix of the powder to the epoxy and then I am degassing it in a vacuum chamber and this is going to help remove a lot of the bubbles that was one of the problems in my sample pieces was the little pits would remain from the bubbles in the epoxy so I am using a slow cure uh epoxy that's going to take several days to cure and that's going to allow a lot of them to pop on their own and I'm also warming it in this water bath and that's going to make it really liquidy it's going to let it really seep down into those cracks so you can see they're just how liquidy it is and that was really key to getting a good finish with this brass resin and you probably noticed that I had it taped on the underside of the table so when I pour this through it's not going to seep right out the backside even though it is very liquidy as I mentioned so what I'm doing here is going to brush it in going to get it as much resin as I possibly can in these cracks then I'm going to come back tape the top of it as you can see here and this is that tyvec house wrap tape it's much better at holding the epoxy in then that painters tape you saw in the back because what I'm going to do is I'm going to let gravity do the work is all this brass is so heavy that it sinks down really quickly so you need to pour this upside down on like a traditional resin and pigment table so what I'm going to do here get it all sealed up flip it over and let gravity do the work to let all that brass resin soak to the bottom you can see here in case any of it leaks out I have the plastic wrap there so I actually went out of town for a few days and when I came back I think it was about 4 days later this is what it looked like and it didn't look good so far but we're going to put the belt sander on it and see how it looked once we got down there and you can see there it's actually looking like it filled it pretty consistently there were some tiny little pits and the cool thing about this brass resin is if you add the CA glue this thin CA glue to the little kind of touch-ups of the brass resin it fills it almost perfectly almost better than the epoxy looks actually so don't be afraid to do some touch-ups with that uh CA glue and the brass powder and one of the downsides was I had to do since I had to have gravity do the work I could only do one side at a time so doing the same thing I did on the top on that side piece there coming back and these ones were so small that I actually was only going to use the CA glue and took me a little bit to brush in enough powder but that thin CA glue will soak down really well and provides a really nice finish to that brass powder and it cures in about I don't know 10 15 seconds so you have a little bit of time to add some more powder like that if it does kind of uh go below the level of your crack one of the downsides to this brass powder is that it's really expensive even by epoxy standard so if your first thought is you want to do a big brass River pour uh I won't say it's impossible I will say it's going to be pretty expensive and I'm kind of experimenting on my next brass resin project cuz I definitely think there's a future in this I think it's going to be pretty cool but these little bags are pretty expensive so it does work a little bit more uh cost effective to use on small things like the cracks and since I wanted this desk to last a really long time and the wife doesn't really like the look of bow ties I went ahead and added some bow ties to the underside of all these cracks to really prevent them from separating and ruining that nice pretty brass filled cracks that we have on top and I didn't go you know as precise as I probably would have on the top I again want them to be pretty presentable but I rush them a little bit more on the bottom than I do on the top top you might remember these cracks from one of the first Cuts we made at the start of the video and they're really cool looking cracks and so I thought this brass resin was going to be a pretty neat feature in the end to have these rather unique looking cracks filled with this real liquid brass since this epoxy and Brass is going to sand much different than the wood I had to be really careful getting these perfectly flat cuz it would be really easy to round these over so got out the RASS in the file set to make sure I got the bulk of it off keeping it nice and flat then coming back with a sander and then removing the excess and overall it actually worked pretty well after I shredded a couple belts sanding these bow ties slush I was able to move back onto some brass touch-ups and this is a good technique I found for the touch-ups this isn't the thin this is the medium CA glue and I just worked it right into a little pile of that brass powder and then I touched it up directly and I should mention that it cures in you know just about 10 seconds or so so you got to work pretty quick you go through a lot of these little brushes but I buy like 50 packs of them on Amazon for they cost about a dime a piece so they are an acceptable loss but working working this in directly to the powder is a really good solution for the very small touch-ups you can see here pretty quick the advantage to using the CA glue for the small pieces instead of epoxy is that this was about 30 seconds of work before it was ready to sand and was essentially finished whereas the apoc y you know could take a couple days or even 24 hours if I used a fast drying one I was going to be dropping in these really cool brass outlets and power supplies that my wife got at a Furniture Market so I made this pretty simple jig and it's going to make a little bit more sense once you see the outlets here but all I basically did was drill a hole uh the size that matched my offset and I'm going to match it with my router drop it in and everything should fit just perfect and I'm doing a little test fit there and the depth was good the fit was perfect and I was able to move on and do a couple more testing each time between holes and there's going to be one more that's going to be for the light at the far end and now is I'm going to show you how I drilled the rest of the holes and I wanted to do this by hand but it's kind of hard to drill a 2-in hole by hand so I decided it was best to use my drill press and this is an all new type of forcer bit to me I can't remember the name of the company but I will add a link to it once I find find it in the video description and there was like no burning there was hardly any heat gave a perfectly smooth hole it doesn't look like it would give a smooth cut with that type of bit but it really does so highly recommend these new forcer bits I can't wait to get a whole bunch more of them I'm reminded again of why I love building desks because if I was doing this on a big dining table certainly wouldn't be moving it over to my drill press and I'm not sure what I would have done to get these holes like this but there's always a way but you can see there is my USB drop in and it fit absolutely perfect and I just love it when things come together like this but what you can see there is the little bushing that holds it on it wasn't designed for a table this thick so I had to use a rabbit bit create that relief and it was actually a pretty simple solution to allow this cuz I think these weren't supposed to be used on a table thicker than like an inch and a half and as I mentioned before my wife got these at a Furniture Market she's in the furniture industry and I believe they were by Doug macket but I can't seem to find them again cuz I get a lot of questions on Instagram about where they can find these so believe they're by macket but let me know if you can find them because I uh not sure where to find them again this was another design Choice by my wife is she's told me that uh aesthetically things need to come in threes and fives so we couldn't do four with like a wire grommet in a brass style so what I did is I came up with this hidden one using a little Walnut replacement piece here and I actually made about three or four different ones of those to get the best match with the wood grain and also I made some different sizes to allow for more wires or less wires to run through moving on went with my standard 8 inch round over bit which I do on probably about 90% of my tables it just gives a nice kind of hand round look uh but keeps it perfectly consistent and then I want to add a little bit of machine lines to this brass resin to give it to make it really look like metal and you can see there you really can sand it just like metal it's pretty neat this piece of wood I'm using here wasn't an accident or a leftover piece of wood that I had I specifically went out and found a piece of wood uh that matched the vision I had in my head and what I wanted was these vertical lines you can kind of faintly see them there and I could have got a really highly figured piece but I just didn't want really gy legs I just wanted a really interesting set of legs if you're not keeping up with what I'm doing so far is I made one mock set of legs out of just 2x4 stock but it's going to be the exact size that my finished legs are going to be so I'm going to use each of those pieces as a template to transfer that over to these nice Walnut pieces and if that sounds a little confusing hopefully it'll make a little bit more sense here in couple minutes but right now I'm just breaking it down to the individual sizes and uh individual pieces for that table base that I'll be putting together here in the end this here is the part that you probably want to pay attention to though is this is what made it so interesting is I am rewing it which basically means cutting in half and this is what's going to give us that book Matched or mirr image look on the table base that you saw there at the start and since I'm cutting these inch and a half thick pieces down to about 3/4 of an inch I want my table legs to finish at inch and a half so what I'm doing is I'm having to glue them to other Walnut stock pieces and so once I get them glued together you'll see what I'm talking about but I am essentially taking that 3/4 in piece I just cut gluing it to another 3/4 inch piece and then I will match that mirror image book match after the glue up doing my glue up with tight Bond 3 glue and these parallel clamps you don't have to use either that glue or those clamps but they work well for me doing a quick pass through the planner and here's where you'll really see that book match you can see the mirror image that those two pieces show and you wouldn't get that unless you did that resaw book match process so now I've transferred that template onto a piece of plywood that's going to be a little bit more consistent and I can start to cut out my final leg shape before we get into the exact template routing cuz I'm not going to cut the final shape out with the banda I had this bit of blowout here and so I needed to fix it since I went through this entire book match process I couldn't just throw a new piece of wood on there I would have had to do the entire resaw the entire book match process the glue up the planing everything again and it then the wood probably wouldn't even match the other set of legs so this is what I came up with to fix this little flaw there a friend of mine that's a welder once said that he liked welding so much more than woodworking because if he messed up a piece he could just weld a new one and that it was impossible to do with wood I told him there's always something you can do and this is what we're going to do here in this case and overall it was actually a pretty good solution my wife I actually never told her about this and she's never noticed it and she's super observant but uh you will be able to see it if you know where to look for but I tried to match the grain lines up just right and overall uh I'll show you at the end just how it turned out and if you're wondering why I have a giant hole in the middle of my leg template it's because when I was doing the top I needed to make a template for these Outlets I was dropping in and I thought this was a scrap piece of wood so I drilled the hole in there until I realized it was actually my leg template so luckily I drill the right in the middle and didn't hurt the template but that is why I have a giant hole in the middle of my leg template and if you've never used a template to build Furniture before it's a really cool remarkably easy way because you don't have to worry about getting the same consistent Cuts if you set your angles you know on your miter saw maybe it's just off by half of a degree if you use your template it's always going to be exactly the same and so since I going to have essentially four leg pieces made out of this template all of them were going to be the exact same angles everything was going to be perfectly consistent since I was using this template and that router bit there for the lower piece that connects those two legs I wanted a slight angle and I apologize because apparently my camera was turned off for the cut so you're going to have to imagine me cutting that 5° and you can see there just a really slight angle and this is going to give a little bit of depth make it a little bit more interesting than if the pieces just went straight across and if these tools look a little confusing to you this is a vacuum clamp by Fest tool super cool tool along with a domino and each one of those tools is like $1,500 so not for everybody um I tend to do a lot of this type of Joiner this type of furniture so it's definitely worth it to me but if you want to do something similar you could accomplish it with a couple clamps and some wood Dows so don't think you have to have this crazy expensive setup just to do a few connections like I'm doing if you look closely you can see that the edges near the glue joints are a little bit darker and that's cuz I added shellac and that's going to help the glue come off a lot easier after it's dried so it's a pretty good standard practice to add a little bit of shellac to those glue joints and it'll help it sand off easier like right here I should also mention that I sanded these before I glued them up to 150 grit to kind of reduce a lot of the sanding I was going to have to do when it was all together and you can see there is my repaired spot and as I mentioned if you know where to look you can definitely see it but overall it was a pretty good solution getting the glue joint out of the the corners without really gouging into your piece can be a frustrating kind of tough task and this kind of bent neck chisel that I have there is a really good tool for getting those Corners out I'm going to have two pieces of wood that run the width of the table that connect each of these table legs and one that's going provide a lot of stability and two it's going to provide a good place to hide wires behind since that joint in the middle was 5° the same was going to be true of these pieces that run the width of the table so I just had a 5 degre cut on my miter saw the same as did on the center there added a domino to each side and everything would glue up nice and parallel to my tabletop if you're just getting into woodworking or maybe you've been in woodworking for a long time you've probably realized how expensive clamps are and how many you need so my advice to new Woodworkers that are on a little bit more of a budget is get a bunch of these pipe clamps like this because you can swap them into longer pipes shorter pipes unlike a parallel clamp that's the size that is going to be no matter what so I had to go buy some extra long think 6t long pieces of pipe for these clamps s but didn't have to buy you know a new set of clamps that was going to be you know $70 $80 each if you watch very many of my videos or comment on any of my videos you probably know that I'm pretty good at responding to almost every single comment in the comments below so if I'm rushing anything if I've skipped anything um I spend so much time making these videos that sometimes I forget uh to add a certain part in there explain why I did something so please feel free to ask me in the comments I'm pretty good at responding to those or if you're new to my page and you like what you see please feel free to hit that subscribe button it really does help me out and enables me to keep making more content like these videos one of the things that people seem to really like is all the different tools that I review and that I'll display here because I give you a pretty honest feedback of what I think and this is a new type of forcer bit that I actually love now I use this on the top build too I use some big 2-in ones and it gives a really clean cut it doesn't look like it would give a clean cut I I can't remember the name off the top of my head that's how you know it's not a sponsored post but I will find it and I'll include a link in the video description below so I really like that new style of forcer bit and again sorry if I can't remember the name off top of my head and what I'm doing here is now that I got my table base perfectly centered on the table I'm going to use a brad Point bit that is the exact size of my hole come through Mark the center and that way I know my threaded inserts are going to be the exact center of my holes that I have uh pre-drilled for that table base using these depth stop collars with these bradpoint bits you don't have to use the depth stop collars but it does prevent you from blowing through the top of your table which I've never done but I've had friends that have done it and make sure you use the right size drill bit for these threaded inserts or you can kind of get some splintering and maybe even crack your your top which probably wouldn't happen because it's a pretty sharp thread on these threaded inserts but it does go in a lot easier if you use the right size bit since I want to really be able to feel the wood grain and even feel the metal this brass resin when you feel it it's actually cold just like metal I wanted I didn't want to use like a polyurethane or a varnish so I'm using this osmo 3054 and this is going to be a finish that I can get a perfect finish in a Dusty shop without having to worry about dust settling on it like I would on a varnish or an epoxy or any one of those film forming type of finishes and you don't have to use a heavy duty buffer like the one I'm using here it makes my life a little bit easier you can even do it by hand or you can just stick one of these white pads or even a red floor pad onto your orbital sander and kind of put your shoulder into it put a little weight into it and buff it on that way so don't think you have to have a big expensive floor buffer to get a finish like this for the sides I just went through with a small cut off section of the same type of white pad buffed it in by hand and once I got everything covered really well you can let it set up for about 30 45 minutes then you just come back and buff it off and you can really start to feel it tacked up which is why it's actually shove in the table when I'm buffing it off but uh what you want to do with this 3054 is make sure you get every last bit of it removed and that is going to be cute you don't want any of it left on there so took a few minutes with these blue Rags got it all buffed off let it cure for a couple days and it was ready to be assembled okay you can see the desk is all together and finally in use I want to really thank my wife for being so patient on this desk process but overall I think she's pretty happy with it I think that light is pretty cool I love that kind of articulating ball uh joint at the base of it I like the dimmer switch I like having the USB and the power you may be wondering why I didn't put a wireless phone charger and we talked about it we just thought that technology was going to be a little bit dated so overall we decided not to do the wireless charging or the sit stand so it's not quite a smart desk but it does have some cool features of a smart desk and let me know in the comments what you think if this is technically a smart desk or if this is just another desk so I wouldn't do it any differently but some people probably wonder whether there's not a little more technology in a desk so involved as this one a lot of people don't know that my first 100 videos or so were all recorded on my iPhone I even edited them and did the voiceover on my iPhone as well so thank you for bearing with that kind of suspect audio and suspect video but we are still using this desk to this day it's been about 3 years now and this brings me to my next build which is my all-time favorite build this is an extending dining table build and this was my very first video I ever did with a real camera this was I believe I got a Nikon camera for this one or it was a Nikon z62 and I was terrified about how to record because I'd never done anything like this before again my first 100 plus videos were all done on the iPhone so I had to not just figure out how to build this project which was one of the hardest of my life but I also had to figure out how to record it which was incredibly difficult the wood that I'm working with is locally salvaged Oregon black walnut that I got up at Goby 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 in by 25 in 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 and 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° surface that you're looking for in a glue up what you might not know is the fesal track saww actually cuts a perfect enough 90 and a sharp enough line that you can 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 joint her 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'm 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 going to 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 2x4s 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 MMX 140 mm dominoes which are B 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 Challen 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 in 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 of you cuz you don't want to be scrambling for extra clamps in the middle of one of these gloves cuz you only have you know a few minutes to get everything together and tight and you can see before I got 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 and 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 8 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 Z6 2 it 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 KN 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 La 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 was pretty straightforward I didn't 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 buil 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 was about 25 in wide from the center point the other one was only 232 so I cut them both down to 23 in from the dead center so that way we have a symmetrical 46in wide table and something that would be easier to mess up than you think cuz 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 measurement 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 work by myself anyway we got up to the point of no return where this is 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'd 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 7 years after a project and that might sound a little excessive to some of you but when you have that one project 5 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 2 and 1/2 in or 3in thick slabs for a table like this these on started out at just barely 2 in so I wanted to finish the table at an inch and 3/4 so I really didn't have much wiggle room after planning 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 16th to maybe an e/ 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 out like 6 years ago thought I'd use it all the time used it like three times in 6 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 Skip planed which just means they were surfaced on both sides but not 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 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 of 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 cuz 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 patchwor and this isn't going to be my finest Hour this is just done with a router if I was really wanted 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 going to see about a 16th of an inch the center part this is something that I really want to 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 eigh or a quar 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's 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 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 bow tiai jig and it's not a jig that I invented I saw 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 $0 to make I'll link that in the video description below the bandaw 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 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 Endra I find those ones especially suspect meaning that they could maybe you know 10 years down the line open up slightly and in laying this wedged shaped 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 intense ating 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 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 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 5 minutes it's just going to 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 sit 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 they 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 of 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 you your holes 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 best8 in the best 9 ft of the table was from one end and I didn't know that I was going to 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 and it actually looked kind of cool in the end but I hope you guys will stick around and 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 why 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° 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' 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 powerered 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 hands saw it came back with the Chisel and 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 going to 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 a 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 mark1 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 Mark the next hole and now these kind of flath 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 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 it 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 tabletop and I will spare you guys that entire Montage with just about a I don't know a 7-second montage of the sanding and one thing I will never skip is the finishing Montage cuz this is the fun part this is my favorite part where you really get to see that grain come to life this is Rubio mono 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 again 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 cuz 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 8in roundover bit and my cordless trim router and I know I wasn't going to show you guys a bunch of about sanding but I felt like I should show you this one last tip because I don't think I've mentioned it before on my final sanding pass I like to switch to a soft pad on my fesal sander put on this Mera abet abret 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 monot to really dur 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 and 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 going to have two words it's going to 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 it to be so specific and they said that's what they want they only want people to come to them for the really specific oneoff 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 Sabin 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 till you can get it right one time cuz then that next cut 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 out 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 got a working Theory and that's that 5 years ago nobody watched YouTube on their television it was only on your phone you wanted things that are like a minute long or 2 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 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 wanted to show you on the table bases they actually Incorporated some leg levelers 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 38 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 Nitro gloves like we are using here and this is big JY 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 um 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 it's been over 2 years since I built this table and we still use it every single day however I feel like we've only used those extension Wings maybe three times or so in those two years and I will admit I absolutely love this table and so I completely baby it my wife loves this table but does not completely baby it so after we had it for about a year I treated it with N3 Nano and today we still do not have a single Watermark or stain from it the N3 Nano is holding up extraordinarily well and all in all just a really fun project that got me out of my comfort zone and speaking of getting out of my comfort zone this next project was the most out of my comfort zone I have ever gotten I guess I still understand what you're trying to make um have I showed you the drawings so I'm not a classically trained artist but this was the first rendition here's the second one started to get a little better here basically this should be drawn to proportion but we'll have stacks glued up all the way on the bottom and then up the top up here and then I'll hopefully be able to carve these into a cabinet because I don't know how to make cabinets okay um and I've never seen anybody try one like this but someone probably has does that make sense yeah for the last several months I've been saving all of my offcuts and trying to cut them into nice square blocks similar to what you see here and my original idea for this project was to use all of those blocks in this build and have a truly scrap wood build however when I started doing the math I realized I had nowhere near enough wood so I reached out to my friends at Goby Walnut and I said hey can I get like 300 blocks of Walnut and I kind of chuckled asked a couple questions but said absolutely so without GOI Walnut this project truly would not have been possible and if you are interested in a pallet of Walnut blocks definitely reach out to them or maybe even better a big Live Edge slab [Music] I don't care if I never see another Domino this is miserable this what being a real woodworker is like care for this at all I posted some progress shots of this on Instagram and somebody commented asking if I was trying to build a cutting board but things just got out of hand and thought that was pretty funny because yeah this is really similar to how cutting boards are made and yes things got incredibly out of hand and my original inspiration for this project was this company I follow on Instagram I think it's called mava mat anyway they make this really cool cabinet but the more I started thinking about it the more I didn't think I'd be able to replicate exactly as they did it so I ended up completely changing my plan after this you getting it figure it out originally I planned on just stacking a bunch of blocks and potentially just nailing them in place but I don't trust my freehand sculpting [Music] abilities that is not a tusk of any kind so we're going to do a lot more glue-ups and that'll keep everything consistent and then we'll just shape those glue-ups down if you haven't heard this rant by me before this is the worst tool in my shop I despise drum Sanders we've already cooked a belt um it came loose which probably use rare but I don't care still don't like it um anyway got to redo this belt start all over and probably do this over and over again make no mistake when I complain about how much I dislike drum Sanders I'm not complaining about this brand I'm not really even complaining about the design of a drum sander it's just kind of like if you had to clear a feel the blackberries with an electric string trimmer it's not the best tool for the job and it's going to take you a really long time but that doesn't mean you have to like doing it and that's me with this drum sander I spent all afternoon flattening these before getting ready to glue them up overall I was pleasantly surprised and kind of shocked at how straight and square these blocks of wood from GOI were however these pieces that are going to form the bottom shelf had a little bit of distortion to them so I took them over the jointer ran a couple of straight edges and this enabled me to get a nice perfectly flat perfectly straight glue up that's going to really be the found foundation for this entire project I mentioned earlier that most of this project was just kind of figured out on the Fly and this isn't audible this isn't something I had planned initially but I started to think it was going to be really hard to get consistent angles just stacking them up and freehand carving them so what I'm doing here is making a couple of templates and this is just going to be to kind of hold all the blocks of wood in place during the glue up so at least the angle stay consistent anytime I try a project like this and really get out of my comfort zone I always get a few comments from people that encourage me to stick to what I'm good at and one of the things that I am good at is building epoxy tables and so much so about a year and a half ago or so I built my own virtual epoxy Workshop which is exactly what it sounds like it's an online Workshop it's over 3 and 1/2 hours long but it's short easy to digest chapters that gives you every step to building a wood and epoxy table in your home shop or garage and there will never be an epoxy Workshop 2.0 where I try to charge you more for the next version I've updated this one several times with free additional chapters and the latest thing we added was a free book that comes with it that's kind of the text version of the video workshop for you to reference as you're building your project and there is a catch though we are just about to raise the price and I always like to give people a heads up when I'm raising the price because there's nothing worse than you were just about to buy something didn't know the price was going up and you wait a little a little bit too long so if you're interested in signing up to that course there's a link in the video description I highly encourage you to click on it soon before that price goes up I definitely made some mistakes during this build but having these templates was not one of them they were the best thing I could have done because anytime you start using clamps or putting some pressure to it everything gets tweaked and twisted and just a little bit bent a skew and having these templates in place kept everything everything at that perfect 7° angle and I have a long ways to go but this was probably the first time in this project that I was feeling a little bit inspired because I had kind of sort of built a box one of the things you don't get to see in these videos is the hours that I spend basically just staring at a project trying to figure out how to do the next step and this is one of those sections I couldn't figure out how I was going to glue up a 7° tilt without everything all twisted and sliding down so here's what I came up with I have a 7° bevel cut onto these scrap pieces or these blocks and then I'm going to glue it and place with my shelf cut at the same 7° nail these pieces in and now I can apply some clamps to it and it'll stay exactly where it's supposed to if you've never seen this next trick using a regular plastic straw I'll be happy for you to believe that I'm the first person to ever think of doing this and if you have seen this before maybe they ALS also saw it from me and if you've seen this before but before I was born just let me have this okay this next part might look a little sketchy because everybody knows you never make a table saw cut like this but if you look really closely you can see this whole video is actually AI generated that I did just to show you guys what not to do and the way I actually got this cut was through entirely safe means but I forgot to record it as I was installing these shelves and these blocks I still really had no idea how I was going to carve this all the shape but figured that was kind of a tomorrow problem and I'll figure that out later but so far felt like everything was going in about as I'd hoped and this is a parallel clamp flipped upside down I've never had to flip one upside down but it worked really well for prying that shelf open so I could put this post in without removing all the glue and you'll notice that I was using some of the brad nails early on in this but eventually I realized that I should only use those on the very bottom pieces because what I don't want to do is carve into into a bunch of nails that I then have to patch so from this point forward I'm not using any brad nails it's all clamps which was extremely time consuming I basically would just do one layer or a few blocks at a time add the clamps and then wait a few hours do the next section and I did this for a few days actually when this project started and even up to this point I felt like a normal happy husband and employer with Elana and Scott by my side however when the ensuing carving and sanding stages relentlessly refused to end I began to feel like more of a caretaker of this project than its Craftsman which would eventually take me to the brink of [Music] Madness all of the blocks of wood that I'd originally got from GOI were cut to 18 in Long however I ended up trimming down those original glue UPS so they had a nice straight edge to about 17 and 3/4 of an inch so all of the ensuing blocks that I clamped in in there were still 18 in so I use this Fest tool oscillating tool to come back trim them all up and give me a nice flush [Music] back I'd copied this smaller piece of plywood from the original templates that I used during assembly and to make sure I have a perfectly consistent radius the whole way around I used the same size spacer that my wood thickness is and you can see it's actually a different radius so I couldn't have used that smaller one for both of them and it'll make a little bit more sense here in just a second here's my new larger radius I drew a nice high visibility yellow line and now here's my smaller one that I copied from the original templates drew a line there and this should give me the same thickness the whole way through you can see right there about 1.42 and the thickness of the wood is about 1.43 so I don't think I can get it much closer than that the next step though I am not terribly confident in in fact I was pretty worried I was going to ruin the entire project you nervous to take a chainsaw to it after we spent days gluing it up you seem me with the chainsaw should I be nervous I glad the camera couldn't see the face you just made just then uh yeah no I'm super freaking nervous I'm horrible with the chainsaw um but I got lines and it's like coloring and you got a little safety buffer there too yep so yeah this is going to be very nerve-wracking but uh nerve-wracking is what we do you ready yeah let's do it it's going well everybody knows chain do are tricky to start um try that almost get up [Music] if you are like Scott and wondering why am I taking a chainsaw with very little skill to a cabinet that I have dozens of hours into it's basically just to save a little bit of time I feel like it would take me several hours of carving to whittle down this little bit of wood that hopefully I can just trim off with the chainsaw in one nice easy straight cut that's assuming I don't go past my line but also get close enough to it that it makes a difference okay how about a REV viw of my cut you want to see how close I was to the line oh I can see how close you were to the line I'm closer to this line than I this line okay oh yeah nail it right something that was even worse than I thought it' be but I didn't go past the [Music] line I mustered up the courage to make another cut with the chainsaw and this one went a little bit bit better but I still don't know that I'm going to be entering any chainsaw carving competitions anytime soon and after that cut was off I got back to the angle grinder which I do feel a little bit more comfortable with but I ran into a fairly big problem much as I tried to bury those brad nails I didn't think they'd pop up but sure enough some of them did so I'll have to address those later but for now just going to hide them with this center punch and then I'm going to be able to fix them a little bit later but for now I'm going to move on to the power planer and this is a brand new tool for me and of course it's freaking nice it's by fesal which means it's freaking expensive but it didn't quite do a perfectly smooth job from there I actually decided to move on to the hand plane I don't want to give any satisfaction to the already arrogant hand tool crowd but that's was kind of fun maybe maybe I should actually learn how to use hand tools someday anybody that ever tells you handles are fun is a liar they're the absolute worst by now the project was starting to feel like all work and no play and so much so that I was starting to have visions of things that weren't even there these slow motion angle grinder accidents that let me know just how bad things could be if I let my grip slip but I continued to persevere and just do my best to carve this down and there's a really nice deer couple I've named them Wendy and Danny and they're always by the house and they always seem to like me however when they saw me this time they seemed absolutely terrified for some reason and instantly ran off it was kind of sad to see it's almost like they sense something was wrong with me one of the few good ideas I had had on this build was this series of templates and the idea is I draw the shape on the front draw the same shape on the back then I just need to connect the two through a series of carving and grinding and the carving and grinding was the tricky part here's a dish by Cuts all here's the power planer by Fest tool that I did to kind of smooth out the legs here on the edge even broke out the little hand plane to pretend like I actually use these hand tools just whatever it took to get the shape that I needed and I will say my favorite tools for this for the cuts saww one this little dish whatever you call it for the die grinder was awesome for these interior curves and I'll have a number of these CSA dis for sale on my website I really like the angle grinder one as well as this [Music] dish some of you are probably pretty concerned seeing me get the chainsaw back but the diger keeps overheating and it's the only tool that can reach in there other than the chainsaw so I have no choice but to continue to improve my chainsaw skills and try not to ruin this cabinet based on what you've seen with the chainsaw so far you probably won't be surprised to hear that I am not excited about having to use it here the best tool I found for this project by far has been that die grinder and that cuts saww dish the only problem is it keeps shutting off and I don't even think it's overheating it would only operate for a few seconds then shut down it's been really really frustrating so I really have absolutely no choice but to risk the whole project and keep using this chainsaw normally I love buying new tools for projects like this the problem is all the new tools I bought didn't really work better than these Cuts saw ones so I just kept going back to those and even this manpa sander that I got worked great for like an hour and then completely fell apart Scott was just commenting on how defeated I sound and I like to think that I don't often get to this point but I'm pretty much fine never sanding anything for the rest of my life um I thought I was through the worst of it and now I realize I don't even think I've gotten started on sanding there going to be so much more so I'll spare you a lot of it I'm going to send Scott to go do some editing and I'm just going to keep grinding at this thing quite literally at this point this was essentially an outof body experience I was just looking down watching myself sand I couldn't feel my hands I couldn't feel my arms you genuinely do not know to spare until you have hand sanded a solid wood cabinet like this for days on and it's like trying to Pedal a mountain bike with your hands up the [Music] hell okay enough of that but if you are someone who feels like you do not get enough cubric references in your day-to-day YouTube viewing you might want to consider subscribing because I got them and I'm going to keep them coming some of the more observant viewers out there probably noticed that amongst these 300 blocks that I glue together there are a few pretty large unsightly gaps and I'll show you how I'm going to fix them and I had all of these offcuts from when I was cutting those 7° angles and they're actually perfect because they have a really nice little taper so picked a few random pieces tried to get the colors as close as I could put a little shellac down to prevent the glue from staining it then I just wedged them in there and that wedge shape works so well for this cuz they just go in until they're tight [Music] these gaps really weren't too hard to fill and there really weren't that many of them either I think I had about four or five of these that I needed to put in there the ones that I was really worried about were those nail holes that I showed a little bit earlier these ones were going to be pretty tricky and I have an idea never seen this done before but I'm sure someone has done it and what I'm going to do is I'm first going to try to find some matching wood and I have a few of these blocks left over and luckily I have plenty of options for getting the right color and from there I'm going to cut some plugs this is just a very simple plug cutter it pretty much needs a drill press though it's the one catch to having this and these are tapered so they're a qu in but they taper within a couple hundreds of an inch so they make a really really tight [Music] plug I used to cut these plugs out with a Banda until I saw someone on Instagram it just po them out with a chisel so now I pop them out with a chisel and this this is where things get a little bit interesting this is something I saw a metal worker use it was a way to get a good solid clamp on a curved surface the problem is if I tried to clamp A straight piece onto that curved Edge it wouldn't sit flat so I'm hoping this domed Underside is going to give me a nice flat reference surface for me to clamp this down and now I'm using a/4 in bit and if you're tracking me here's what I'm going to do is I'm going to clamp this onto that curved surface I'm use a metal bit in that Quin hole which should guide me perfectly straight cut out that Brad nail and leave me a/ Quin hole for the plug in theory anyway there was a tiny bit of tear out but all in all it was actually really really successful I made a few extra plugs so I could choose the best color and grain orientation then just a little bit of regular wood glue and that tapered fit works really well because not all drill bits are exactly the same they might be off by aund of an inch or even two hund of an inch but that tapered fit will just keep going down until it's snug and to make sure that there's no visible Gap I mix a little bit of wood dust that's walnut dust and a little bit of Oak dust just to give that variation so it's not like a brown ring around the outside mix it in there and hopefully when I sand this off it'll look really good even the non-observant people probably notied this large gap just under those plugs and that was just a poor glue up by me so I'm doing the same trick as I did on the front front just a little bit bigger and there were a few glue spots so I couldn't do just one continuous wedge so I had to break this up into a few smaller pieces using that wood dust trick a third one going in there and I know this looks bad but I think this is actually going to work pretty well in the end again adding a little bit more of that Walnut and Oak dust and let it sit overnight and we'll see how it looks that was my flush cut saw from veritos which I really like but I'm yet to find a flush cut saw that actually Cuts flush so I need to come back clean them up with the Chisel a little bit before bringing the sander in and I could probably have brought the sander in straight from that saw but I do like to clean it up a little bit beforehand and here's how those wedges looked I did a pretty pore job on the color choice of a few of them but that one looks pretty good that one is a little bit lighter but all in all I think that's pretty good although that color was a little far off these plugs and this strip of wood I think are going to matter much more than those fixes on the front because no one's ever really going to see those one they were so small to begin with and we did a pretty good job patching these are the ones that I'm fairly nervous might not look great especially if that color doesn't look right once it gets sanded down but got everything cut flush came back cleaned it up a little bit with the block plane just to prove that yes I still use hand tools throughout the whole process put some 120 grit sandpaper on there sanded it down and here's how it looked here is the allnew Blacktail Studio Damascus marking knife showing one two and three just kidding there's three not too bad though and if you want to get a marking knife just like that one the second generation is now for sale we're doing a very limited run there's a link in the description this is the part of the project I am most excited about because I have wanted to try this for years but I've never had the perfect project and I bought this relatively small roll of copper which still very expensive this was like $600 and some doll but my idea so I'm going to do a hand hammered kind of backsplash that fits in the back of each of the openings so it has this really cool contrast with the Walnut and the copper something I have wanted to try for years but it was a lot of work that was a lot how long was that it's probably like 40 minutes yeah before I ever started this hammered copper project I did a ton of research and a ton of samples I had some smaller sheet metal pieces that I did I looked up online of all the different types of texture there are for these hammered patterns I was completely confident that I had this figured out I was going to do all the panels first but I thought I couldn't wait any further to see how this looked so I taped it on the back and tilted it up just so I could see we got the copper in there and I was real confident I was going to love this kind of looks like crumpled up tin foil I don't want to admit I was wrong after all that work but I don't know what to do I don't have another plan but I also don't want to make this worse just because that was the original plan so Scott what do you what do you think first off does it look like foil I think it kind of looks like foil okay what do you think I should [Music] do Scott has a lot of really good ideas but his black plywood idea was not one of them so here's the next idea and that is to use a bigger Hammer spaced out a little bit more and actually using steel which I'll use like a black oxide solution to give it a really rich gunmetal look hopefully that'll look better and at least these templates served a purpose here nobody ever told me how painful these hand shears are to operate this steel isn't even that thick but this was absolutely agonizing to work through one one each of the panels took a little bit of hand tuning either with the Snips or this grinding belt here and you can see that I actually cut a little bit of a rabbit All Around The Backs side of each panel so all of these panels will sit perfectly flush nothing will stick out when this cabinet sits against a wall using sheet metal screws here I'm sure somebody will have a problem with that because I'm using wood and Sheet Metal so no matter what I'm going to be using the wrong screw for one of the surfaces but here's what it looks like and I actually freaking love this I like the color I like the pattern but I think we can get it a little bit better this process is called cold bluing and I've done it a little bit but don't use me as the resource to teach yourself how to do it because I am definitely not an expert and how I did this though is I set these panels out in the sun to get a little bit hotter got them extremely clean you need to wipe them down really thoroughly with acetone or alcohol something like that to remove all the oils from it then you just wipe it on with a rag and it's really really simple and it does happen this quickly and after it's done it leaves this really deep kind of bluish gray color and as I understand it the warmer it is and the more times you do this the blacker the Finish will be and initially I wasn't going to do the backside but I figured I might as well anyway it's such a quick process but what happened is after I let these dry I let them sit a little too long and I got that surface rust but it doesn't matter because after that application you need to buff it with steel wool anyway and the steel wool remove the rust and leaves that kind of bluish gray surface and after you get it all buffed off the last thing you need to do is you need to seal it in with oil and I don't know if I'm supposed to use motor oil but it's what I had sitting around and I didn't see a problem with it and apparently you need to let it sit for 12 to 24 hours and then that kind of grayish blue will be locked in if you wipe the oil off before that you can wipe off that [Music] bluing if you are a woodworker I'm about to blow your tits off and no this is not sponsored this is a UV cured hard wax oil and here's how it works you wipe it on hit it with the light or the sun and it is freaking cured that fast and I don't mean you can handle it but wait another 7 days before exposing it to water I mean it is fully 100% cured in like 1 second I know for me this is going to completely change how I finish absolutely everything I'm still pretty early on in my testing of this vesting oil so I don't want to tell everybody hey this is the future of Wood Finishing everybody needs to run out and buy this now that said it's starting to look like this might be the future of Wood Finishing because instead of having to wait weeks for sample boards to test everything out to see if it works you can test these for water and Spills in like a minute because you wipe it on wipe it off hit it with the light or put it in the sun and it's ready to go there is one big catch though is those lights are crazy expensive and I think that might be what actually prevents this vesting oil from really going widespread in The Woodworking Community those lights cost anywhere from like $500 to $2,000 depending on which one you get so I do think that's going to be a pretty big hangup however if you live somewhere where it's not raining you can always just put it outside even on a cloudy day I should disclose the vesting did send me this oil at no charge and also sent me this light on loan for now so I could be at least that biased and I have been in talks with their USA distributor and I told them that it's going to be a problem that there's no real good way for everyday people to buy this finish in the United States currently and I can only vouch for two colors I used the English Brown and I used their pure satin which is kind of like the Rubio pure and so those are the only two colors I can vouch for so he's going to let us sell those on our website as I use more colors I might start offering more colors but this is the pure going over that English Brown and this is honestly the best Walnut stain best Walnut color that I've ever found it kind of looks like that zirot color that zirot wood is just a really really beautiful brown and their satin is every bit as nice as the Rubio satin maybe even nicer cuz you can build multiple coats I will say that two coats of the vesting gave a very similar Sheen as two coats of Rubio and for a cabinet or a bookshelf whatever you want to call this if you like that Sheen you're probably fine stopping there however if you want to bump that Sheen up and increase the color and the contrast I highly recommend looking into this N3 Nano which is just this invisible layer of protection that also increases the Sheen and the color of any wood finish doesn't have to be a hard wax oil could be a lacquer an epoxy shellac any wood finish can benefit from this M3 Nano in fact it's also a very good metal sealer this type of metal if left unsealed would eventually rust but this is just like a super wax it will not really increase the sheen or the color of this metal but what it will do is completely prevent it from rusting it's a really really incredible product okay after about 150 hours of work here is how we ended up and as a quick reminder here's how we started and here's how we we ended up and one other surprise I added hidden lights to this too financially speaking I don't know that this piece was the best investment for me because I am a woodworking business and my business is selling furniture however I just can't bring myself to lower the price of this piece to a point that it would probably take to actually sell so you can buy it on my website however I'd also be pretty comfortable just holding on to it for the rest of my life which isn't the best financial strategy if you are going to run run a woodworking business I didn't expect that much but I think it's my mouth this last build that I'm going to show you this is the one that is probably my most creative build because I didn't actually think this would work when I started but in the end it turned out to be maybe the most original thing I've ever built when I started this project I did even know what I was making I first wanted to see if I could mix a few different colors of epoxy and kind of make an ombre effect and I thought that'd be the end of it I thought that would be as cool as it could possibly be for this type of project so what I did is I got my wife enlisted she came out helped me mix helped me find the perfect colors because as I've mentioned before I'm color blind so I got her out there we had a little bit of fun mixing the colors and this apparently was just the start I did not know how far I was going to take this project and honestly I did not think it was going to work wa Jesus as you can hear my wife is extremely helpful when it comes to choosing this perfect color but I really brought this on myself because I was shocked at the number of paint samples she got for the inside of our house when we painted it so much so that I asked the guy at the paint store I said hey what is the most samples anybody's ever gotten for a room and he goes oh man this one time someone got like 30 samples my wife got 60 samples 60 samples for the inside of a house anyway I digress and we finally got ready for this pour and we opted not to use a tripod for some reasoning and I'll just let this play out oh it's not holding goes right underneath it hold it down yeah you hold it down now that's what I kind of thought might happen but it's okay Jesus it's floating away hold it this alone is very ombre like o ooh okay this is pretty maybe we should have used the tripod you got it uh-huh oh all right it's all right Jesus that looks hilarious as long as I've been working with wood and epoxy people from The Woodworking Community have been telling me that I am not a real woodworker and that just mixing wood and epoxy does not equal woodworking so finally I am trying to earn the respect my peers and I'm no longer mixing wood and epoxy and this solid epoxy project is the one that I am hoping that they finally recognize my skills and qualify me as a real woodworker I mentioned earlier that the end result of this project really surprised me and that could not be more of an understatement and this part didn't really surprise me I figured I'd be able to mix a few colors together let them blend in mold and it should look pretty cool and it does but the finished product at the end of this video that I didn't even know the direction that this project was going to take at this point in the build was probably the single project that I am most proud of out of everything I've built so much so that instead of selling this in honor of the upcoming 2 million subscribers that I hopefully get to I'm not there yet I'm at like 1.9 as of the time I'm filming this I'm going to be giving this project away to one of you guys and there'll be details in the video description or later in the video so if you're interested in winning this project I will ship this anywhere in the world because most of my viewers come from outside the US so I don't want to limit this to just us viewers so Link in the description or more details later in this video at the end of my last video I asked people to start their question or comment with the bald celebrity they thought that I most closely resembled and I would choose my favorite one and give them a shout out in a future video and we had so many good submissions that I actually have two we have a crowd favorite and a personal favorite and first first off the crowd favorite that one comes from complexities and they said that I most closely resemble Johnny Sins and if you do not want to admit where you know Johnny Sins from just play it safe and say that you know Johnny Sins from his YouTube channel and nothing else on the internet however my personal favorite comes from James Jim and it was a Japanese saw restoration video and he said that they most closely resembled Mr Sparkle and I'm also partial because I'm a big vintage Simpsons fan so thanks to everybody that gave their submissions and especially to James gym and [Music] complexities if you look through my past videos you'll see that I generally gravitate towards pretty sharp edges I like things like a really sharp 90° waterfall Edge or a 22° chamfer that I end up putting on most of my tables and so this time I want to do something a little bit different and so I am using this 2 2 and2 in radius bit on my router table and I'm just softening these edges I'm giving them a nice curved radius because the next step that I'm going to take is pretty ridiculous it is something that not only have I never tried before I want to go as bold as to say I don't think anybody on the internet has done this before and I've never said that before because I feel like the internet is too big of a place and everything has already been done so if you can find this anywhere on the internet leave a comment with a link to that and I will post a public ret reaction because I don't think anybody is stupid enough to try this and I end up risking this $1,000 chunk of epoxy for something that I didn't even think was going to work but before I could do that I had to build a form and this is just a big box with a solid curved radius which is what I'm doing here at this point I should probably say that I'm building a box just like real Woodworkers do when they want to do those really really cool curved bent laminations or steam bending however I don't actually know how to do that and so what I am basing this entire design on is a series of memories that I have where I've seen Instagram clips of people bending wood with either steam or just those bent laminations and hoping that the same thing can possibly apply to trying to bend a big solid brick of epoxy and the reason I want to give this disclaimer is because I don't want anybody who wants to try the real bent laminations or steam bending to copy this design because I'm sure it's the wrong way to do it however if there are any real Woodworkers out there that know how to properly build these boxes definitely leave me a comment and let me know how this design can be improved upon because I left plenty of room for improvement and all I'm doing here is just cutting a bunch of 2x4s that will act as the support and help me build this giant curved form some of you are probably correctly starting to wonder how exactly does he think he's going to bend this solid brick of epoxy it is fully cured before epoxy is completely cured it tends to be a little bit gummy and a little bit flexible however this is cured for over a year and a half it is rock hard there is zero Flex in it you might think that you could do this if you just poured it and then try to bend it in the first week however you couldn't surface it like I did so I have it perfectly consistent and flat and you wouldn't be able to do that with the kind of gummy epoxy so I don't think you could do it that way and the inspiration behind this idea comes from a friend of mine who was installing an epoxy table and while they were getting the house ready for it they had it sitting out in the sun and in just a few minutes the center of the table started a taco started to Sag from the heat so what I'm doing is I'm going to see if I can do that on purpose I'm going to use the sun to try to heat this up and bend it over this epoxy form or not epoxy form but whatever you call this bent form the first thing I learned though is don't use this hardboard that does not flex and was a horrible idea to use there so went back got some Thin plywood that I'm going to cut some curs in because I also tried to bend this and it did not want to bend either and at this point I did not know if this was going to work but again I was in for a penny in for a pound I'm all in I'm going to see if I can make this work and it's a pretty big investment at this point between the money of epoxy and the materials and most importantly the time so we don't get a lot of 100° days in Oregon and I had a 4 days stretch were supposed to be over 100 every single day so this was probably my last opportunity for the year to try this project I was pretty inspired by how well cutting those curves in that thin plywood allowed it to bend around this radius and so now I just needed to find a way to attach it as perfect as I possibly could and I knew it wouldn't be hard to get it attached in some fashion however what was going to be really critical was getting it as smooth as I possibly could because unlike bending wood where the wood is going to kind of naturally bend in a radius this epoxy once it heats up it'll allow itself to be dented or kinked or anything like that so if there's any lumps or defects in it that epoxy is going to soak it up so added some glue added some clamps and here's what we got so you think it's work oh this I I think there's a 10% chance of it working but if it does it's cool 10% yeah I just I usually have a pretty good idea like when something's a good idea and when it's not this is one of those doesn't seem like a good idea but you never know until you try also this pretty shoddy just a little lumpy little lumpy yep for once the weather was actually cooperating the high today was supposed to be about 104° F which is about 40° C to the rest of the world and that's pretty hot for Western Oregon I know that there's somebody living in Death Valley or Nevada that's going to comment and say that I don't know what it's like to actually be hot and that's true I might not but for us this is pretty warm and so first thing in the morning we got it out there it was as cool as it's going to be we had two cameras rolling so we didn't want to miss anything and I was just winging it I didn't know what was going to happen and then this happened it actually started to bend in the sun that's a time lapse but I was blown away I was so freaking excited that it actually worked and so now I got some ratchet straps out and I was just going to try to help it along and I was shocked at how well this was working I was blown away because it was completely flexible and I could have pushed it probably all the way at that point but I was afraid of cracking it and I had had the entire day to go so it let that time lapse run it actually got so hot that both of our cameras shut off in the shade but here's how it's looking this is totally gummy and now the only thing I'm worried about is if it's actually going to be consistent and if it gets too hot to crack the epoxy and I did continue to check the temperature of the epoxy which got to about 135° F which I don't know what that is in Celsius I'll probably put it up on the screen but there we go we got it all the way down and this is the next morning there we go never ever thought this would work all right got to get it out of the sun now back all right it's been about 3 days since coming out of the form and initially everything looks really good there's no major creases there's no cracks or anything like that when you look a little closer you start seeing some of the imperfections though there's a little bit of distortion on one side versus the other there's a couple creases where I had the clamps clamp without any towels under them it's a perfect 90 right down the middle but then if you get off just to the sides it's just off of a little bit from a perfect 90 so not terrible for a first attempt but definitely not perfect the simplest way for me to finish this probably would have been just to sand it lightly up to about 180 maybe 240 grit and then spray it with something like a lacquer or a varnish however I just don't think that looks quite as cool as when something is polished all the way up so what I'm going to do is I'm taking it from this 80 grit all the way up to 3,000 grit and then I'm going to buff it with Automotive compounds and this will be the worst sanding job of my life and I feel like I probably say that in multiple videos but this is the Undisputed new champion of horrible sanding projects and here I good thing I have about $2,000 in Sanders because now I get to use all the little odd ones I have like that little Rotex 90 that actually did a really nice job at getting in the curves there and this bigger Rotex the Rotex 150 did a really nice job of kind of smoothing out some of those dimples and dents that I showed you earlier from where the clamps had kind of compressed that epoxy and did a surprising job of smoothing it out I wanted to stick with this theme of using just these soft edges and so I bought this half inch roundover bit and it was actually surprisingly hard to find a/ in roundover bit for a/ Quin Chuck which is this little trim router I have here you can see why I had to use the trim router because I had to Teeter it on this little edge here I do have larger routers that would have worked better with better desk collection or I should say epoxy collection but this is what I had come up with and this was pretty messy and by the way that new respirator I have there it's pretty freaking cool there's a link in the video description for it if you interested in it it's one of my favorite respirator purchases of the last probably ever actually and it is really really expensive though so be forewarned that it is not cheap and here's the mess that I made this was just a couple epoxy shavings and we really sped this up because this was a pretty long process to get this whole thing completely rounded over about a year ago I took a pretty big gamble I spent about 30 hours or so creating a script and a step-by-step game plan I hired an outside film crew and we spent about 40 hours or so filming my virtual epoxy workshop and the reason this was a gamble is I probably could have made two or three maybe even four YouTube videos in that amount of time but people were always asking me to bring back my epoxy workshops because I used to do them in person but I had so many people that couldn't fly from across the country or across the world and wanted to have a good resource on how to build a wood and epoxy table so I committed myself to this plan and it was something that I didn't want to miss a single step so there was a lot of work that went into it I even did kind of live sessions when I was filming it with Instagram so I could get live feedback in real time so if there was a question that the audience had that I might not have thought of I could answer that just like I was doing a live class and it's something I'm really proud of and to be honest I was completely blown Away by the response I have had so many more people sign up for it than I expected and if you are interested in it you can watch it over and over again you can just watch a single chapter you can rewatch multiple chapters it's just something I am incredibly proud of and if you're interested often I'm running a promotion so check the link in the description and see if there's a current promotion going on right now I was recently on Tik Tok and I was watching the southern Craftsman and he said hey I know everybody seen this trick a thousand times but if you don't know how to mark your line here's how to properly do it don't put your square up to the line and then Mark it you put your pen or pencil up to the line and then bring the square directly to that and I'm embarrassed to say I had never seen that trick before which is what you saw me do when I marked this acrylic leg here so thanks to the southern Craftsman for showing me a trick that apparently I should have known years ago in my last video I mentioned that I have an upcoming project that didn't involve any wood whatsoever and spoiler is not actually this project there's still would to come as part of this project so stay tuned for that but I showed this Quick Clip and I said if anybody could guess what it was I would send them a prize and it ended up being a wood and epoxy cutting board and it only took an hour and a guy by the name of Mr Cody fo correctly guessed that I'm going to attempt to restore a real life woolly mammoth tusk and here's a clip of it now and here's a shot of what I hope to make it look like which is not one that I've done before and it's something totally new to me I think it's it's going to be awesome some people are wildly confused about why anybody would want to attempt this I think it is really really cool and I hope you'll stick with me and I promise I'm not going to Pivot to a fossils Channel or anything like this it's just something that I am personally fascinated with and I can't wait to tackle this woolly MTH Tusk and congrats to Cody on getting the answer correct this is the fun part and it's also the nerve-wracking part because this is when the epoxy really comes alive this is when you polish it up and you can see right through it but you'll also be able to see any sanding imperfections that you made along the way so going all the way from 80 grit up to 3,000 grit there's a very good chance that I miss something and once you polish it you'll see these little pigtail Swirls and horrible scratches in there and so far it's looking pretty good this is the extreme heavy cut stuff with a wool buffing pad and it gets a lot Shiner than this but so far I'm pretty inspired thinking that it's coming together pretty nicely and it's really starting to look more like blown glass than epoxy which is not something I expected so at this point I'm feeling pretty good I got the stage one out and now it's really starting to buff to a high gloss until Scott pointed this out what what's that is that God Dam it well what Scott my video guy just pointed out and thank you for that by the way Scott I have a giant clamp footprint in the middle of this that somehow didn't get sanded out during the entire sanding and polishing process and it's got the perfect microfiber imprint from when it was in the form and the sun my only theory is that when we heated it up during this polishing process it got that plastic memory from when it was clamped in the Sun and kind of sprung back into shape I have no idea if that's true if you are a Plastics chemist definitely let let me know in the comments cuz I I can't imagine how I would have missed that sanding but now I'm going to sand it down and try to fix it since this entire piece is already essentially fully polished I wanted to be as gentle as possible when it comes to sanding so I only went down to 1500 grit which as it turns out was just aggressive enough to completely remove that stamp now the only question is does it come back when I heat it up in the polishing process what do you think going to come back I I have no clue what do you think uh I don't know I look like I know what I'm doing I know for sure I know for sure it's gone I don't know if it's going to spring back all right there [Music] nothing part of me is tempted to really push it to see see how hot I can get it to see if it comes back but part of me wants to go really slow and not get it hot is right now it looks good um so how curious am I as it turns out I was not quite curious enough to really push the polishing process to see if there actually was something in the chemistry of this table that would cause that plastic memory to spring back if I got it just hot enough so proceeded rather CAU ious ly with the rest of the polishing process and about now I started to wonder about a name for this table because it's not really a waterfall table it's not really an epoxy table at least the epoxy table that we normally think of and I asked my friend Chris over at Four Eyes Furniture what he thought I should call it he said that I should call it the Peron table but doesn't really resemble any type of Russian meat pie so I don't even know what he's getting at there but if you have a suggestion for a name I would love to hear it so any ideas you have I would love if you left me the suggestions in the comments and if I end up using that as the future name of this table I will definitely give you a shout out in a future video this is a clear piece of acrylic I bought up at TAP plastics and it's actually much nicer than it looks underneath that clear protective wrap they sell them with and this is an idea my wife had she suggested I keep everything very modern very transparent with this clear acrylic and the Clear Blue Table and this piece was actually really really expensive it was like $240 for that one chunk of acrylic which if you know my wife is generally pretty fitting and I was a little nervous though about how I was going to attach it because I didn't think straight epoxy on epoxy was going to be strong enough so I wanted to have a little bit of mechanical force in there too so what I came up with is this Jig Is it fits a bushing for my router just perfectly so that bushing clicks into that jig I have a/ in router bit and as I plunge it down it should leave a perfect halfin hole and the idea here is this will allow me to use some clear acrylic dowels that are also 1/ in and when I use the same template on my table everything should line up just perfectly and I'll have that kind of mechanical reinforcement I was pretty nervous cutting this small round piece of acrylic because I wasn't certain it wouldn't shatter or shoot back into my face but normal cross cut blades seem to work well and to make sure I had three dowels the exact same length I used my cats mosa stop block and now I have three pieces the exact size I need that'll fit perfectly into those holes however when I started looking at that piece and looking at that piece I couldn't bring myself to put my router into that epoxy table so I scrapped the idea of using that acrylic leg and here is the wood leg I'm going to use instead I had an idea for a single Table leg that would really match the style with those kind of soft rounded edges and kind of modern design but I didn't want to use regular boring wood and By Boring wood I just mean wood that I've used a million times before so no Walnut no Maple no anything like that this is a piece of zebra wood I actually went down to the Woodcraft just down the street for me and I rifled through everything they had and I got this 8/4 2in thick piece of zebra wood and it's a really really beautiful wood species and one that I've never used before but pretty excited about it but there's still the question of will a single table leg actually balance this thing from behind so have to see if I can pull this off but first just some normal jointing and planing this is actually a jointer I'll be giving away in a local giveaway here pretty soon cuz I just got a new one from Oliver this is an 8 in shop Fox One totally decent so stay tuned for details on that jointer giveaway too just like before I nipped the edges off with the band saw came over to the rter table but this time I believe I used an inch and a half radius bit and I felt that this looked a little bit better since it was a much smaller piece I didn't want to use the same large radius that I used on the table but now is where it gets really interesting because there is very very little room for err with this mounting system that I'm going with but if I pull it off I will not have to put any holes into the table which is my dream so I've got my spots marked I've got a forcer bit in there that is a very specific size and you'll see why it has to be just so perfect in just a little bit and also at this point you don't want to blow out the other side so I have it clamped down which should prevent any blowout I went almost all the way through and then finished it from the other side leaving just that satisfying little disc there I am well aware that most Woodworkers do not have a band saw like I have here and if they do have a band saw it's probably not as nice as this one which I've only had for a couple of months now but one thing that any woodworker can do is build jigs you can use Jigs and a router to build almost anything make a bunch of sleds for your table saw it is incredible the things that people come up with that enable their table saw to become multi-function tools and if you still need some industrial tools if you still need tools that aren't available through using a jig I actually made a website a few months ago it's called maker book. and it's kind of like a uber for tools except for the fact I don't make any money on it I actually lose money having this website but what it does is enables anybody with a small Shop create a listing and they can rent out their drop space their time their tools so if you don't have the tools and you just need to use it for 30 minutes or an hour there's probably someone local to you that'll rent your shop out rent the tool out to you and enable you to woodwork without actually having to make that big upfront investment of the expensive tools so I'll include a link in the description but again it's maker book. the finish that I'm using here is a water-based poly which is a really difficult finish to brush on and I actually recently got an HV LP gun but I've just been too nervous to use it so it's still in the the box and I'm trying to build up the courage to actually learn how to use it and here this took a few coats and a little bit of sanding in between but it looks really really nice this is how I'm actually going to attach it well I'm not actually going to use adhesive on this to the table but what I'm using here is contact cement and then I have this kind of sticky felt pad and there is adhesive on the felt itself but this contact amend adhesive is really really strong so I thought it would be a little bit more durable and so it took a little bit of wiggling trying not to ruin the Finish with that adhesive got it stuck on there and I let it cure for a little while before I came back to trim it up like I mentioned earlier in the video this is an older video so this giveaway is no longer live but I do have an interesting update and I could actually use some help from you guys I mentioned that I would ship this anywhere in the world for free and I meant it and the winner of this table was in the UK and so I looked up shipping it's was going to be about $1,600 to ship this which wasn't terrible for going overseas but I thought maybe this guy would just rather have $1,600 than this table which I would totally understand so I said hey instead of the table would you just rather have the $1,600 I'm happy to ship you the table but if you want the money instead I'll just send it to you and he goes yeah I'll take the 1,600 bucks so I did but what I didn't think about is so many people entered this giveaway and now I'm stuck with a very unique piece that I don't want to sell it and I can't do another giveaway because everyone's going to say you already did that giveaway so I actually have no idea what to do with this table now I'm terrified of how this makes me look I'm sure the guy that I gave the money to would be happy to vouch for me but let me know what I should do with this table because I just don't think I can do another giveaway and have it come off as authentic so anyway I hope you enjoy this build and I would love some feedback about what to do with this table now I hope you've enjoyed my first ever woodworking Anthology video and if you like this video if you want to see more videos like this definitely feel free to leave me a comment with other compilations you'd like to see but more than anything I really hope that I'm not talking to anybody in particular at this point because if you put this video on hoping to fall asleep and you are still awake 2 and 1 half hours in you need to seek medical assistance right away and anyway every week I like to give a little credit to people who make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comment with the word insomnia and I'll that you made it all the way to the end of the video thanks so much have a great week

Channel: Blacktail Studio Uncut

Views: 3,124,001

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Id: Alcrxzoo2kk

Length: 155min 20sec (9320 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2023