How To Edge Plywood - You've been doing it WRONG !

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop in this video i'm going to cover how to edge plywood how i do it i do i've been doing this for a long time plywood is a great material it has advantages and disadvantages you can learn to work around them i'm going to show you how i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new and you haven't subscribed please do so hit the notification bell so you'll receive alerts when we release a new video and anytime we use a special tool we'll always leave a description down below all right let's get to work if you're new to woodworking you may not be as familiar with plywood in fact there's a lot of negative out there about plywood but actually used in its proper place it's a great product it's very stable that's its biggest advantage that means it's not going to increase in its width or in its length over the lifetime of whatever it is you're building it on the downside is that it has edges that can't be left like that it's not very pretty seeing multi-layers or this is mdf core meaning instead of using what's called veneer core the near core is several layers of thin wood and they're glued together laying grain runs this way on one the first piece opposite way in the second piece always has an odd number of pieces and then the exterior is your finish in this case it's red oak so there's a very thin slice of red oak on either side this one they use mdf which is actually my favorite and the reason is it's even more stable there are no voids lurking below the surface of the veneer and what i mean by that is sometimes you're going to have a knot or a void in one of these layers of veneer especially near the top and the veneer the finished veneer goes over top of it and all of a sudden right underneath you've got a hollow spot i've had that happen before also sometimes the thickness does not is not consistent you try to put that into a three-quarter inch dado it may be tight here loose here tight here you don't find that with the veneer with the mdf core it's very stable product even more so than the veneer core heavier either way both of them have their applications but you've got to be able to deal with that edge that's what i'm going to go through not going to show you a ton of options i'm going to show you what i use what i think is the best it's the quickest and it's has served and lasted a long time okay so the first question that always comes up when talking about veneer or pardon me edge banding a piece of veneer or plywood is what do i need to do in order to get a strong joint well i'm going to tell you that you don't need anything you just need two smooth flat surfaces however you should look at some of the limitations we know that if you glue something onto the end of a piece of wood in other words take that piece of oak this is the face grain this is a piece of pine this is the end grain if you glue it like that you're not going to get a very strong joint because the glue does not adhere to the end of the wood like it does to the edge glued together like that that glue joint becomes stronger than the wood itself glued together like that it could be quite easily broken apart with my hands if we look at a piece of veneer core well what you're looking at is long grain here end grain here long grain here end grain here and then grain here a little bit of long grain right here on the actual piece of oak and a little bit of long grain out here so you're going to have approximately half of this thickness which is three quarter is long grain so when you glue your piece of wood on here instead of gluing to a piece of three-quarter inch material you're really gluing to about three-eighths of an inch now that said it's still going to be plenty strong now on the mdf some folks get even more worried about that but i've done testing several years ago when i was doing a project and i found that solid wood glued to that mdf edge would be more than strong more than the strength required in fact it surprised me how strong it was and yes you have got a little bit of long grain wood along here with the veneer but that's again too small to even count but that solid wood glued to that mdf would be extremely strong not a problem at all so for that reason i don't bother with any kind of an indexing or any kind of a tongue and groove some folks will go through the trouble to come in here and cut a notch in there and then sometimes they'll use a floating tongue which means they would cut a corresponding notch in this piece see if i can get this pencil to work and then they would have a spline hardwood spline maybe even a hardboard spline but they would put that into the groove and they would glue the two pieces together and yes it increases the glue surface but i was going to tell you it's unnecessary what it does do is it helps to index the two pieces so what i'm going to do is almost unfair because i'm working with a couple pieces that are 12 inches long when you start trying to edge band something that's four five six seven feet then it gets a little bit trickier in that application it's sometimes nice to have a tongue like that because you simply put it together and start clamping and everything centers for you what you don't want to have happen is to glue this up and have the edge band move so that the bare plywood is now sticking up on top of the edge band so you've got to be able to keep that centered that's an area where it's not a bad idea to have some form of an indexing but in terms of strength not required at all not in my opinion all right let's cover all the bases on this you want a nice flat smooth surface here and here but i'm going to cover this one first so if i have a good table saw blade and in this case i'm using a a cross cut which means it's got a lot of teeth and if you have a problem with this get yourself what's called a zero clearance throat insert that means that where the blade comes up through the throat there is no excess room on either side so what i'm going to do i'm going to go in here and i'm just going to clean that up as much as possible i'm not going to take a very heavy cut i'm going to go nice and slow [Music] all right so if we look at the back side it's nice and clean there's no tear out on there at all i can still see some saw marks but it's gave me it has given me a pretty smooth surface to work with i'm going to one-up it i'm going to take a light pass with my plane and i'll just make one or two passes actually that was enough so that one is ready to glue to and then this is going to be the edge band now i'm going to tell you a little bit about this if you try to use an edge band that's really thin you're going to have to have a whole lot more clamps now i have a friend in southern california whose name is ahmed and what he likes to do and i haven't done this enough to talk about it other than to show it to you but he swears by this i'm just using masking tape to go on there and hold the edge band eye in place and once the glue dries he has great results i've always used clamps so i'm going to stick with that today but this may be something that you want to experiment with what i was going to say is if you're trying to use edge banding that is that thin you're going to ha and you're doing a great traditional clamping you're either going to have to add a call which is another piece of wood like that to help spread out the pressure from the clamps or you're going to have to put a clamp about every three inches on there and that's a lot of clamps and a lot of weight so i'm going to do it my way which is stick with a thicker piece of wood and if i had a lot of work to do i'd have an even wider piece because i would glue this one on the big wide piece spreads the pressure from the clamp out to reduce the number of clamps and then i would go over the table saw and rip that off with a little extra to spare clean this piece up and use it to band the next piece and just go on and on but we're only doing one just for demonstration purposes so i've got a piece that measures a little better than an inch inch and a quarter in width now i've already jointed it but i want to improve it and i'm going to go with there's a little bit of hardwood there you can see the brown and this is blonde which color works best i'm going to go with the blonde so i'll go in and just clean that up now when i glue that on that should give me a nice finish i'm a little bit thicker than the wood if you try to be a wood miser pun intended that's just three-quarter and if you try to use a piece of three-quarter inch solid wood you're going to have a really difficult time keeping that so it's flush on both sides you'll inevitably end up with one where it's sitting a little bit low and now in order to flush it up you end up having to take off this material and you don't have a lot to play with so what i suggest is depending on your planing skills leave yourself enough thickness so that when you're feeling it with your fingers you can tell you're proud that solid wood is proud on both sides then you can come in with your plane and we're going to show you how to clean it up but that's ready to go together so let me get a couple of clamps and we'll put this one together now my mentor dale nish once said that you've got the best glue spreader there is five on each hand actually four so what i'm going to do is use my finger to spread that glue out and if you can get it in one pass all the better go back and make sure that you have glue everywhere where you want it if you don't it's not going to get there on its own now i would prefer not to have drips going down the face so don't use too much i find you only need you only need to glue one side i'm not going to bother putting glue on the piece of maple now put that in place and i'm just going to hold it for a second until it tacks making sure i can feel on both sides that i've got overlap i've got three clamps and the reason i use three clamps is because they have a tendency to pull on one side so i need to counteract that even though these ones actually i really like because they're a little bit easier to handle than traditional pipe clamps you can put them right there in the middle so it's almost going to negate what i just said and that slipped make sure that you have overhang on both sides i prefer not to do this on my good bench but for filming purposes it almost has to be you always want to if you can you always want to have the pressure being applied right down through the middle of both pieces when i used to use pipe clamps a lot what i would do often is take a piece of dowel i'll actually show you this i'm going to put a third one in the middle this is where it really gets awkward when you're dealing with a long piece and you're having to use multiple clamps now you want enough pressure so that there is squeeze out but you don't want so much pressure that there's nothing left now that can be set aside i've got overhang on all the way along almost foolish to do it on something this small but when you're dealing with a big six-foot piece it is a big deal right jake's convinced me that we should try a meds method here on tv and see what happens now i'm going to go through and do the same thing i actually prepped this the same way over in the table saw so but i'm going to go in and take a couple passes with the plane now you're planing long grain end grain so we're going to have a little bit of tear out here a little bit tear out here a little bit of tear out there so be prepared it's always nice to have your board a little bit longer than you need so you can trim it after the fact but i want a nice clean surface top and bottom and when i say that i mean this outside veneer and that didn't tear bad all right now since we're going to use the masking tape we should be able to get away with a much thinner piece so i'm going to actually cut this down but the first thing i'm going to do while i've got some thickness is i'm going to go in i'm going to plane that face back that blade in a little bit a little bit more [Applause] more still all right nice light pass that's clean i'm gonna go over to the band saw and i'm gonna rip that off to right about there here we go get out your glue spreader by the way i really like titebond three i don't do commercials i don't get sponsored by them i just really like that glue it has water resistance and i've had situations where a piece of furniture was left in a room and it had a leak in the water pipe and ruined a piece of furniture had i used this glue at least it would have been salvageable it was a bent lamination so it just completely delaminated all right so we're going to put this in place again this is wide enough that it overlaps or it sticks out beyond on both sides now does he use regular masking tape i'm going to lift that up a little bit so as we're pulling down get that the stick won't be hard he already i already know he is all right so i'm just checking to make sure that we've got overhang on both sides we do so we'll set that aside i don't have any glue squeeze out there so we'll see what happens first thing i want to do is try the masking tape method take the tape off flush it up we'll show you a couple of different ways of concealing the joint i'm curious to see if this was enough pressure to close that now if you plain hand plane your two surfaces before you glue them you should be able to get a decent joint now actually i thought i had it all the way in i like to just use my thumb to constantly feel where i am in terms of how much material has to be removed you want to keep if at all possible as much of the plane on the plywood side as you can so i'm not putting any downward pressure out here and i'm looking through and i want to cut with just the the far right side of the blade then i don't worry or minimize the risk of having that corner dig into my veneer okay that's really close it's close up there so i'll just focus a little bit in the middle i'm going to pull that blade in a little bit and if you're wondering why i chose a five and a half you could use a block plane i just happen to like this one i need a little more blade and you can feel within too within about a thousandth of an inch with your fingertip thumb so you can get it to the point where it's as perfect as you're going to be able to tell so i'm going to switch and use my block plane just because smaller footprint and it's going to it's going to do this as opposed to riding off the high spots keep my throat down tight which means loosen the front knob move that toe plate so there's just a little bit of exposure pardon me gap and what that does is if my blade happens to cut into the veneer it's not going to lift it up should it end up going against the grain a little bit of wax it just reduces the friction now by turning my plane sideways like this i'm lowering that or shortening that footprint if i go like this then once again i've got a plane that long and if there's a dip in there it's not going to go down into the dip it's going to ride on the two high spots on either end if i turn on an angle like this then i'm only effectively using or a plane that is that long versus that long and that's got a better chance of going down in that valley a little spot right here okay if i run my thumb along there i don't feel anything let's flip this over and do the other side you rub it hoot here and when i do this so that you don't end up if you get your blade out too far and you set it down here and go you're going to feel a real mark right there so what i do with my blade in quite a bit very little exposure so you set it on there and as you what you do is you start to gradually push down until it engages and then you don't have any transition mark whatsoever okay so you can plainly see that just because of the color difference part of that is due to the hand plane versus sanding not quite as noticeable over here and i would consider that completely acceptable on cabinet work on furniture wouldn't want to see it so i'm going to show you a way of disguising it by the way i'm going to put my magnifiers on have a real close look at that because i'm pretty impressed so if you look at that really close and if the camera can get in there there's absolutely no gap between the solid wood and the plywood so ahmed you're a genius and i'll show you a couple examples of how i would do this now i've got my i've got an eighth inch router bit in here if you look over here this is a 16 inch radius and i i don't like a big radius in most applications so a 16 inch radius is just enough that it's soft to the touch you can see that it's a radius uh it's more accurate than trying to do it with sandpaper so i actually ran a 16 inch router bit over there and then probably used you know 240 maybe even 320 grit paper just to smooth it up a little bit but what it does is it maintains that look of the full width if you put more of a radius on there this starts to look a little bit thin not into that but what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut a chamfer on one side show you how to do that and then we'll go ahead and we'll process this just have to go until you get a complete shaving meaning full length full width and then you know you've got the entire surface cleaned up now if i'm doing this i have a actually have what's called a chamfer plane which is designed to cut a perfect 45 degree chamfer on an edge but i can also do it with block plane and what i'm doing with the block plane is i'm using my finger on the underside to run along that piece of wood to help maintain that angle now that's going the wrong way but it's the most convenient way to plane so i'm going to close that throat down even more and i should be able to get a better surface i gotta see a little bit better that's tearing still so the last couple of passes i'll do the other way i'm just watching to make sure i get right to the joint all right we'll turn this around pull that blade in a little find the angle another pass didn't mean to skip right there now if you're that's that's a heavy chamfer i would take some more material off of there in fact when we prepare to do this side i will take it and it'll look a little bit better but with that chamfer line right on that corner that disguises somewhat might fool a novice all right now we're going to go in there and cut that radius and we need a 16 we need an eighth of an inch left on there so go back over the table saw and take another pass all right now we got to make sure we set up the router that that part of the router bit right there is flush with the top or flush with the base of the router so that we don't leave our little ridge on there i haven't got it plugged in yet i'll eyeball this first and i've added an extra fence on there just to give a little more stability an extra tip base i should say [Music] [Applause] [Music] ah [Applause] now i'm going to grab a sanding block that's red oak so 150 is all you'd ever need on that and i'll just hit that corner [Music] so if you were building something that could be almost considered furniture grade because the radius the top of the radius is right at that joint line and it does a pretty good job of hiding it and it's strong that's never going to come off now there's that there's how the the chamfer side looks when it's when we cut it down a little bit so it's not quite so heavy and that's decent as well i wouldn't sand i wouldn't sand that because you don't want to lose that nice sharp pro that nice sharp point that you have on both sides of it if you're going to use a chamfer you're looking for the nice crisp lines if you're going to use round radius like that then it's a different story altogether all right now i'm going to do the same i'm going to process this one as well but having started with a thicker piece i don't want to have to plane all that material i'm going to plane that down to about a quarter of an inch then we'll just go in and plane off that side and see what it looks like if we just leave it like that all right i did that bottom side and i'm still using my block plane i'm gonna advance that blade by the way this is a wood river and what i like about it it's always easier to adjust your blade if you can remove the tension nice thing about this is you can pop that lever cap up hold it with your thumb so that it's not too loose but it gives you enough sl enough slack that you can easily make your adjustment on advancing the blade without changing the position of the blade take your time with this and just plain and check plain and check and you can get to a point where you don't touch that plywood but it leaves it perfectly flush you feel a little bit right there okay now i i would i would probably at this point go back over the quickest way to do is go back over to the table saw set it set your fence to be closer to what you want which now that that will lay perfectly flat on the table it will give you a square edge that you can then simply remove the saw marks i'll go ahead and do it on the shooting board just not so convenient if this thing was really long all right now we'll just trim that one in and show you how i do that if there's not a lot of them to do i'll just use a flush [Laughter] [Music] now trim you're using the flush trim it always it's designed to cut on one side and it'll tell you this side up and because it has set only on one side it's almost always going to swoop on you a little bit now that's a little bit short meaning you don't have a whole lot of reference so i'm going to grab the five and a half [Music] and just plain that so it's nice and flush and square now that would be acceptable the time you put a finish on there it's it's always going to show a little bit but you're not i'm not trying to fool anybody this is plywood i use it for a reason it's nice and stable it's hard with plywood don't want to see the edge so i put a band on the front last thing we're going to do is we're going to go through and do that test and see how strong that joint really is stay tuned i i know this will break i don't know where it'll break but one of the things i want to watch for is show you is how strong it actually is and then of course the curiosity part is which joints going to fail first i'm trying to make everything so it's perfectly even these two pieces of scrap plywood are the same height the two pieces of wood are the exact same size and i'm going to put this center piece right in the middle and i'm gonna use my big clamp grab it underneath put the pressure right there in the middle and then just start twisting see what happens so already i that was a lot of strength now look which one broke the veneer core i said earlier i remember doing tests on this way back in the late 1980s and i was amazed at how strong the joint was on a piece of mdf but either one of these would have been more than sufficient for the application and there you go the long grain joint was actually the glue joint was stronger than the wood itself because the long grain maintained contact and actually there's wood stuck there the end grain portions didn't that's not surprising if you like my work if you like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level and i've always said better tools make it a whole lot easier if you click on the icon with the plane in the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you all of our tools and also talk to you about our online and in-person workshops good luck in your woodwork

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 481,748

Rating: 4.886179 out of 5

Keywords: how to edge plywood, how to edge plywood with hardwood, how to edge banding plywood, how to apply edge banding to plywood, how to cover plywood edges, how to laminate plywood edge, plywood, edge band, edge band plywood, edge banding plywood, plywood edge banding, cover plywood edges, rob cosman, woodworking

Id: 5oeMesQmT5s

Length: 31min 43sec (1903 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020