How to Make Breadboard Ends - (THAT WORKS !)

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop i'm going to show you how to make bread board table ends for years this has been one of the preferred methods of keeping a wide solid wood top from cupping as it goes through the various cycles in humidity if you've ever wondered how to do it stay with us i'm going to show you 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 to our channel make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell which will alert you whenever we release a new video anytime we use a new tool or technique we'll leave a description down below so that make it easier for you to find all right let's get back to work let's start by explaining the problem what i have in front of me is a piece of northern white pine it's 19 and an eighth of an inch wide now the problem is that if you were to put that in your house unsupported meaning four legs perhaps underneath as the humidity changes from one season to the next and the wood is going to absorb or give off moisture it has a tendency sometimes to cup cup means moving like this so what do you do how do you deal with it the other reason that we use a breadboard end i think some people didn't like to look at the end grain on the end of a piece of board i can't really imagine that since i think any part of the wood is great but there was a time when they didn't want to see that so let me show you this first and a lot of folks i don't think fully understand this you can prevent this board from cupping quite easily it's not hard what you can't prevent it from doing is expanding as the moisture in the atmosphere around it increases or from shrinking as the atm as the moisture in the atmosphere reduces if you look at these two pieces of wood this is a piece of pine in its length came out of the tree like that here's a piece of pine across its width both are three quarters of an inch thick both are two inches wide if i take this piece see how easily i can bend it very easily it would take nothing whatsoever to keep that nice and flat here's a piece running in the opposite direction and there's no way i could bend that in fact if i really hit it hard i might be able to break it i could snap that by just leaning on it a little bit so you can prevent a board from cupping and keeping it and you can keep it flat across its width how do we do it well on a breadboard end you simply have what we call a tenon or a tongue on the end cut back a little bit from either end you have another piece in its length which is nice and strong and you cut a matching groove in it stopping short on both ends you always have to make sure that this tongue is not as wide as this groove because it's got to be able to expand out and when you fasten that on that will then keep that top from moving but you have to fasten it carefully and you also have to prevent it from restricting any movement in other words that tongue inside of that groove can't be glued because it has to allow it to expand and contract but because the tongue is sitting in this groove with a nice snug fit it prevents any of that cupping that we were talking about so what i want to do is walk you through the process of taking something from this and getting it to this and we'll also show you how we can fasten this piece so it stays nice and tight there's a couple of different methods that we can use i'll explain both of them to you now i'm going to cut what we would call the mortise or in this case the groove first and you'll notice i don't go all the way to the end obviously i don't want to see it out there and you need to leave enough material in here to give that some strength and if it's a hardwood you can get away with less if it's a soft wood you're going to want a little bit more so what i've done is left 3 8 of an inch and the reason why i don't want to leave too much is because i want to be able to grab or support as far out on the either either edge of the table as possible so the shorter we may the more material we leave here the farther in we have to bring that tongue from either edge so i'm just going to use this as a template now we'll bring that in 3 8 on both sides i suppose we could have just measured in three of an inch from the top as well okay now as far as depth i made this one three-quarter so i'm going to make the part of the table the tenon portion just a little bit less than that just so i don't worry about it bottoming out so i'm going to set this height for just a little more than 11 16. now first thing i want to do is mark where the blade first starts to touch the wood and i'll put a mark on here and then i'm going to go to the other end and do the same thing mark right there then i'll come over here just to make it a little more pronounced okay i'm going to something else that i do a little bit different normally when you're doing a mortise and tenon you're going to go a third third and a third meaning if you're using dealing with three-quarter inch material you're going to have one wall a third of the thickness which would be a quarter and then your opening or your mortise would be a quarter and then the other wall would be a quarter and then when you do the tongue or the tenon you would have a shoulder that's a quarter you would have the tenon which is a quarter and of course the other side would be a quarter i'd like to leave a little more than that so i'm actually going to go with 5 16. for the width of my gap or my tongue so since i'm dealing with material that measures 13 16 i'm going to bring this over so that the distance between the outside or my right side of that tooth and the fence is going to be just a little bit stronger and a quarter i'm going to do it a couple of times to fine tune it now i need to know where to stop and where to start so if i line this up and then put a block back here and clamp it in place and then when i go forward if i line up where the saw stops cutting with the mark that i made and i'll put a block on the other end and then clamp that in place now i'll hold it like that set it down it does it won't kick back on me move forward till i get here i can lift it up i'll flip it around and just keep doing that until i get the width that i want all right i've got my height set i know where it starts and where or where the the two ends are going to be where the blade will make stop making contact i'll turn this on and i'll start these cuts [Music] so flip it over now i didn't get rid of that material in the middle so i'm going to move that a little farther over we'll pick that up okay check our gap it's not quite what i want so we're going to bring this over a little bit more actually i'm going to shut that down so i can measure it so if i measure what i have right now i have a strong quarter i'm going to go for a weak quarter so i'll set my fence so that my tooth is just inside the quarter inch mark and that'll give me a little more meat in the middle [Music] and we're actually measuring almost 3 8 but i'm all right i'm okay with that all right now what we want to do is clean out these ends you can do it with a chisel we can do with a hollow chisel mortiser i'll show you how that works so the first thing i want to do is get my depth just right so i'll set that down to the bottom what you would do is simply loosen this and then when that rod touches that's your depth we want i'm not going to try to take two passes with this simply because there's not enough material supporting the chisel all the way around so if you take one full pass and then take another partial pass sometimes the chisel wants to slide over into there and it's not good for a small chisel like that so what i'm going to do instead is just take one pass out of the middle and i'll clean up what's left with a chisel regular beveled edge chisel so i've got that right in the middle lock that this keeps it from pulling up and i'll simply come over here and hit it on the line and then i'll take a full pass meaning full width of the chisel and i'll just keep going along i'm dealing with the curvature of the blade so i've got to come out here a little ways so now with most of that material out we can go over to the bench and with the belt that chisel we can clean it up and it'll take us a few minutes this one doesn't have much material on at all so what i'm going to do is lay that chisel against that cheek and just pair straight down i don't want to make it any wider i don't want it to be any narrower now come in here and make a cut and this is mild enough wood that it's easy to force the chisel through just by hand no need for a mallet now there's a little more material on the other side so what i'm going to do is start right about here and make cuts at about eight inch intervals staying tight to this wall closest to me so i eventually get to that back line make that pass now i can come in and do the same thing keep the chisel tight to that already cut wall i'll come along the bottom now i think there's a little bit of curvature left so i'm just going to use my chisel with the bevel down that way i can control the depth and just go along so i'm riding along this flat part and then just picking up any of that radius that's left because of the blade table saw blade now remember we're not going to bring the tenon all the way over to here we're going to keep that back about 3 16 of an inch and that's going to be where that will allow it to expand need be okay we'll do the same thing on the other end okay so there's my breadboard end cleaned out we still have to plane it clean it up a little bit on the outside but the inside is ready so now we can go and cut the tongue or the tenon on the end of that large tabletop and get that to fit so the table saw is still where it was when we cut that groove so if we leave it right like that it'll give us the same length tongue but i'm going to drop it down just a bit so that the tongue ends up being just a little bit shorter and again i don't have to worry about it bottoming out and i don't have to go in there and clean that out it'll also allow me to take a couple passes with the plane to clean that up without having to worry about having it bottom out so what i'm going to do is i have to figure out what my my depth how wide this tongue has to be in order to fit in there and then work backwards so i'm going to shoot for 3 8 of an inch and i'll i prefer to finish that up with a router plane so i can get it just the right fit so if we were to go three eighths of an inch this piece measures 11 16. so what i'm going to do is simply move it so that we have 16 and a half on either side and that puts our middle that could be a little sharper puts our middle right there and if we're going to go 3 8 on either side 3 8 means 3 16 over here and 3 16 over here so we want to set our table saw i'm going to say safely we're on 3 16 of an inch so we're going to measure from the outside the left side of the saw blade to the fence and we want that to measure 3 16 of an inch okay now i'm going to use these feather boards to help keep that tight now this is my auxiliary fence but when you're cutting something tall like this it's nice to have all that extra reference surface instead of a regular fence which is only about half of that amount so i'll put this right there push it in and then back here we want about the same amount okay [Music] [Music] let's take a quick look at that [Music] yeah we've got too much material we've got to take some more off of that so we'll move that over about a 30 second i'd rather do this three or four times and sneak up on it and get it right than to try to get it the first time and end up making it too narrow and then you've got to either start over or glue pieces back on [Music] okay that's really close i'm gonna leave it at that all right take this apart we gotta go in we're gonna cut our shoulders and this is just gonna be a bit of trial and error i'm not worried about that little thin piece being trapped it's too small to cause any kind of a problem [Music] okay we're not we're not up deep enough we're only about a third of what we need you can see that are still about fat 16 [Music] shy [Music] [Music] [Music] you would never want to do that where the piece of wood was big enough to cause a problem something light like that is okay now i didn't get all the way into the corner but i can do that up with a chisel i'm going to trim this to size now remember we can't have this bottoming out on the on these ends either because then there's no room for it to expand it defeats whole purpose so if we put that in place so there's where the end of our breadboard end is and now you're going to figure we need about that much for expansion so come over here and do the same thing on this end so square line across the end and then run one up that face do the same thing over here now as big as this table is i find it a lot easier to take care of that with a hand saw than try to hold it up on the table saw i always like to have that sitting level now i'm going to use a cross cut saw i'll come in and trim that with a chisel now while i have this up on its end i'm going to go in and clean up those corners the first thing i'll do is reference off of this shoulder that i've created in the table saw and just swing right around make sure i don't have any material sticking up too high right there so what i'll do i actually prefer to do it on this side i'm going to hold the chisel up against the cheek let that back corner drag and just run right along there like that that'll finish that cut to the bottom and i'm going to get here just turn around do the same thing the other direction then referencing off of this shoulder come in and do the same thing let that rear corner drag all right now we need to find out how much we've got to take off in order to get that to fit that's not bad i'm going to cut a little chamfer right there on the top edge to make it a little easier to squeeze it in not too much just enough to ease that lead edge in i don't want to spread these so it can't be it can't be too tight and that's that's too snug so we've got to take a little bit off the easiest way to do that is with a router plane so let me clean up this is what we call a router plane this one's made by lee nilsson i added a base to it just to give me a little more reference when we use it in an application like this where there's no support out here and the blade shape is wanting to pull like this i've got lots of reference now so what we want to do is just check this to see just a little variation in the depth of that so we'll come here this seems to be a low point i like to actually adjust it under a bit of tension here so that it it doesn't fall you've got to force whatever adjustment you make now you can use a regular router but it's noisy and i find this hand router a lot easier to control and you can dial it in quite easily to take that last little tiny bit okay now i suspect we got to take a little more off but before i check it and before i turn over and do the other side i'm going to take this and check it and see if we're any closer now i don't want to be fooled by the natural cup that's already in this board which is going to make this feel a little bit tight so i'll do the other side want to get right into that corner and i suspect that'll be just the fit we're looking for that's good okay so now we have to secure it there's two ways we can do it the first way is we'll put a little bit of a radius like this on the breadboard end then we put it in place we'll actually glue it right in the center not much maybe just an inch or so glue it and of course just putting it on like that is going to leave a little bit of a gap right there so what we would do is put a large clamp and stretch it and push this in until this is tight and because of that little bit of a radius we've now put these outside ends under a lot of tension which will keep that nice and tight you'll never have a gap there we'll glue that and then we'll put a pin in from the other side from the underside side you're not going to see and it will purposely drill through the cheek through the tongue and partially into this cheek but not all the way through before i do that i would go in and clean this up and by that i mean playing that surface and i would plane this one as well but i'm just going to show you how we actually do that process so let me grab a drill okay we need to prepare this that's nice and square the first thing i want to do is use my shooting board i don't think that's too long you know i can still do it and i want to square up this edge and also clean it up get rid of all the mill marks we want these edges to be nice and sharp because they'll show well when they come up against those shoulders okay let's check this that looks good so now we need to do is come in here and a little bit of a radius i'm going to use my big number eight as a guide i'll show you what i mean i'm going to use my block plane to make the cut we'd have to have a short soled plane or else it's going to it's this is too long in order for us to give a bit of a radius on the inside the first thing i want to do is check this maybe we actually have a little bit of a bump so we want to take care of that i want to make sure that this is cutting square so i'll grab another piece of wood to check that on okay what i did is just ran that a couple of times check it and it's square so we'll come in here now it'll make it a little bit easier if we mark our center so this is 19 and a quarter long so we're just back right here nine and seven eighths double check that and that was wrong nineteen and a quarter nineteen and a quarter is going to be nine and five eighths so that's our middle and then we'll go three inches out from either side and then another two inches beyond that okay so we'll start here you didn't get rid of that hump yeah now the secret to this is to exit while you're still in motion i'm gonna come back to the middle let's see what we got okay now the fact that it wiggles like this means it doesn't touch in the middle it's only pivoting from the outside edges and seeing as it's pine it's going to bend quite easily i'm going to do this again make it a little bit more i'll start two inches either side of center two inches this side of center and i'll go to there so when i say you have to be careful when you do this you want to be in a forward motion when you disengage in other words you leave a little skin tag on there and one more pass almost to either end make sure i can't feel any marks set that on there so now i got a little better gap in there we'll actually try that and see how it works hopefully we didn't take so much off those cheeks that we that we made it so that this would bottom out if it is we could just go and plane it off a little bit put this back on while we have the advantage of the vise pulling it flat now this up on the bench we have a good side now what i want to do is put a clamp on here and pull that in and then just get some idea of how much tension there is holding that pull that in so the gap is nice and tight all the way along and there's no way that i can pull that apart so that would work just great now next thing we would do decide which of these tops which of these surfaces are going to be the top i think this would be it looks a little bit better so from the bottom side i'm going to find my halfway mark which was nine and five eighths right okay our tongue was 11 16 so that puts it right there so if we drill our hole right here we should be good so what we need to do now i would glue that if i was finished with this but i'm going to want to be able to take it apart because this needs to be finished before we put the end cap on pull some tension on that keep it nice and tight now this is awkward to try to take under the drill press so what i use is my my uh drilling guide and i use it simply as a way of holding the bit square to the face check this quick so just mark that i'm taking into account the point i'm going to get a piece of masking tape and we can safely go down we can go three quarters of an inch without worrying so if i can find that mark again right there oh this isn't going to work but what i can do is put the masking tape on this side for right now and i'll just put that much of it in the jaws so when this bottoms out on there i know i'm down safe distance so that hole all right there's a little bit of spring back there but when we if we glue that inch or so that would lock it and i wouldn't worry about that bouncing back let's flip this over and look at it from the good side i mean that like i said a little bit of glue in there to help hold that and lock it in place or we could have made the dowel dowel was could have been just a little snugger but i don't think it'll be a real issue by the time you put some glue in there put the dowel in hold that clamp once it dries that's not going to come back okay now let's do a quick one on the other end another option so what we're going to do on this one as another means of holding these ends in tight is we're going to use three dowels so we'll put one in the middle and then we'll come all the way over maybe about an inch inch and a quarter in from the end and we want i'm gonna put that about five can we go three eighths i think we can so we'll come in here put a mark at the 3 8. now i'm going to use an awl to start that hole now i'm going to take this one over to the drill press since it's a lot more mobile and we're going to drill that to right about there before we do anything [Music] so okay so we have three holes this is on the underside so put this in place center it now just to keep everything tight i'm going to put a clamp on there that's the bottom side so we don't have to worry about it as much now you may need you may need a guide block if you've got a steady hand you can use that hole that you just drilled as your guide careful when it pokes through [Music] i'm going to move this out here so we have that same tight fit me [Music] okay now we have to allow for movement out here so we'll take this off and you can use a router if you're careful you could use a a rasp but whatever we do we've got to come in here and extend extend these holes into ovals so i'll take my marking gauge and put it right at the bottom of that circle don't do the middle one i'll do the same thing at the top of the circle so i would suggest we probably want to remove about that much [Music] clean up that back side now we would need to do the same thing on this side but for demonstration purposes we'll cut three dowel now i would actually suggest that you go in and do the same thing that doesn't hurt at all put in that slight radius it just guarantees that these are going to stay nice and tight we would glue again if you glue from there to there you're not going to run into a problem we put this in place line up that center hole okay i did the wrong one yeah it did so the center one is going to keep all of the movement i'm just going to cut a little bevel on that there you go now when we put this one in it sits in that elongated hole and as this center panel expands or contracts that moves within that oval shaped hole keeping it nice and tight that slight radius we put on this is going to do the best job this is just a little extra security and again if you had that even wider you might want to do that you could put it in several of them if you needed to but that's a breadboard end you

Channel: RobCosman.com

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Keywords: how to build breadboard ends, how to build breadboard table top, how to build a breadboard table top, breadboard ends, breadboard ends by hand, breadboard ends hand tools, breadboard ends table, how to join breadboard ends, attaching breadboard ends, breadboard table, breadboard table top, breadboard table top construction, create, dining table, mortise and tenon, rob cosman, woodworking

Id: 7kG0Zq-6Ips

Length: 44min 50sec (2690 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021