How To Freehand Inlay ANYTHING! Bowtie Tutorial

none of us like cracks in our woodworking projects especially if you're working with live edge slabs my favorite way to fix them as a bowtie inlay and it's an extremely easy process to do in this video we're gonna take it a step up from the one I did four years ago and we're gonna go 2.0 inlays in inlays let's go so if you're wondering why the hell do we need to do this it's because when you look at a crack like this what's gonna happen is this wood expands and contracts this way and as it does that that crack opens and close and it keeps crawling and it also comes out of level so what you see in a lot of woodwork and it's actually a really nice visual aspect of a project is an inlay to keep those things from moving apart so essentially you just want to have some shape that's wider at the sides and more narrow in the center to keep it from pulling apart so that's what we're gonna do here so the first thing you're gonna want to do is choose a contrasting wood we've got a walnut slab and it's best friend maple I like that combo a lot of people like that combo so we're gonna use maple for the inlay now you want the maple to be like 1/3 to 1/4 of the thickness of your slab if it goes the entire thickness or if it gets too thick tickity thick thick thick thick thick then you're gonna have to worry about expansion and contraction in your actual bowtie itself so we'll come on in the next thing you're going to want to make sure you're taking into consideration is where your grain is going you want to make sure that you're drawing your bowtie with the grain not against the grain it'll crack if you draw it against the grain all right so I'm gonna put the bowtie in this area here so I want to get it looks about if I go to 4-inch let's go with a 4-inch er this is all gonna be preference to yourself we're gonna start out I'm say inch and a quarter and I would use a pencil if I wasn't trying to make it look good on camera okay inch and of course and we're going to come into two inches find the center now I personally typically don't really care about the angle but if you're a stickler for stuff like that you're gonna maybe want to shoot for say an 8 to a 15 degree angle somewhere in that ballpark and use a bevel gauge we'll give that a shot that's math let's go Lewis you can see 15 can get super dramatic so we're probably want to come somewhere that's like more like 10 10 that's that number what you need to remember for this is that it doesn't have to be perfect because you're gonna be able to shape this and each and every single one is gonna be a little bit different cool like math here's how I make them if you don't want to use the math same concept go on the top there then again you want to create your length okay inch and a quarter then I'll come in so centerline bucket in five eights you prefer to cut these out first but not a big deal or an inch and a quarter bring that in an eighth that's gonna be seven eighths you can just find your corners and connect the dots you don't need the bubble in which sea so using a crosscut sled you need one got a plan for this one link down below touchiered lang [Applause] rip your whip a couple parts here this is a very similar to the zipper table we did if he ins remember that one now over to the bandsaw turn it on let it throw all the epoxy dust out of it I like to leave the line when I'm cutting [Music] all right now we're over at the table saw is another way to cut them you set your blade to the angle you chose we're still at 10 degrees we're just gonna set our set our bowtie right to the edge here and let her cut we're gonna keep it right under that height that way we can finish that cut by hand and keep it nice and safe so lining up the edge of my bowtie clamp it in [Music] we'll just finish the cut using the edge we've already created you can do the same thing on the bandsaw last thing we'll do clean the shoulders up with a chisel so now the word could I speak lean on this guy pick the spot you want it to go if you're going to use an edge and you want it to be square for reference get yourself a square I'm going to measure off that edge make some sort of line then you're gonna reference your bowtie to that line make sure that it's nice and square to the edge of your table we don't care for this look the look we're going for on this slab and I'm gonna use blue tape to show you guys a little trick here soup that looks pretty good make sure it's spanning it across the crack because crack kills and Jimmy crack corn and nobody cared I don't know if you guys knew that one we're needs a little dab of CA glue but if you're not a woodworker who carries CA glue around in their pocket you my friend are missing out so get it to about where you want it and then just let the CA glue work its magic what we're doing here is setting the bowtie where we want it so it doesn't move around when we're marking we're gonna use a marking knife to now mark crazy where our key is so what you're trying to do here is pierce through the tape and the top of your wood surface break those fibers is what you're looking to do and this is why this is 2.0 compared to my last video on this it's also four years old so a little wiggle and that my friends is where we're done put some lacquer on it and she's good to go so everything's marked out now as I said earlier we want to be about a quarter of an inch thick so something nice if you want to do multiple bow ties is you can just resaw a thicker bow tie like this one John why didn't you do that earlier someone put a beer tap in the wall and may or may not this is a palm router highly versatile tool something we use a ton that bit is a bit seen a few sunsets huh that is an up spiral bit but you can use a straight edge bit as well both work fine take the tie and then adjust the height of your bit to being just slightly below it walk your height in place that part is done now the next tip that I have you're doing this is a light it's kind of hard this this router itself has a light inside of it so I don't need it but if your router doesn't have one you want to take a little light like this shining across the surface so that way you can see so when you're coming down into the cut it's not dark coz when it's dark it's hard to see so weird unless you're a bat and if your bat you probably shouldn't be woodworking yeah they definitely don't so we're gonna take the router turn it on and then plunge it down into the pocket that we're gonna cut here you want to come up to but not go over your blue line the blue tape makes it super easy to see and when we remove it you're gonna have a nice crispy line where you can chop down and clean up with your chisel I stole this tip from actual professional woodworker Mike [Music] neat so now that we have hugged out the majority of the waste you come in sharp chisel I've got this isn't it one inch chisel and I know my edges there are less than one inch so it'll allow me to get into the corners I will just start chopping back to the line now you don't want to go immediately to the line and give yourself a little bit of room just a little bit and that's why the blue tape makes this so much easier just pare down work your way up when you're with the green compares a lot so be careful [Music] one thing I forgot to mention is that you want to mark the spot you have down and what direction it's facing that you marked on the base so do that before you cut that way you're not guessing where it goes when it goes back in there's only a few options so that looks like it's gonna be nice and tight the next tip is you want to chamfer the edges on your actual key we've got a little file here project just put them in then your vise put it wherever and just give yourself a little chamfer that'll help it just get started in the slot you can also use a chisel for this if you're comfortable hold Heidi now we're gonna peel the tape because you know we have close to a snug fit make sure everything's out of your pull we're using type on here decent amount of glue and now a moment of truth hammer her dad all right from there you're ready to sand if you take the dust collection or if you don't use dust collection on your sander take it off or make sure it's not there because what's going to happen when you start sanding this is there's any cracks or voids it'll leave them on the surface and it'll kind of fellow man you'll see in a second so not your basic bowtie you can see perfectly crisp no gaps looks phenomenal great contrast if you want to take it to the next level though my gosh all right real quick I want to send a huge thank you out to woodcraft for sponsoring this video if you guys are looking to get any of the tools I'm using especially these chisels Wood River chisels are specifically a wood craft product you can snag them up I got them linked down below or any of the other stuff I'm using in this video big thank you to wood crafts for supporting what we do here and all of our woodworking projects now let's get back to doing some awesome so here's the one cool thing about learning this freehand not using a jig is that once you develop this skill you can literally in lay anything so we're doing a little fancy on this one we're going to inlay so anyway you get to doing bigger stuff be careful you'll crack it all right so now we're going to inlay and this is we're gonna go back to how I traditionally do these just because I need to be able to see where I'm lining this thing up gave myself some marks there so I set the depth on the router on this one to leave a little bit proud that way we're not going the entire way through the existing inset and I can use a plain hand plane to bring it down and then say anything final to instead of letting us spray let us now [Applause] so now that I'm plunged in I'm gonna run up to this line and what you'll see here is it'll kind of poof so I'm gonna just get as close to the line as I can same concept as if you had the detail [Music] moment of truth [Music] I would say that that looks much better than a crack about yet so if you guys liked this video let me know we definitely want to be doing more of these leave it comment down below on what you'd like to see and now I'll catch you on the tutorial if you end up for you right here

Channel: John Malecki

Views: 227,408

Rating: 4.9544487 out of 5

Keywords: John Malecki, John Malecki Builds, Woodworking, How To, Wood, router, Bowtie Inlay, Bowtie Key, Butterfly Inlay, Butterfly Key, bow tie wood joint, inlay woodworking, wood bow tie, wood inlay, bow tie joint, woodworking bow tie, bow tie inlay, bow tie joint woodworking, bow tie wood, bowtie wood joint, bowtie woodworking, butterfly joint, wood bow tie joint, bow tie splines, butterfly keys, wooden bow tie

Id: gdRHy2h58Cc

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020