Hexagon Patterned Plywood | How To

[Music] all right it's pattern plywood time once again in this week it's hexagons I've been wanting to do hexagons for a while you guys have been asking for it so I did a deep dive this week into all the different patterns you can make with hexagons and I don't even know if I scratch to the surface but I came up with loads of cool patterns and I know these look crazy complicated but they're really not once you understand the principles of them they're pretty easy to mix so stick around I'll show you how to make all these different patterns this video is sponsored by rocker Thank You rocker [Music] so this entire project is going to be built out of this one piece of scrap plywood this is a piece of Baltic birch plywood and it's seven inches wide by 36 inches long I'm going to start by ripping it into a series of 60-degree strips and the first step is to remove that outside edge [Music] once you have a 60-degree edge for reference you can then set up the fence the way that I like to do this is to press the board in between the fence and the table saw blade and that way you know that it's set to the same thickness as the thickness the material then you can flip the material over and start ripping now that I have a bunch of strips I can cut them down to manageable lengths I cut these at 12 inches mostly because my board was 36 inches and then divided nicely into three but you don't want to go too much longer because it'll make the glue up more difficult later right off the bat we can make a couple patterns with these pieces the one on the left is sort of like a star pattern when it's all glued up and then the one on the right is more of that 3d cube look all right so you'll notice that I saved a little bit of this board and that is because I want to make some equilateral triangles out of this and what I'm going to use for that is this little piece of scrap so this is this is cut at the 60 degree angle as well and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna flip that over set it against the fence and bring the fence in to the saw blade once it's right there I have a new fence that I can ride this board up against and I can cut through those triangles notice that I've taped that piece of scrap wood to the fence with some double-stick carpet tape so that it doesn't move at all during the cut and once again I'm gonna cut all those triangles down to 12 inches with the addition of all these triangles there's loads of new pattern options so the first is just to assemble all the triangles together into this concentric ring hexagon thing it's kind of like a bull's eye and so there's the first basic three patterns and from that you can form a countless number of other patterns you just take those elements that we used before in this case combining two rhombuses and two triangles and you have this u-shape it sort of looks like a fish scale when you combine it all together another one that you can make is with four triangles and one rhombus and this is sort of like a spiral and the last one that I'm gonna glue up is this sort of faceted diamond and it's made with two triangles and two rhombuses and now that I've selected all my patterns I can begin the glue up I use blue painters tape to hold it together so that I can fan it out and then I also like to lay down a glue mat so that I don't get it all over my table you want to use a lot of glue on this because the plywood has a tendency to absorb it into the end grain and then when you roll it back up again you want to put some pressure on it with your hands so that the glue squeezes across all the surfaces when it comes to clamping all I use is a bunch of rubber bands [Music] all right it is day two and these are looking really good they've had plenty of time to dry and I think I'm going to run over them with a sander real quick just to get rid of any any glue squeeze-out and then I can go over to the table saw and crosscut them [Music] after sanding off all the excess glue I decided to check their fit and I'm glad I did because they weren't fitting super well you can see that Center one is moving around quite a bit and in order to true it up I decided to use the same jig I made before that 60 degree jig and run each glue up along the blade just taking light passes this made sure that all the angles were exactly 60 degrees and I'm really really glad that I did this because they they fit up way way nicer after doing this [Music] doing tests earlier I had issues with chip out and so I decided to switch out my blade for a higher tooth count blade this is an 80 tooth blade the other one was like a 50 or 60 and that's just gonna help when it comes to cutting all this plywood making sure that it it has the least likely chance of chipping out then I set up a stop block on my crosscut sled I'm setting it at half an inch here you can kind of determine what the thickness you want your panel to be but half inch seam to be plenty thick enough for me [Music] all right so this is the fun bit so there are five patterns in front of me and depending on how you orient the pieces together and combine them from other groups you can come up with loads and loads of different designs so I'm going to play around with a little bit figure out which ones I like the best and then glue up a couple panels [Music] once I've picked out all the patterns that I want to glue up it's time to build a jig and this is really simple just a couple of boards nailed to a piece of melamine and this will act as a straight edge so that when you glue up the panel that you have something to press against I also want to seal all the surfaces with packing tape and wax just to make sure absolutely nothing sticks to it as you can see it just hooks onto the edge of the table and then I can load in my hexagons when it comes to this glue up I've found that the best way to do it is just to press the individual hexagons into place I tried clamping and every time I use clamps they end up distorting and so you just have to be patient and press these in and be real careful with how they're arranged don't worry if you get a couple gaps here and there but the fewer the gaps the better don't be shy with the amount of glue that you use I was pretty liberal with it and it can actually function to fill some of those gaps that you may have [Music] after letting each panel dry for several hours I was able to pick them up sand them and man did they just turn out awesome [Music] all right so that is a deep dive into hexagon plywood I'm super happy with how these have come out and I know how many questions whether I used wood filler on them or not I definitely did I did the sawdust and wood glue mix and it just goes from looking a little bit loose to really tightening it up it's it's subtle but I think it's an important step so make sure use some wood filler on the surface of it and if you got gaps don't worry about it you can fill them in I'm sure you're wondering what this is this is next week's project so make sure you're subscribed and hit that notification bell so you can see it more pattern plywood also a big thank you to this week's sponsor Rockler Thank You Rockler for supporting my channel time and time again a big thank you to my patreon supporters who also support me every single month I really appreciate it if you've been watching the channel for a while maybe consider kicking in a couple bucks I got a bunch of Sketchup files on on the patreon that you can only get there along with exclusive stickers and a bunch of other stuff so anyway other than that I hope everybody's staying safe staying indoors staying busy and I'll catch you on the next one thanks a lot [Music]

Channel: Michael Alm

Views: 665,588

Rating: 4.9601593 out of 5

Keywords: patterned plywood, almfab, michael alm, stayhomewoodworking, scrap wood challenge, scrap wood, plywood, plywood furniture, scrap plywood, DIY woodworking, DIY, How To Woodworking

Id: oNk1vvflLdE

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020