i build a mid century modern dining table - woodworking fail

hey everybody this was my biggest commission today and I screwed it up pretty good stay tuned to see what went down and if I was able to salvage this train wreck we'll get into how this project went so far off the rails and how I fixed it later on but for now we're going to focus on getting started in this build I was commissioned to build an eight foot long by three and a half foot wide table by local client here I was excited to take on this challenge because it was my first mid-century modern dining table so I began by purchasing the eight quarter Maple and beginning the Milling process as you can probably see it's pretty clean Lumber meaning there's not very many knots it's relatively straight and clean on all but one side but I still like to take it through this entire Milling process to make sure I get the boards completely flat and square as you might notice my tools are a little bit underpowered for a project this size but with help with some rollers and a little bit of Ingenuity I'm able to manage with what I have with the boards for the table top all squared up it's time to move on to cutting them down to their final width in this case each board width ended up being a little bit different but to the eye after it's all complete you never be able to tell the difference in width there are lots of tricks to make sure that your boards joint up perfectly when you get to your glue up but one of the easiest ways to ensure a good glue up joint is by making sure that your table saw is set to a perfect 90 degrees after setting the angle with my Klein digital angle gauge I was able to rip down each board into its proper width now we're actually going to do the globe for this tabletop in three different sections so we're going to glue up two halves and then join those two halves together at the end so after getting my plastic laid out which I usually have to struggle with but went pretty well this time I got all my clamps laid out and boards for the first glue up during this globe you'll notice that there's no dowels biscuits or dominoes cut in the edges of the boards and it's actually totally okay to skip all those alignment tools because that's really all that they are alignment tools helps keep the boards perfectly flush during the glue up but ultimately the glue joint by itself is all that you need for strength now I could have glued up all the boards for the table top in one go rather than dividing up into smaller Globes like I am here but by splitting it up into more manageable sections like this I find that it's a lot less stressful and I don't have to worry about the working time the glue drying too quickly I did the other half of this tabletop glue up off camera but here we're moving on to the final Globe we're going to join those two halves together and this is where the beginning of my problem started although I did not know it at the time at this point of the project the table top has a couple inches of extra length on each end so that when I get them glued up to their final width I'll be able to go back through and cut it off to a perfectly Square end when I was carrying over the two halves for this final tabletop glove they're already pretty heavy by themselves so by the time I felt the full weight of this tabletop I was a little bit worried and definitely wanting to move this around as little as possible moving forward into the build off camera I spent about an hour standing with a rough 60 grit to remove any glue drips and any little joint imperfections before moving on to an 80 grit pass the reason I added the pencil Mark grid is just so I could more easily visually track where I had sanded and make sure I didn't miss or over sand any spots after getting the tabletop sanded to a rough 80 grit I turned my attention over to the base of the table now like I mentioned this is going to be a mid-century modern design so I'm going to need some tapered legs and what I'm doing here is not actually the final pass I'm just ripping these boards in half so I can more easily cut them down to their final shape after talking things through with the client they had a pretty clear idea of what they were hoping for in this table so basically what I was doing here and how I established this 13 degree leg angle is just by taking kind of the reference pictures that we had and determining the angle that I thought looked best given this situation it's definitely more of an art rather than a science determining that initial angle but after you kind of get that established it's really important that these measurements are on point and consistent across the length of the four legs after getting everything marked out I took the legs back over to the table saw and the tapering jig to cut our final tapered angles now I stopped just a little bit short of going all the way through and that's because we're going to be adding a radius on the inside of each leg so I took it over to the bandsaw where I'm able to finish off that radius for the inside corner while I wanted the measurements and the angles to be really precise earlier on at this point the angles were actually less important so I just connected those two corners and let that set the angle of my miter saw this may seem like a bit of a haphazard way to go about establishing these final angles but actually when you eliminate the process of doing the math beforehand and just measure in place and transfer those measurements oftentimes you'll find your cuts are a lot more accurate so with that portion of the legs finished it's time to move on to the Cross stretchers that are going to attach the main stretcher of our table base I won't get too far into the details here but that final angle for those stretchers is just 90 degrees minus the sum of our previous two angles I wanted to add some sort of internal joinery on this joint just to make sure that it added some extra strength to it you wouldn't have to worry about it failing down the road so what I ended up doing is basically a poor man's Domino so a domino I'm sure you've seen if you've watched it in YouTube days before and while that tool surely is in my future it's not quite in the cards yet so right now all I'm doing is using a quick and easy jig to make along with my router and I'm actually going to be routing out what is essentially like a domino mortise to create a more sentence joint I think this is a good reminder to anybody who's looking to get into woodworking as a hobby is that when you first start out you definitely will not have all the tools that you would want and really that's okay I don't have all the tools that I want in an ideal world but at the end of the day you can still put out some really high quality stuff with even far less than the tools that I have now you might not want to get into woodworking after you see the mistakes that I've unknowingly already made on this build but we'll cross that bridge when we get there I suppose with the mortises complete it was time to cut our tenons for the joint and I actually meant to make this a little bit bigger than the joint and playing it down to its final thick thickness but I ended up nailing on the first try which I don't think will ever happen again so we'll just celebrate the small wins on this one as we cut them up into our small individual pieces with our Tenon pieces complete it was time to move on to actually gluing up our leg assembly so all you see me doing here is using a little bit of blue tape and CA glue to temporarily fix on some glue blocks onto the back of this leg before moving on to the actual glue up and the benefit of having these mortise and tenons within the joint is that it not only creates kind of a mechanical Fastener between the two pieces of wood but it also increases the surface area of the glue this increased surface area really strengthens the joint and leaves you with something that you can trust years down the road with those leg pieces assembled and glued up we are getting really close to the point where we could glue the entire base together so what you see me doing here is just kind of get laying it out getting a general idea for what that base is going to look like and I was really liking how it was turning out so far but there was still a little bit of cleanup work to do on some of these curves for each of these legs I started off with a rasp to hone in the rough final shape of each radius and then moved on with some sandpaper to make it nice and pretty it is way easier to sand pieces when they're able to be laid down flat on a table so that's what you'll see me doing here is just going through knocking off any of the glue marks that we had and getting it sanded up to 150 Grit as you saw earlier when I was laying out the base on the table top these legs are going to go into the middle stretcher at a 45 degree angle it's pretty easy to cut the angle on the opposite side that you intended to so that's why I went ahead before and marked out the general direction of the angle and then I'm going through and marking out each cut using my digital angle gauge once again I took it over the table saw and set my blade to a 45 degree angle and use my cross cut sled to make these Final Cuts now one thing that I did not foresee coming is that my blade was just slightly too short for this application so I actually had to go back through with my hand tools which I do not get the chance to break out very often and kind of hone in this angle it was kind of an annoying extra step but at least he got a nice little chisel shot here so you're welcome with those cuts cleaned up and our angle fitting actually just right we're able to lay out our base one last time and establish the jointer that we want to do in between these two pieces so I have to use just a simple dowel jig as sort of an alignment tool for our guilt here additionally I added some pre-drilled holes for screws that we're going to use during the glue up in order to kind of clamp everything together since our base pieces were already pre-sanded I went ahead and taped off with just some basic blue painters tape all the portions that could get glue on them so I don't have to go back through and re-sand this entire piece with the main portion of the base glue up complete all that was left was to add a support piece between the legs and the stretcher here so as you can see I'm marking up my cut lines and taking it over to the miter saw where I'm cutting my angles I was getting pretty excited at this point because I thought I was entering the home stretch completing my last phase of glue UPS here but unfortunately that did not end up being the case in a moment we'll get into exactly what went wrong and how I go about fixing it but for now we're going to turn our attention back over to the table top we're going to be fixing any little imperfections with this starbond CA glue for bigger knots like this one I usually go through with a chisel and carefully remove any of the loose wood particles that are in the nut before going back through with our CA glue I really love these starbond CA glue products because you're able to fill the nuts in a way that's very aesthetically pleasing and also very quickly with the accelerator spray it only takes a few minutes or a few seconds rather for the glue to dry and be ready for you to sand off the excess ironically enough my first viral reel on Instagram with about 13 million views was me filling knots with LCA glue on this very table so if you want to follow along on my Instagram and see kind of what I'm doing on more of a daily basis go check me out there at altered grain customs if you're still with me after that Shameless plug we're moving on to cutting our tabletop down to its final length I'm using my one track saw here to square up each end and to get a consistent clean straight cut you can achieve the same result with a circular saw but the track saw makes things a lot quicker and just a lot easier in general and finally I'm here to set the record straight that I have not been click fading you when I said that this project went terribly disaster struck Friday night right as I was just about to close up shop for the day I put the table top onto the base and the base was comically undersized I messed up my proportions and it just looked horrible in my opinion definitely not the look I was going for in addition to that the tabletop had developed a bow in it throughout the course of my glue UPS a dual table saw blade and over clamping during the glue UPS led to almost a quarter inch bow within the table top all these factors put together and I was looking at a tabletop that wasn't right and a base that wasn't right so great thing to be putting on the internet I know mistakes may not be huge in the grand scheme of things but my whole business is built around trying to produce the highest quality pieces possible so those mistakes just are simply something that I was not okay with and didn't feel comfortable with delivering to the client so my only decision in my mind was to redo it this was definitely just a terrible situation and I've never had anything remotely like this happened to me before but at the end of the day mistakes are gonna happen and I guess on this one I just got them all out on one project so hopefully I do not ever have to make another YouTube video saying I had to redo an entire project the one silver lining in all this is that when you're building the exact same thing for the second time it really does go a whole lot faster so I was able to catch it back up to where I was just a few days later with that little sob story behind us we're ready to move back on over to our tabletop that has been freshly redone and add on an edge profile so all I'm gonna use here is a 1 8 inch round over bit and this just creates a nice consistent edge profile along the length of the table to create a more finished professional look the only thing that I changed about the table in the second go around is that I actually ended up taking the table top down from one and a half inches thick to one and a quarter inches and this was very nice as far as moving around the shop like I was doing here but I think it also worked with the base better proportionally at the end of this build with the edge profile complete I moved on to water popping the table top when wood is exposed to moisture like it's going to be when we put our finish on it has a tendency to raise up the grain a little bit so by water popping before our final 180 grit we're able to knock down all those rough edges from the moisture there's a couple steps remaining on the base that we have to attend to before we can move on to finishing the whole piece removing the top and bottom screws on these joints may have been redundant but I wanted to make sure that I didn't run into any issues with seasonal wood movement down the road so after going through and making my dowel I was able to cut them up into smaller pieces and fill all of our screw holes after giving the glue time to set I went back with my flush cut trim saw to trim off any of the excess on these dowels before coming back in with the Chisel and getting it perfectly flush after a quicksand all these plugs were looking just fine One Step that I had intended to do earlier prior to all the base gloves was at a 3 8 inch round over to inside the corners of the legs and a 1 8 inch round over to the outside corners there's a little bit of a dicey process considering I had a router blade spinning at 3000 RPM just a few inches away from my chest but we got it done is well worth it because this detail I feel like really added a lot to the look of the base foreign steps before moving on to applying our finish was to create some sort of way to fasten the base to the table top and I went back and forth on multiple different ways to do this but I ended up landing on just a simple metal bracket that I will attach via the bolts and threaded inserts I couldn't find a metal bracket readily for sale that suit of my needs perfectly so I ended up just going to Home Depot and grabbing a plate of 1 8 inch bar stock that I drilled some holes in and cut down to size now this is about the extent of any metal working content that you're going to get on my channel so if you're into metalworking I hope you really enjoyed that 15 seconds these plates needed to be recessed into our base to make sure that our tabletop could sit flush on the base so I went through and marked out all the positions of these plates and then went through with my router to hog out most the material where these plates were going to go after going through the Chisel and cleaning up all these router Cuts I was able to put the metal plates in and test them for their fit these plates are actually going to dictate the location of our threaded inserts so after getting them temporarily fixed onto the base I took the base over to the table top and laid it out where I wanted it to be and it's eventual resting place after marking out the location of the holes where my threaded inserts will go I removed the base and was able to start drilling the holes for our threaded inserts as humidity Rises and Falls throughout the year wood will naturally expand and contract along with that rise and fall so the rest of the inserts are a great solution for an application like this because it allows the tabletop to expand and contract throughout the seasons without putting any undue stress on the base with the holes drilled we're able to move on to our very final step before putting on our finish and that is actually installing the threaded inserts I typically like to add a little bit of CA glue or super glue to this process just to make sure that the threaded inserts aren't tempted to back out over time the client ordered a set of chairs separately to go along with this dining table so we had a very specific color that we needed to match in order for the chairs and the table to match I went through probably 50 samples to try to get this color just right and I ended up landing on a mixture of three different water-based stains like I mentioned before this table is built out of maple which is notoriously difficult to stain because it tends to get very very blotchy now there are several different ways that I'm gonna try to reduce this blotchiness effect the first of which is using a pre-stained conditioner and this is actually something that I learned from the Wood Whisperer on YouTube it's a homemade mix of wood glue water and a little bit of the stained pigment and it ended up working out really really well to prevent any blotching on the stain as you can also see I'm using a large floor stain applicator to make sure that I can get this stain on as quickly as possible to prevent any streaking or blotchiness before being able to wipe off the excess stain now this color is far lighter than the one I eventually need to get to so I ended up actually doing three separate coats of stain on this piece one advantage to using this water-based stain as opposed to an oil-based stain is that the dry time is much much quicker just a couple hours as opposed to a full 24 hours so at this point I was a little bit nervous but I was just trying to have faith because it looked a little bit ugly at this point but we still had our top coat to go which really brings out the natural luster of the finish and the natural wood itself the top coat that I use for this project is a spray-on lacquer using an HVLP spray system this is my first time doing any sort of spray finish so it's a little bit apprehensive but honestly spraying was super super easy the only Annoying part was the setup and just the journal kind of mess that it makes even though I don't plan on doing very many spray finishes in the future I was actually really pleasantly surprised with how easy this application was and how even a machine it left the biggest relief throughout this whole spraying process though was not the spray itself but the color that we ended up getting it was actually almost dead on to what the client was hoping for that was a great relief there after a few coats of black spray paint on these base pieces we're ready to move into our final assembly so I begin by laying out all the metal brackets then moving on to just attaching them with a couple screws to the base something that you'll see in the background of all these shots is the bench that I actually built to go along with this dining table it was almost an exact replica of the dining table itself so essentially I've done this design three times total now isn't that fun with that we're about wrapped up all that was left is to attach the base to our table top using our threaded inserts that we drilled out earlier and we're on to our Beauty shots now even though it was a bit of a roller coaster of a ride we were able to deliver this piece to the client that they truly loved so thank you so much for following along with me and if you enjoyed the video please subscribe for more see you next time

Channel: Altered Grain Customs

Views: 4,849

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Id: Wl0s3BI1mcE

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023