Woodworking Liar

[Music] hi I'm Chris and I'm a liar well not always but there is one lie I've been telling everybody including myself for years now you see back in 2010 this was the first thing I ever built right because actually this is the first thing I ever built not nearly as cool but that's not the bad part I've always called this thing a spider table but now that I'm being honest with myself it really doesn't look anything like a spider so it made me wonder what if I were honest for once and made a table that actually looks like a spider well today I'm going to do that and it's going to rock actually that is kind of a concern by Rock I don't mean wobbly I mean like cool you know what let's just get into the video oh hang on wrong [Music] button so when I first started thinking about this project my idea was to do something to use up all of these leftover scrap pieces but I pretty quickly realized that only these two chunks were going to work and if I'm being honest they're too big to call scraps but they're also too small to call slabs so we'll call them scabs anyway here I've got what will eventually become the base for my form and I'm using it to figure out how I'm going to position my scabs and this is the problem that I kept running into so right now I got something like this and I really don't like this Gap but none of these pieces are going to fill it in that well except this one but all of these red edges are man-made saw cuts which I think will look really bad if they end up in the finished top that said I think I found a solution if I take this long skinny piece and do what's called a resaw cut I can butt the two man-made edges together so that I maintain a Live Edge everywhere and these are always pretty beefy cuts to make so I like to start on my table saw taking several passes raising up my blade in between each cut and then once I've maxed that out I can move over to my band saw to finish things off and the result no man-made edges anywhere and I actually think it looks worse so I guess big gap it is on this one now something that I think always gets lost in these videos is scale like watching this video this probably looks like a pretty normaliz coffee table but in reality it's big definitely bigger than average so the reason that I bring this up is that in full disclosure at some point I would like to sell this table and I want any potential potential buyers to have a good sense of the size for example I have a pretty normalized living room and if I tried to put this table in my house I think it would be way too big like I'd probably have to get rid of this chair now I know that big is a relative term so to make it quantifiable it's a 46 in diameter and a circle table that you might find at Ikea is going to be more like 35 in and 11 in might not sound like much but it depends on what you're talking about like I'm 6'2 and if I were 11 in taller I'd be sha okay maybe there's a few other differences but you get my point anyway to recap the table is big but not novelty big and while I'd like to keep it there's no way it'll fit in my house unless I get rid of this chair and I don't want to get rid of the chair because I love the chair in fact I think that chair might be my favorite piece that I've ever personally designed and built just kidding it's a pretty famous design by Charles and Ray e [Music] [Music] this next step's going to take me about 216 hours to complete and it starts with brushing on a thin layer of epoxy that'll act as a sealer coat and that takes about 30 minutes then the next say I'll put my slabs in the form secure everything down and mix up a small batch of total boat thick set fathom epoxy and pour a thin layer and this step is arguably unnecessary but I play it safe and do it that way if there are any leaks all know now and this step probably takes me about another 30 minutes then the next day I'll check my epoxy to make sure that everything's looking good and that there are no leaks and if everything's all right then I'll go ahead and mix up a bunch of the thick set and do my full pour and this will probably take me about another hour since I like to do it in a few small buckets rather than one big bucket and then I'll let that cure for about a week so there you go about 9 days AKA 216 hours to pour epoxy or 2 hours of actual work just kind of depends on how you want to look at it now earlier I mentioned how this table's going to be very spider inspired in spidered I guess bad joke anyway I also mentioned that the table will be for sale and this Probably sounds like a pretty terrible idea I mean I don't know what that ven diagram looks like I guess you've got a lot of potential people who buy coffee tables but then very few of them who also happen to love spiders but needless to say I don't expect this one to bring home the bacon sorry will any who whenever I'm building anything I've got a lot of time on my hands to just think about random stuff and what I kept thinking about while I was building this piece was why why build a table that looks like a spider but then it occurred to me that YouTube is full of wise why does Cam build tables out of his old bugle boys why did Shawn build a table that holds one cup of coffee why did I build a giant Nintendo switch or a table inlaid with crayon twice and once with Lego I mean let's face it none of these projects were the most lucrative uses of our time but you know what they were they were fun and I know it sounds like a feel-good thing to say but I think have fun might be the most overlooked tip and I think it actually is practical advice if you pick projects that you're excited about you're going to be more motivated to see them through and willing to work harder to to learn whatever you have to learn to get a job done that's the reason that the original Spider table was the second thing I ever built I thought it looked cool and I was excited to build it and that pushed me to figure out all kinds of stuff how to cut repeatable tapers how to clamp a bunch of weird angles together how to attach the top to the base how to cut a really steep bevel so yeah have fun and build stuff that you're excited about isn't a tip I think it'll take you way further than a tip like sprinkle salt on your glue surfaces to to keep things from sliding around will by the way that salt tip I don't know if it actually works but I've seen like five YouTubers mention it so it's got to be true [Music] right anyway if you found value in any of those tips either the philosophical have fun tip or the salt one give me a like and a subscribe it's free to use you and I've heard other YouTubers say that it really helps their Channel out again no personal proof but there's got to be something to it you just saw me using my CNC to flatten the top and then trim the circle to its final size and technically I could have cut all the way through doing this but for whatever reason I just feel more confident only cutting about 3/4 of an inch down and then using my band saw and some templating bits in my router to finish the cut then I have to clean out all of these bug holes that Clara walnut's notorious for having and it's kind of a pain in the butt but they can end up looking really cool in the finished piece so it's worth it plus thematically it fits right bug holes on a spider table okay time to get to the good stuff so when you think of a spider aesthetically the first thing you might think of is is their legs and this is where this Project's going to really come to life so I ordered some chunks of 64 Walnut from my buddies over at woodworker source that I'm going to use to make the legs and when I picture spider legs I imagine something kind of like this with a bunch of joints so I'm going to reinterpret this shape as something that's a little bit more furnitur and since I have to make eight of them I'm going to make myself some templates out of MDF also I just told another lie remember a couple seconds ago when I said when I picture spider legs I imagine something kind of like this well truthfully when I imagine spider legs here's what I see in my head absolutely nothing and actually that's what I see when I try to picture anything in my head and I always thought that this is what everybody saw when they tried to imagine things but apparently it turns out there's a whole spectrum of things that people see actually here's an infographic that I pulled up from clevelandclinic.org that probably explains it better than I can but basically on one end you've got what people like me see which is nothing and then on the complete other end of the spectrum you've got a lifelike image now I only discovered that this was a thing recently so if this is your first time hearing about it don't feel bad but I'm glad I did because it actually explained a lot to me particularly about the way that I was in school and it's probably the reason that I draw and model everything that I build so meticulously I guess because I can't really plan or imagine each next step in my head I always fully buil everything digitally and kind of create a plan for myself that I can refer to as I'm building by the way I didn't start talking about this so that I could plug our woodworking plans but it does kind of feel like the opportune time so if you do want to build any of our planned pieces including the original Spider table I'll have a link in the description anyway I don't really remember why I started talking about any of this but I don't know maybe some people will find it interesting and I'm going to stop now but it's called a Fantasia if you're interested in that and you can look it up there's plenty online okay so I just made my template and cut my wood into some small chunks and next I'm going to use those templates to cut my small chunks into smaller chunks basically each leg will be made of two parts so right now I have eight of these pieces and four of these and next what I'm going to do is split the four bigger pieces in half so that I have eight of everything still oversized at this point and here comes a real Pro tip this tip is going to be way better than the salt one and that is always leave things as big as possible until the absolute last minute and you'll see why for two reasons as these legs come together so reason one the next thing that I'm going to do is cut all of my joint faces so where the upper and lower parts come together and the more oversized my pieces are right now the more room for error I have when cutting these angles in other words I could be fairly off but as you can see my finished leg shape will still easily fit within the oversized assembly now obviously I'm still going to try to make these Cuts as accurately as possible but it's nice to have some margin and the second reason that you should leave things oversized is that weird shapes like this can be really hard to clamp so to get around this a lot of times what you'll see people do is take off Cuts or little wedges and kind of glue them onto the edge strategically so they can get good pressure and that definitely works but then you have to remove them and you want to make sure you don't damage the material that you want to keep or at the very least you got to clean up glue and a much easier solution is to cut out a few little notches that you can use to clamp to like you see me doing here so subtracting instead of adding and I usually like to do it where I can get two clamps on each leg that way I can use the pressure to kind of fine-tune things if I need to okay next I'm going to show you a subtle detail that a lot of Builders Overlook that has a big impact on how people view the quality of your work but first let me take a minute to thank ethos for sponsoring this video people don't like to think about life insurance for obvious reasons but ignoring it doesn't help and it actually hurts because the truth is according to Investopedia each year you wait as you get older life insurance rates can increase by 8 to 10% personally I got a 20-year policy when I was in my mid-30s and I think the smartest thing you can do is get it when you're at your youngest which is now unless you got a time machine and Ethos have made the entire process way simpler faster and more affordable to the point where you can get a quote in seconds and apply for life insurance in just minutes online without any medical exams you just need to answer a few health questions and most people are able to get coverage the same day plus the rates are obviously going to depend on you your age and what you're looking for but you might be shocked by how affordable a policy can be stop putting it off I did it so that I could make sure I was protecting the people most important to me so take a minute go to ethos and get a free quote so that you can get the ball rolling all right thank you ethos so what you just saw me do there was use my sled on my table saw to start shaping my legs and I started by making one cut like this then another cut like this so that we were left with this shape and next we need to trim here and my goal is to have this transition Point happen right at this joint now it's not really important in terms of structure or anything like that and honestly it's probably not anything that anybody would ever even notice it's almost like a reverse detail like if you do it right it's just invisible it's not there but if this transition and Joint are off by a half inch you do notice and it makes the whole thing feel less refined okay that takes care of the straight part of the legs and next we need to take care of the curved parts and well every time I hit record there's a truck backing up so I don't know what happened I've got my legs but somehow I lost my footage but I think I've gotten but I think I got an easy fix thanks to animations and some b-roll so to cut the curved part I always start by removing most of the material on the band saw I did have that part so you saw that footage but then I'll attach my template to my workpiece and use a router with a template bit to basically duplicate the shape oh no now the cops are coming so hopefully that animation explained it but if it didn't here's some b-roll okay I'm going to go look for that footage one more time but if you're watching this then that means I didn't find it and moving on if there's ever a truck blocking you DM me I'll start recording it'll back up it'll get out of your way promise so right now we've got mostly shaped legs that are just too long here and here so next we're going to use a slud to cut them like this and there's going to be a lot of weird order of operation stuff that comes into play right here and while you're watching it you might question the order that I'm doing things in and I'm going to explain it all but trust me this is the smart way to do it so the next thing I'll do is cut a domino mortise into those freshly cut ends and eventually we're going to use these to connect everything but we got to cut them in right now while they're still [Music] Square then we're going to head over to the router and do a round over detail that's going to run along the inside curve of the leg but I need to make sure that I don't round over the tip where the mortises are and you'll see why in a minute then we can head back over to the table saw to trim the bottom of the legs to [Music] length now now longtime Watchers of the channel will know that it's actually pretty rare that I get any new equipment in fact I'm coming up on 8 years of making videos and I still have a lot of the same equipment that I started with actually the first two tools that I used in my first ever video were my Joiner and planer and they've served me well but it's time for something new so here's my new Joiner an SCM minia Max fs52 es rolls right off the tongue and here's what 8 years of progress looks like and here is my new planer an SCM minia Max fs52 es it's a combo machine now I'll be honest I'm not much of a tool nerd like I don't really geek out over this stuff to me they're literally tools you know to get the job done and I also like to use something for several months before I form an opinion but holy sh am I already loving this thing that's my early review but I'm going to give it a few months to form an actual opinion as well as some thoughts on some of the other new stuff that I got and I don't think I'm going to be posting any tool review videos anytime soon but I don't know maybe after I form my opinions I'll post something on my other channel and link to them I'll keep you updated now what I was joining and planning there was this chunk of wood that's going to become the Hub piece that's going to connect all the legs together and this piece still has to look cool but it's definitely more technical than the legs were and the reason I always wait to make this piece is because the dimensions have to be based off of whatever the legs actual dimensions are not Theory so once I know that I can model everything up and then because I had already made templates and eight legs and this is basically the same workflow I cheated and used my CNC to do the initial shaping is that cheating I don't know not really I mean if you think it is you can keep going with that line of thought and any power tool is cheating heck any tool is cheating basically if you aren't shaping all of your parts by knowing on them like a beaver then you're cheating okay the last thing we need to do before we assemble everything is figure out how we're going to attach the base to the top and one of my favorite details on the original Spider table are these standoffs I think they look cool and they're functional and normally the way that I cut them in is by making a little jig and then using a router but I guess I was already in a cheating mood so back to the CNC it was and all joking about cheating aside this is actually something that I'd like to start playing around with more on the CNC which is cutting in joinery I think 95% of the time that I use it now it's basically for flattening slabs and I know it's capable of so much more but I feel like there's also a fine line between boring and interesting with this particular tool so I don't want to embrace it too much but I think I could be doing more so have you guys seen this trend on YouTube recently where people are making woodworking compilation videos basically one upload that has several individual videos back to back the first one I saw was from jper makes but since then I've seen Blacktail do one Morley CT has done one and I'm sure we're going to be seeing others and I'm curious what you guys think of these videos first do you watch them or have you been served them if you do watch them what do you like about them let me know in the comments also remember a few minutes ago when we left our legs Square here on the end that got connected to the hub piece well here's why it's a lot easier to get a nice transition if you round this over after it's glued together okay we're back to the tabletop here and the next thing I want to do is mechanically reinforce this Gap with something and my first idea since this is a spider table and since some spiders have hourglasses on their bellies was to do a big hourglass but as you can see in this shot I'm clearly cutting in slot for some c channel so that didn't happen and here's how it went down so way back at the beginning of this build I had this idea and I took a picture so that I could mess around with shapes and figuring out scale but when I did that I didn't account for the fact that the slabs both Wayne away from each other so the gap on the underside is quite a bit bigger than it is on the top side and the shape that I had modeled would just barely bridge the gap so it wasn't really going to do much of anything so then I tried stretching it out but I thought it looked goofy so then I tried scaling it up but I came to the conclusion that I should probably just abandon this idea Al together and that's because wood moves across its width and The Wider a piece is the more it's going to expand and contract so if I inlay a big chunk of wood that has the grain running perpendicular to the top it's going to want to move this way and eventually it's probably going to do more harm than good I guess that's why when you see people reinforce cracks with bow ties they always use several small ones and not one gigantic one every time I use this stuff I get questions about it and you just saw what it is so here's why I use it with any slab you've got a lot of negative space to fill and epoxy is going to fill like 99.9999999% of the voids but there's always little cracks and holes that you can't get into so that's where this stuff comes into play and I actually found out about it while I was watching a Blacktail video so I guess I'm paying it forward anyway I like this stuff and cam seems to like it too actually he really likes it but even the Hot Melt won't get into the tiny tinest of holes so for those I'm going to use some black CA glue okay the top is looking good and here is where this entire project gets flipped on its head so remember a few minutes ago when we cut those slots into the top of the legs by the way the woodworking jargon for that is a mortise well now it's time to make the little standoffs that we're going to use to connect the base and the top together and these are technically called floating tenants so I get a piece of Walnut that's way too thick and start off by resawing it on the band saw then next I need to make sure that it absolutely perfectly matches the width of those mortises so I Mill it down and everything's looking great then from there I need to rip it to its final width which has to match the length of the mortise and again no problems there so at this point it's sized perfectly other than these radiuses which we still need to cut but there's a simple solution for that on the router [Music] table so I cut in all four radiuses or radii whatever and I go and give it a test fit and it fits great honestly maybe too great so then the last thing I need to do is cut these to length so that after everything's installed I get that Gap that I want so in terms of the base at this point everything should be done and the next step would be to cut the matching mortises into the underside of the top but I think let's give it a quick little preview see what it looks like so my buddy who's also named Chris helps me set it all up and it looks awesome but then I think just for fun let's see what it looks like if we flip the base upside down and well I I like it like this but I thought you know what I'll sleep on it for a day I'll make some drawings hoping that might change my mind but it didn't and I know this is a big change I mean this whole time I've been saying I was going to build an actual spider table finally you might even say I lied but in my defense this was not planned and I'm going to get into the specifics on why I think this is the way to go and minute but if I am flipping the whole thing upside down that means now I need to figure out a new way to attach everything so had this been my original plan I probably would have designed it more like this so that I could do some threaded inserts and bolts through these stretchers but obviously this table doesn't have those stretchers so I came up with a bunch of solutions for this but here's what I ultimately landed on doing I've had this plate of 8 in aluminum sitting in one of my drawers for no kidding about seven years and I decided to use use my CNC to cut out eight circles that have an inch and a half diameter basically like a large coin and what I'm going to do is attach each one to a foot so that it's hanging off of the edge of the foot towards the center of the table and then I'm going to cut eight recesses in the underside of the top that are just slightly larger than the coins and that's it no mechanical attachment so this will ensure that the top always sits in the right position aesthetically and it stops the top from being able to rotate or slide relative to the base and the only way that the top can come off is if it's intentionally lifted now this would not have worked on the original design because if a lot of weight were placed here it's possible that the table could lift but with this design no way it would have to be such a massive amount of weight that the entire table would either tip over or break before the Top's going to lift so I feel pretty good about this solution but now the other thing I need to take care of are the mortises on what are now the bottom of the table's feet thankfully I've already got some pretty perfectly sized plugs that I can use to fill them in just a lot of work and attention to detail that ended up being for nothing but I think that's a good lesson learned it's never too L to Pivot here it was very late in the game but I had an idea that I liked better and even though that meant that some of the work that I did leading up to this point was was well pointless staying on that course and going with the design that I liked less just to avoid that wouldn't be good reasoning actually there's a term for it the sunk cost fallacy like right now you might be thinking God it is Chris about to go off on another tangent but then you go well I've already come this far and the video's almost over so I'll Stick Around first thank you for that I appreciate you but that's the sunk cost fallacy at work be honest did you just hover your mouse over the video to see how much time was left we're almost there so to tell the truth I really did consider just sticking with the original plan even though I didn't like it as much and the biggest thing that made me consider doing that was perception I'm sure that some people watching this right now liked the original design better and think that I made a bad decision and I totally get that I mean taste is subjective and there is no right answer and I don't say this to try to convince you but when I looked at the design side by side it was six to one half dozen to the other I liked them the same until you start to have a more realistic View and I mean that literally like what a person would see walking into a room and to me this looks far more interesting and I actually think to do the spider table the right way I should use glass again that's not the right answer that's just what I think and I have to do what feels [Music] honest so I went into this project with every intention of building an actual spider table but now that the sawdust is settled what can I say I guess hi I'm Chris and I'm a liar but that's okay thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 502,734

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Id: vxa-qHs7MOs

Length: 29min 38sec (1778 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024