How to build & install BUTCHER BLOCK COUNTERTOPS // Home Bar Pt. 4

what's going on everybody I'm Johnny Brook welcome back to the crafty workshop video and welcome back to part number four of my home bar built in this part in the final part I'm going to be building and installing these butcher block countertops they've really kind of tied the entire bar together made it look like a completed project and I love the way it came together so without further ado let's go and get started with the project I decided to build my butcher block counters out of hard maple which is a traditional choice for butcher block countertops and hard maple is a great choice because as the name implies it's really hard so it'll stand up to wear but it also has an extremely tight grain structure that'll help keep bacteria and dirt from getting caught I picked up this hard maple from my buddies at Asheville hardware my local lumber and woodworking store and the total price fourth wood actually ended up being just about as much as a commercially available butcher block countertop and I probably would have just purchased a premade countertop but the length I needed was ninety nine and a half inches and most commercial countertops come in two foot increments anyway I cut my boards to a rough length of 101 inches and then jointed one edge in preparation for ripping the boards into strips at the table saw and after jointing I headed over to the table saw and that's where my problems began so little did I know that these boards had a ridiculous amount of tension in them and this is pretty common with hard maple after struggling to rip a strip from the first board I was really hoping the issues were just with that board but unfortunately all of these boards were really full of tension so much so that my table saw actually turned itself off after trying to rip a strip on the second board just to keep the motor from overheating so with the table saw pretty much out of the question I moved over to the bandsaw which is much slower but also much safer and the reason the bandsaw is safer is because I could rip these boards freehand so the fence wouldn't be constraining the strips and pinching the blade and the blade is also much a narrower on the bandsaw which further reduces the likelihood of pinching and kickback is basically non-existent on a bandsaw so since I was ripping the strip's freehand I first needed to mark a line at my width and then follow that line on the bandsaw and this was easier said than done considering the length and weight of these boards but an outfeed roller really helped a lot and I would have used an infeed roller as well but I didn't have to on hand I also swapped over to this behemoth of the bandsaw blade for this task it's a one-inch wide resaw blade with carbide teeth and it actually made pretty quick work of the task I just made a new mark after each pass and followed my line occasionally joining the edge if I started to get too out of whack I didn't want to remove too much material though as I just didn't buy enough wood to cut a ton of extra strips anyway once I ripped all the strip's I sorted through them and removed a few that ended up just shy of the dimensions I needed after ripping the strip's I wanted to skip playing the two faces of each strip that would be glued together to get a nice clean glue line but first I needed to empty my dust collector and this was actually the first time I'd had to empty this new 55-gallon dust bin let me tell you it 55 gallons of sawdust is really really heavy anyway with an empty dust bin I could plane the glue faces on each trip and I only took off enough material to just clean up the faces and as always I ran the board's through one right after another to help reduce planer Snipe and I used that same outfeed roller again to help support the strips as they exited the planer with the glue faces cleaned up I decided to also clean up the show face of each board to give me a flat reference surface when clamping the boards together and you can see in this shot just how bowed some of these boards are and having a flat face made aligning everything during the glue up later a heck of a lot easier after planing I had marked the show faces with marker so I didn't get them mixed up during the glue up and then sorted the boards into groups of five and I decided to glue the counter top into three sections like this for a few reasons first trying to get all of these strips aligned and one big glue up would have been incredibly stressful since I would have been fighting the glue curing second flattening a 25 inch wide countertop would have been much more difficult than 3/8 and a half inch wide sections since those sections would fit on my jointer and were much easier to move so after rotating the boards so the glue faces were facing up I swapped over to this super handy glue spread attachment from Rockler on my glue bottle and this glue spreader really helps to apply glue evenly without applying more glue than you need and making a huge mess after applying glue I made sure the strips were lined squarely and then slowly tighten the clamps Hayling on the boards with a dead blow mallet to get them flat against my parallel clamps and again since the flat show faces of the strip's were facing down I could just make sure those strips were nicely aligned since this counter top was longer than any of my work tables I ended up with a good portion of the counter top overhanging each into the table so to help align those ends I clamped the strip's to one of my Rockler bar clamps with some f-style clamps also you can see here why they say a woodworker can never have too many clamps anyway after letting this first section send the clamps for about an hour I remove the clamps and scraped off the glue squeeze-out and it's a ton easier to do this while the glue is still slightly wet then waiting for it to fully dry and I just repeated the same process on the other two sections off-camera and let the glue dry on all of the sections fully overnight with the glue completely cured I could get the sections flattened and luckily I just upgraded to a brand new 12 inch Powermatic jointer so these eight and half inch sections fit just fine but you could just break your countertop down into more sections if you have a smaller jointer if you don't have a jointer you could probably get away with skip planing your countertop sections as long as they're reasonably flat or you could use something like a planer sled to get them perfectly flat luckily my sections were pretty flat and I only had to make two passes of the jointer and then I could clean up the other face at the planer and once again I wanted to remove the minimum amount of material so I only raised my planer bed about a quarter turn per pass and removing less material also results in a nicer surface finish especially with this helical head on my planer after getting the sections to their final thickness at the planer I join today edges to square them up and then rip the sections to final width at the table saw actually after ripping the sections of the table saw I made one more extremely light pass at the jointer on the edge I cut with the table saw and I find the jointer it leaves a cleaner edge than the table saw especially on pieces of this large finally with the sections Milt's where I could get ready for the big glue up and help keep the sections aligned during the glue up I use dominoes but biscuits or dowels would give you very similar results that's it I'd really encourage you to use something to help with alignment as any mismatch in the surface will require a lot of work later on I marked for Domino's roughly every eight inches and then cut the mortises making sure to actually count them out to ensure I didn't miss any and I've done that in the past and let me tell you it makes for a really stressful glue up trying to figure out why your boards just won't go together anyway after cutting the mortises I could get the sections glued together which went fairly uneventful E and I'm lucky in that I have quite a collection of parallel clamps so I might have gone a little bit overboard with the clamping it's also really important to apply even clamping pressure from both sides of your glue up to keep it from cupping and I actually over tighten the clamps on the underside of my top and ended up loosening them slightly later on to remove the slight Cup I had actually added with the clamps once the glue dried for a few hours I scraped off the excess glue and then could get the counter top cut to final length and I used my tracks off of this but a circular saw and straightedge would work in the exact same way after cutting one end square I measured and marked my final length of ninety nine and a half inches and then cut the other end square and after cutting I double-checked four square by measuring the diagonals and ended up pretty much dead on when cutting one of the ends I noticed a hairline crack running from one end of the strips and I wanted to just quickly stabilize the crack so I added some painters tape to seal the bottom inside of the crack and then added some thin CA glue and the CA glue is thin enough to run down the entire crack as you can see through the painters tape and a quick spritz of activator cured the CA glue instantly and locked the crack in place next it was time to get the counter top prep for finish to clean up the glue lines and get the top evened out I pulled out my cabinet scraper which is a tool I actually haven't used much in the past and a woodworker friend of mine showed me how to really dial it in and I must say it really helped give this top smooth out prior to sanding after scraping I could sand the top with a 120 grit to really smooth it out all right while I'm sanding let's take a second to talk about the sponsor of this week's video noir board and their become a framer campaign so in case you don't know framing talent is at a massive shortage right now in the US and I think that's because most kids these days are pushed towards a traditional four-year degree I know I was but framing is a pretty cool job you get to work outside you get to work with your hands you get to build stuff and the pay is pretty dang good and it is rising because there is a shortage the other nice thing is that you can get educated on framing for a lot less than you used to be able to do and in some cases even free so to learn more about becoming a framer and to be entered to win one of these awesome s twing framing hammers as well as some other really cool prizes visit become a framer dot-com slash crafting workshop and there you can see all kinds of stats and basically how you can learn to become a framework thanks again to nor board for sponsoring this week's video and let's go and get back to the project after sanding with 120 grit I pulled out my router and a chamfer bit from infinity tools and added a chamfer to the top and bottom edges of the counter top and I realized that chamfer on the back edge of a countertop is kind of pointless but it'll be covered by my backsplash and caulk anyway and it's actually easier to get a clean corner by chamfering all of the edges rather than trying to stop the chamfer at the corner and these sharp edges are also super fragile so the chamfer will just help to keep the edges intact when I move the countertop into place it would have been pretty tricky to chamfer the corners with the router so I pulled out my block plane after chamfering the rest of the edges and it's important to chamfer the corners after the other edges just to help reduce blowout and this cheap little block plane made really quick work of this and gave the countertop really nicely finished look once the edges were chamfered i sanded the countertop with 180 grit sanding the chamfers as well and then I could add some finish all right guys so let's talk about some butcher block finishes so if you're watching this video chances are you might have bought a commercially available butcher block but most of those are gonna come unfinished and that's because there are a bunch of different use cases for butcher block countertops now some of you are gonna be preparing food directly on your countertops in that case you want a food-safe finish so by far the most popular and readily available food-safe finish out there is gonna be mineral oil it's really cheap you can get it at pretty much any drugstore on Amazon that kind of thing really easy to apply you basically just dump it on let it soak in for a little while wipe off the excess and you're pretty much done now the one thing about mineral oil is that you will need to reapply it that's really gonna depend on how much you use your countertop and how much you wash it because the oil is basically gonna wash away as you wash it off so it could be every six months every year but reapplying it is just as simple as the initial application where you just basically flood it on if you want a similar finish that's gonna hold up maybe a little bit better than just plain mineral oil you could look for something like this which is a butcher block conditioner this is basically just mineral oil with some sort of wax added I think this has carnuba wax in it some of these also have beeswax this one actually has both carnauba and beeswax but those waxes are going to essentially Harden and provide a little bit of a film finish not something that's gonna completely dry and peel off but something that's just going to protect that mineral oil a little bit and help it stay in the countertop rather than being washed away so besides those two they're definitely some other food safe finishes and a walnut oil is another popular one now one thing you don't want to use or vegetable oils things like olive oil canola oil things like that they will go rancid over time and obviously you do not want that so stick with something like mineral oil or a butcher block conditioner and you should be pretty good to go there now in my case this is a home bar counter anytime I'm going to be doing any sort of food prep like slice and citrus for cocktails I'm going to be using a cutting board so I want a finish that's basically going to be super super durable impervious to water and for that reason I'm going with a marine grade finish so we've got a couple different finish options here from total boat who is one of the sponsors of this week's video so I'm going to be using the halcyon clear and the nice thing about Halcyon is it is a water-based finish which means I can thin it really easily with water clean it up with water and it dries super super quickly I can recoat this stuff after about an hour and that's one other thing I should probably touch on whatever finish you end up going with whether that's a food-safe finish or a film finish like these marine finishes you want to finish the top in the bottom of your countertop if you just finished the top you're gonna have a lot of issues with your countertop cupping or bowing over the seasons as humidity is absorbed through that unfinished side hopefully that's been helpful hopefully you have a few finishing options in mine now and let's go ahead and get back to the and I'll show you how I applied the finish to this countertop so as I mentioned I used Halcyon clear for the finish on my countertop and I decided to spray it on although it can be brushed or rolled on as well I thinned this finish about 20 percent with water after applying the first coat and that made it spray a lot better in my experience I sprayed two coats on the bottom of the countertop letting the finish dry about an hour between coats and then flip the countertop over to finish the top and before doing that I vacuumed off any dust just to make sure I got a really perfect finish and then I sprayed on three coats sanding with 320 grit after the second coat after the last coat dried I could get the counter top loaded up and brought to the house which was a little bit tricky by myself and this Rockler material mate cart has become an absolute lifesaver in the shop I highly recommend picking one up if you have to move pieces around your shop solo like I do before putting the countertop in place on the cabinet's I went ahead and drill the holes through which I'd attach the countertop and the stretchers were the perfect spot for attaching the counter tops and I drilled large oversized holes to allow for seasonal wood movement if you don't drill oversized holes your countertop will most likely split in the future especially if you're installing it in the middle of summer like I am once the holes were drilled I moved the countertop into place and the only spot where I had some interference was the trim around the door which I knew was going to require subscribing so I marked out where the countertop met up with the trim and then cut away the trim with an oscillating tool and I figured it'd be a lot easier to scribe a square corner into the trim rather than trying to scribe the countertop to the kind of undulating trim which I want to replace with more modern looking one in the future anyway after cutting away the trim I could slide the countertop into its final location and get it attached with inch-and-a-half screws from the low and I had large washers to the screws that keep them from coming straight through my clearance holes they also pre-drilled for the screws in the underside of the countertop the last thing I wanted was to split my countertop at this point and I definitely recommend you pre-drill your holes as well with the countertop attached to the base cabinets the last step to finish the countertop was to add a bead of caulk around the perimeter and I'll most likely be adding a tile backsplash at some point in the future but the call could just keep water from running off behind the countertop in the meantime so as I mentioned earlier in the series I designed these cabinets to fit a sink so the last step for me was to get my sink and faucet installed first I needed to cut a hole for my sink which is designed to be both an undermount or drop in sink and I went with the drop in option to help reduce the water contact with the countertop and drop in sinks are also a lot easier to install in my opinion so I traced down the edge of the sink and then marked another line 5/16 of an inch in from the original line which was just based on the sink instructions to cut out the hole I first drilled an access hole for my jig saw blade and then cut the opening with my jig saw and I made sure to stay as close to my line as I could but again drop in sinks are a little bit more forgiving with less-than-perfect cuts after cutting the opening I vacuumed up any dust apply two bead of silicone to the bottom edge of the sink and then dropped it into place and this sink is held in place with these little clips which I attached on the underside of the sink finally I could install the sink and the sink I went with required an inch and 3/8 diameter hole which I drilled out with a Forstner bed and I just made sure the hole was centered with the sink installing the faucet was super simple I just dropped in the faucet and tightened it down by hand and this faucet has a built-in gasket so you really don't need any other sealant but you could add something like plumber's putty or caulk if you wanted to be extra safe and with the faucet installed I could call this countertop install done and this home bar project complete at least for now all right hopefully you guys enjoyed this one this was a massive massive project for me I think it's been four weeks now of building total I love the way the whole thing came together I think it's a beautiful addition to our home as always I'll have links to all the tools and materials I use down the video description below if you're not already subscribed go ahead and get subscribed and ring that little notification bell so you don't miss my future videos alright thanks for watching everybody and until next week have your building

Channel: Crafted Workshop

Views: 407,959

Keywords: butcher block countertops, butcher block, how to, how to install butcher block countertops, wood countertops, do it yourself, butcher block countertop, ikea countertops, butcherblock countertops, butcher block countertop diy, ikea countertop, mineral oil, diy butcher block, counter top, ikea butcher block, butcher block countertop installation, diy countertops, ikea butcher block countertop, crafted workshop, workshop, woodworking, diy, how-to, howto, make, maker, build, modern

Id: A0AYNqOy7Zs

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019