How to make a Snake | Paul Sellers

when i lived in texas we used to see snakes periodically different ones rattlesnakes copperheads water moccasins that kind of thing and um a lot were scary and a lot weren't scary rat snakes and so on but um i got used to snakes but we're going to make one of these this is going to be a great project for children can either make it with their parents or something like that but it's very simple to make especially by hand so i'm going to show you how to make this snake and i think you'll enjoy making it's good for the kids good for the grandkids and it's going to be a quick simple project with some shaping that you can develop your kids can develop their shaping skills they can develop their sewing skills and we're going to get this bang on because we want this snake to be a very happy snake in your household so there it is one snake and i'm going to show you how to make it what we need is two pieces of wood this is three quarters of an inch thick and i cut this down the center so it was it was 15 16 wide when i started and then i took a saw kerf out by sewing it down the middle with a tenon saw like this so whichever way whichever method you use i just sawed it in two and i ended up with two pieces so from there what we're going to do is do a little bit of hand planing to get the surfaces ready for us to put the snake the snake the two halves of the snake together and how we do that is we're going to take a piece of cloth tape like this once we've cut it apart we're going to re-glue it together with the taping with this cloth tape and we have to choose the right tape because it has to be strong and we're going to glue that back together in the middle but there are a few steps we have to do before we get to that so i'm going to walk you through it and step by step and we'll enjoy making a snake so stay with me and i'll take you through the next steps great whether you've ripped this by hand or by a machine um cut on the bandsaw or the handsaw or with a even with a table saw the surfaces may not be perfectly level they could have slight undulation and that can affect the quality of the joint line between the two halves so what i'm going to suggest is that you clamp the two in the vise so as you would any other two pieces of wood that you're going to glue together flush them underneath whatever you need to do clamp it tight and then just take a shaving take it down like this a little bit coarse set there even for me back the iron off nice light pass and keep going over the two pieces until you get that clear shaving off both pieces at the same time and that will mean that those edges will even if they were out of square one would compensate for the other when you bring the two surfaces up together you'll end up with this uh airtight so i don't have any gaps on there and that means that this is almost ready for use so let's um go ahead and do the next step and i'll show you what i do there what i want to do on on these two surfaces these are going to be the meeting surfaces that come together i'm just taking a fine-tooth saw and i'm pulling this at an angle like this across the surfaces both surfaces like this and then i'm going at the opposite angle like this so that i create this triangular diamond pattern in the surface diamond pattern triangular so now i've got this uh diamond pattern in the surface of the wood that works it works great now i'm going to show you this section because this is where the diamond section ended and then i go into the non-patterned area and this is too smooth so when we add glue to this the glue has the danger of not really adhering to the cloth or to the wood mostly the wood so we want something that's stout and strong and resilient so we're going to texture the whole length of this until it's just like that and that's the those are the surfaces that are going to mate with the um cloth tape in between it's important not to do it too much you don't want to roughen the surface way too much and take out the straightness that you had now that will go together nicely with the cloth in between i believe like that my next step after i've roughened those two surfaces i want to first of all i want to make a mark two inches from the end and square that mark around to both sides so that's the top and bottom side of the snake so i measure in two inches from the end flush the ends up here make sure those are dead on and make a mark across that two inch mark transfer it onto the edge of one side like this and flip over so that it's exactly the same on the opposite side that means i can work my pieces of wood from either side using that two inch mark that's going to be our datum point that's going to be our registration point from which subsequent cuts are going to uh come from so what i've made here i'll show you this a little bit closer in a minute i've got a saw kerf that i did dead square across and dead square down into the wood so i made sure i took a little time to make sure it was square in both directions because it's important because this is going to make that cut going across down into the wood so i've got very tight um gap between the two halves but this does not go all the way down it goes down so that the back of my saw hits the top of the guide and that stops the saw from sewing all the way through each of those pieces of wood you'll get this in a minute i'll show you exactly what i mean so let me bring you in a little tighter so you can see what i'm talking about and then i'm going to show you how to cut them i just made this this cutting guide here out of some scraps of pine nothing fancy about it at all what you want to do when you start making yours is you want to make sure this is dead square that middle saw kerf is dead square in this direction and dead square in this direction i say dead square if you're a fraction of an angle off it probably wouldn't matter that much but watch here i've got this with a tight tight between the two pieces of wood the two halves like this so you can see that's fairly tight once it's in it's fine and it's fairly easy to cut but i do have to lubricate the sides with my rug in a can oiler and now i'm going to place it in the vise so it'll be easier to pull against but the important thing is i cut my piece of wood so that the the saw in here how can i make sure it's stopped by the brass back about quarter of an inch from the bottom 3 16 actually sorry let's just say it's 3 16 it is 3 16 so that the back stops the saw so that when i saw through and then also you can see these marks here were taken directly from the side of the plate on each side and it's half an inch to each one of those increments so half inch there and half inch there get them as close as you can because the you keep using that as a guide so you cut one and you slide it up to that that cut line and then you cut your next one and you're moving along like that so the more accurate you can get it the more these halves will line up when we do the final cuts pretty critical what we need to do is to bring this pencil line onto this inside face because that's going to give us the position for us to make our first saw cut that's two inches from the end if you remember so get make that cut across there and that one is going to line up with this saw cut when we make that first pass so we drop it in here and if you want to you can put the saw line right in between the two sides of the curve and then slide this in and i'm going to just cut this one while i'm here until it stops and once you've done that you've got the position for that saw kerf it's left a little bit on the bottom and now we just simply bump it along to that next half inch line we push it up against the line i'm just going centered on that line with that saw here and we just keep cutting so i move it along again and we've got lines so we can go in either direction if we want to [Music] and we keep bumping it along nudging it along eyeball the center of the kerf on the cut line on that that way we end up with these very nice square across cuts to exactly the same depth on each one [Music] what i've done on this side i'll just pull these apart just so i can show you i want these to be exactly the same as on the other side the side i just cut so instead of running them separately what i'm doing is i'm aligning these that i've already done and i just keep nudging those along and i'm going through the guide and into that first side that i did that guarantees that the two halves will marry absolutely perfectly and that's going to be a big help because it's surprising how you can incrementally nudge one along and end up with one slightly differently to the other so we're going to do this this way until we finish this side as well and then they'll be exactly the same and of course you could you could have done them both together at the same time i just found it a little awkward that's all the next stage in this is is really simple we're going to take the tape and we're going to glue it right between sandwiched in between those two halves and and just leave it there i would suggest you leave it overnight because it takes about 24 hours for this to cure and make sure you've got the two halves fully aligned glue both pieces of wood and then offer them to the tape and then clamp it in the vice i'll do that now on mine and then you can follow suit with your own the important thing is to get those little saw curves lined up perfectly or if you've done it properly you should be able to just line up the ends and that will give you exact registration i'm ready to glue up we're almost ready i've got a little seal over the end of the glue bottle here that needs to come out before i start make sure you've checked the two surfaces to make sure that there are no um fuzzy bits in between holding the parts apart so what we're going to do is um lie these down and then run a bead of glue along the surface like this i'm just using a wiggle and i don't care if you use too much glue on this the problem is if you do use too much the glue is going to go into the saw kerf which isn't that much of a problem but um because you'll be sewing through again more sewing to do on this and when you do saw through again it's going to enable you to completely continue the saw into the glue that's inside the curve so don't worry too much about it i'm just putting an extra bit of glue down the middle and then pulling it onto my piece of wood now i've got that rough um surface from the uh the uh abrasive on there and i did test it out and it felt great it didn't uh didn't seem to not adhere at all so a little bit of sliding here like this just to even out the glue distribution i would just def it's already gluing this it's already sticking together and you want the two surfaces to be at the same height so i would go ahead and press everything down onto a flat surface in my case it's the bench top so i'm nice and even on the underside and then i'm flushing the end because the end was my initial registration and that should align all of those saw curves nicely really i put it up in the vise like this check it as i cinch it tight that nothing is shifting so it shifted a little bit because of the glue so i'm going to just shove it back to where it should be and this time it should not shift i don't believe there we go now all we do now i've got these clemsia clamps which work perfectly for this on the end one here i'm going to go vertically and that will that should stop any slight slide this is going to be the nose of the snake here if it slips it's not that big of a deal because you can go in later when you take this the clamps off here and you just simply plane it flush i know you've got abrasive in there and it will affect your blade but not very much in fact you could just use a knife or something else if it bothered you it didn't bother it didn't bother me on the ones i've made and then we come down the length of the snake fairly close together i would say get them as close as you have enough clamps for alternate them like this and you can see the glue oozing out which i can just aligning my whoops that's an old man trick there i have pulled the wrong cam clamp clamp cam so it looks like a clamp tree uh and people said to me can't you find a better way of using your clamp storing your clamps there it is really we don't have anything else we can do to this tonight so when we get together tomorrow we can have some fun some shaping for that next if he slipped now i don't think i would bother trying to as long as it wasn't very much i don't think i would bother trying to straighten it at all i would just finish it tomorrow and do the shaping and everything else tomorrow that's what i do no point um upsetting that blue line at this point and what i would also do is i would come back in 20 minutes or so and check the clamps because clamps have a habit of slipping when you've gone to bed and you're fast asleep clamps have a way of moving in the night i don't know what it is so that's me for the day i'm done and dusted nothing more for me to do tonight i think i have enough clamps on maybe one more in here but i'm out of a clump so i'll go with a good old oldie clamp they work fine too there we are see you tomorrow guys so taking the clamps off and this is the amazing thing because before i glued it up this wouldn't bend and now it feels just like a single piece of wood and this is what we want we want this to be rigid for quite a bit longer yet it's so tempting to go in there and to start sewing the other half but we have to do the shaping first because we need that rigidity to do the shaping otherwise it would you could still do it but i think it would be very difficult so let's take a look at the next step and then the first thing i want to do is i want to cut this um this excessive sandpaper off and what i do for that i'm just going to take a knife here and pull that knife along the abrasive paper like that and i'm going to have to be using the spokeshave into that paper which will dull the blade a little but not much and i can resharpen as soon as i've got that where i need it to be so i'm using a scrub plane here because it's a rougher blade and i use it for rough work i'm just going down until i get the two halves perfectly level and that will look like a stripe down the middle of the snake's back when it's done if you've got the scrubs line just use your number four and what we're going to do next is we're going to have a flat on one side so we have to kind of decide which part of this is going to be the top side for the head so this is going to be where my head is going this is going to be the pointy tail and um so everything's looking fairly close i think yeah i'm happy so if this is my top side this is my bottom side and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna just put the shape of the snake's head on here so it depends on what kind of snake you've got you could have a hognose snake um you can have a there are all so many types of snakes you could have so i'm just putting my snake's head on here rattle snake maybe so many types of snakes whoa and then you can paint these if you want to find yourself a non-toxic water water-based paint so there that's my shape that's what i'm going to shoot for and a lot of this now can be done with a chisel quite easily so on this part i might take a a one inch chisel and a chisel hammer i've got my lines to work too that is very complicated isn't it there see that so it's not complicated at all really so just a chisel we'll do this a bit good sharp chisel like this and just eyeball it to see if you feel your fairly evening or even i think i'm good and even there this last bit here i would go with a rasp and if i didn't have a rasp i would wrap some coarse sandpaper around a stick and use it like a rasp just like i'm doing here so this then comes around on the nose of the snake and now we're working on the shaping right and into that end in the center flip over and do exactly the same and you have to keep just eyeballing this to see if it's even enough for you that's nice isn't it so there can you see it so i'm a little bit heavy on one side and lighter on the other so i want it fairly even i think a little bit off this side because it will disappear that um we're going to be rounding this anyway so now here on the underside here i want my snake to lift its head so i'm going to take the chin off here and come down here like this so my chin is above so this again is a job for misshula shizel here we go in with the rasp just to even out so now my snake is lifting its head a little bit and then i want these scallops on each side so what i would do is just put this in the vise now as soon as i go through the cut line here this head is going to start to be loose how am i doing pretty good should have switched my phone so it's got a bit of a head there now coming quite nicely i'm not sure if i'm going to go down to my line yet because i still have the rigidity as long as i don't cut through that surface well we'll do the other side and then if i want to i can start really shaping the head i think i'm happy with the way that's going to look um the pencil lines are throwing you off because my pencil lines are off a bit so now i put this in the vise like this so i've gone catty corner to catchy corner and this is where i take the plane and i start playing in that corner i'm going to set it a little bit deeper no point having a scrub plane if you can't scrub wood off there so i go all the way here at 45 degrees i want an oval not around so i keep going at the same angle all the way through into the head as well you can hear that plane now kissing the surface of those grooves and i'm altering my angle now this i'm bringing up here see it's very simple i'm just taking off the bulk so i'm getting something like an oval now same on the opposite side i'm going to go catchy corner again for a little bit it's just easier and the other thing is if you've got good grain in your wood just put your chisel off your chisel to it and see how it feels because it's uh now that was the equivalent about ten strokes now see i'm nose diving there so i've got to go in this direction but that's about the equivalent of uh 10 strokes with the with the plane there see so you have to where how you feel about it with the nature of the wood you're using you know now this is the underside i'm working on here so i want that to have a little flat to it there we go so i've got an oval already let me show you another method now let's do this i've just brought in a spokeshave because you can take the corners off with a stroke shave and with children this is a much better tool than the hand plane the younger children if you're down to seven and eight year olds this is a much easier tool for them to work with so you can take the corners off and reshape and everything with just this one tool and they work just fine i think they would enjoy it and i'm sure mums and dads can enjoy it too if they're that kind of mum and dad [Music] great [Music] this next bit here is just a question what i'm going to do with this i want to make this the the shape of the tail so i want it fairly long and serpentine so i'm going to go from here i don't want it too sharp because sometimes children start flailing around with these so i'm going to make it that long i think and i'll do the same on the opposite side so again you can put this in the vise and take a sharp chisel or a plane or a spoke shave see i'll do one side like this this is fast and i get nice and even so that works just perfectly really and then go with a either sandpaper wrap around a piece of wood or a rasp if you happen to have one works very well and then i might even take um a file a flat file like this just to clean up that end there a little bit make it smooth but some paper will do that too so now i'm getting my snake's tail but what i was going to say is if you've got a spoke shave you can do it this way too just short pulls and i think that works just as well as the chisel maybe not quite as quick but i think with children that might be easier there you go see it and then you can go with the rasp the sandpaper the file or whatever i wouldn't dismiss using um a coping saw too it's just if with this starting to get quite thin uh it might not be rigid enough so that's the two side the side profile has come together just fine and uh and here on the top part now spock shave chisel it's entirely up to you i do want you to be more careful because you get resistance now and you uh are you're applying quite like i'm applying quite a bit of pressure there with the chisel so i might go with this and see how i feel about it and i feel good yeah that feels fine not too much on the underside is this the underside yeah it is just get the flat i think and then you can start working that cone at that tail into the cone shape that we want like this this is so much fun in it just imagine my granddaughter with this when i've done she's only 16 months at the moment and of course she's never seen a snake in her life except on a maybe i don't know so now i've got the head to think about and i've got some sanding to do of course so i'm going to focus on the head this is the underside of the head this side where you see my fingers i'm using this like a potato peeler here just to take the hard corners off i've seen a lot of snakes in my lifetime big ones small ones copperheads rattlesnakes rat snakes chicken snakes so many different types don't go too thin around the neck we don't want to make a weak snake my wife might not agree she hates snakes oh wow this is coming together so we do what do we do here we can go with the rasp if we want to on these inside corners but i think it might be easier just to go with the bevel down chisel to do some of it just go into the hollow like this just to take the bulk out i've gone bevel up when i told you to go bevel down didn't i see that just go into the bottom of your hollow like this and then come from the other side which i think you'll be able to work out what i'm doing just scallop it in now there's not much rigidity now there's just that very very thin strand of fiber in here there's not much can you see that how there's not much meat there now so we've got to somehow get that nice and even so what i'm doing is i'm going to wrap a piece of 150 grit sandpaper around my fingers and work this area until it's smooth and even it shouldn't take too long it feels pretty good now i've got a little bit of a lip there but that's all it needs now is just a little bit of tender loving sandpaper oh also you can use um if you if you're using a hardwood to make this you could use a scraper for this as well it would work very nicely for clean up that works perfectly so many different choices when you're a hand to list aren't they so i'm going to spend a little time sanding on this just to get the uh finish much nearer before i break through those cut lines and start making the breaks i would spend a little bit of time with the coarse sandpaper and the fine sandpaper you know 150 and then 250 to get all the marks out it's much easier now before you make the cuts because once those cuts are made this becomes very uh flexible and much harder to sand so i'm going to probably decide now that i'm going to put the uh i'm going to put the tongue in and the eyes in next and because that needs to be done while it's rigid it's just much easier so this is my 250 and now it's feeling really slick you don't need very much work after so there is my snake coming together i know the kids are going to love this one so is granddad and so is grandma and so is everybody else that's involved in the making of this serpent okay i've got to work out exactly where i want my eyes now so uh i will probably just go ahead and make a couple of marks with a pencil first yep that looks pretty good to me and then i've got my serpent's that little fork tongue that comes out and i'm gonna make that out of the cloth backer the um the cloth backed abrasive paper will work very nicely for that so i've got to do that i'm going to drill a little hole right in the middle of the mouth there at the lower part oh that's not so it feels a bit scary to me that does okay so we've got to drill a little hole right in there so i'm going to start with a square all right on that abrasive paper keep saying paper i said it earlier and i meant abrasive cloth backed abrasive so i'm going to go with a very tiny hole first so let me go in and drill the hole that's about half an inch deep and i'm going to enlarge the hole because i need to so i'm going to use a 1 8 bit for this now i need to fold this abrasive paper abrasive fiber fabric okay that's my whole that was total success and now i've got the eyes to do we're gonna use it all again i've got my two dots on on there i marked them before so i've got one two and they do need to be in alignment going across an equidistant from the center line so i'm looking for that as i press that that dot is slightly off and now i've got that exactly where i want it so i'm going to go back with the i might i think i'm going to go back with the small one and see how it looks first because um once you go with a big one you can't reduce the size in fact these that are there don't look too undersized so there [Applause] oh yeah that's gonna work very nice start if you've ever looked into a snake's eyes these look pretty scary to me okay so cloth fabric now that's the next thing just a piece of wood to cut the fabric on i think piece of leather would be great so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna just use some abrasive i could actually that would be a very big tongue i'm just gonna use the abrasive to take off the abrasive more like that oh i forgot to tell you that's what i did with the um the abrasive before i glued it and i forgot to put that in the steps [Music] so remember to do that won't you so what i want to do is i want to cut something like a shape i'm going to make it an eighth well a little over an eighth of an inch inside and then i'm coming out to get the fork tongue on the outside just like that so i've gone three sixteenths wide at the start of this and then come out on the out she's very technical making tongs for snakes isn't it so that's what i've got so then when i put this in i'll be bending the fabric yeah fold it along its length and that hopefully will go in that 1 8 hole there and that is about right so i made that one about an eighth of an inch long and now i'm going to make the forked tongue park part like this so it'd be like two strands coming out of the snake's mouth i think like that like that and that goes in that way so the cup part is facing uppermost and i think that looks pretty close to what we want for a snake don't you pretty nice okay so all i do now is take some pva and drip that into the hole and along the length of that and and that is glued in place which i shall do right now because that concludes all the main construction part apart from slicing this thing in two so i'm going to put the glue on here now i'm not because it's bunged up that's it i don't want to get too much glue on the outside of the uh the snake head so i'm gonna slide this in and see how well i do that probably won't do very well what do you think just pulling off some excess glue oh yeah i did very well really so i'm going to leave that there just like that and let that glue dry uh well i don't have to stop work it's not going to go anywhere so i can just leave it there for now so i've got no glue on my snake which is great so now i'm ready to do some cuts that's what i'm going to do next so what i've got to do is i've got to eyeball um the saw curves in the cut in the snake with the soaker on that back but actually from where i can see i can actually see it perfectly lined up there like that so if i then i might have to work left-handed which i don't really like to do with a saw i saw through here just until i'm through and then into but not up to and then after that i can align with the sleep uh knife wall and i just go through very carefully just with a couple of cuts until i meet the other side same with this one we'll keep it nice and firm while you're fitting and you can go in afterwards and clean up now see that one i was slightly off and that's going to show when i finished so it shows you that we've got to be ultra careful see in this case where is it there so you don't let that saw don't apply so much pressure that you lose grip and uh and whoops i dropped the snake oh he's still living i don't want to be too rigid in fact i may even turn this around because i feel like i have better control with my left with my dominant hand that's perfect that's better i should have done that so don't go through into the cloth please because that will definitely be a no-no because if you do you're going to ruin all the work so i'm just going into the glue really you see me going past the depth but i'm going into the glue a little bit this is still fairly rigid right now i wonder if i should go from this side then you can see where the looseness starts see there is my snake head and now it's a little bit wiggly that's what i want [Music] so i'm going to go through all of these cuts now just like this and then we'll get back together and i have something a little bit more interesting to show you i'm very happy with the way i think this will loosen up after a while but i think it gives the right impression and that's about it you can't really bend it much more than that but it's very nice isn't it a simple snake a little bit of sandpaper now just to take off those hard fuzzy bits i think what i'll do is go in between each of the saw curves next with a folded piece of sandpaper and pull it through but you don't enlarge those too much because they do pinch and that's why we don't make snakes bigger than this like this long or with the kerfs done on the bandsaw the bandsaw curves tend to make a large curve and that's when the kiddies get their little pinkies caught in there and it and it's uh can be hey it won't hurt very much but it's there so there you have it one snake for the use of i've just taken a strip of the felt back sandpaper and i'm putting it in each of the curves going one way like this just to take off then turning it over and going the other and it's putting a nice little round on that corner that hard corner which i think is going to be really enhancing once you've um sanded every part of your snake you can uh i think i i'm not i wouldn't color mine i like the natural wood color because it already has some nice grain in it and i'm just going to apply some shellac that's the preferred finish especially for toys because it's safe it's it's a very safe finish non-toxic and so on and so um once it's dry it's perfectly safe it's the kind of uh stuff they coat sweets with to give it to give a shine to candies and and so on and also it's used for painting ladies fingernails generally so it's uh it's one of those finishes that you can suck once it's dry so it's perfectly safe to use for children and that's what we're going to do now is coat this little piece with like i only got a little bit of shellac left more than enough to do this with i would probably give it um two or three coats depending on how shiny you want it two coats if you want a non-shiny finish i probably would want a non-shiny finish something that has a little luster to it so i'm going to settle on on two coats [Music] and i'll just put one coat on let it dry for 20 minutes put a second coat on and then i'll leave it until three or four hours and then buff it out with some furniture polish but check the contents of the furniture polish because some plenty of polishes could be toxic we don't want that for our little kiddies do we so there we have it there is my snake and there is my finish and i can put a few coats on now two coats and i'm [Music] done [Music] i've got so little left to do this now to this snake now it's finished uh the only thing i've got to do is sh that work or what that works great isn't it so uh all i've got to do now is um steel wool a little bit of steel wool with some beeswax just to make it feel nice you could go with some well-worn um 250 grit abrasive paper like this just to take off the nibbing and that would be fine i think that's what i will do a little bit of light sanding just like this on the bench top not much along the length and she already that feels very nice so that's what i recommend you do is just take a little bit of abrasive paper 250 is um fine enough and i wouldn't go any rougher that's for sure and sand those little nibbings off get rid of them so we'll do that and then we'll put a little bit of beeswax on then we'll keep saying that beeswax i mean furniture polish very nice i'm glad we did this one i had my doubts about it at first but now that it's completed i think we've got a winner for anybody to make and it's so simple don't be don't be put off this is one of the simplest projects i have ever made beautiful don't you think [Music] you

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 46,268

Rating: 4.9165545 out of 5

Keywords: hand tools, paul sellers, woodworking, DIY, workshop, joiner, carpenter, craftsman, crafts, furniture, joinery, Snake, Toy

Id: 71W_tYxR_NM

Length: 56min 3sec (3363 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020