INSANE 3D Wood Art

hi everybody this week on the family woodworker my son met actually dives into this insane pattern for a 3d wood art project that he had planned it's an amazing amount of work stick with us and we'll show you the steps and we want to mention this is also one of the ideas we talked about in our early 2019 small workshop plans video and we really wanted to dive into a project like this and credit where credit's due this idea and a lot of the instructions are out on Lumberjacks comm where we're going to be creating trapezoids and also these small triangles to put the pieces together so to start out with this was a combination of maple cherry walnut and for a small trim piece some tiger wood and first things first the boards were picked out were pretty flat but they weren't all the same thickness so we took a second to get them plane down to the same thickness and also to make sure that the services were ready for glue up the next step is that each one of these pieces is going to be cut into a 3-inch strip because ultimately it's going to be glued together and so here's the cherry the walnut and eventually the maple and we really trust the table saw we've mentioned this in other videos when you set it at 90 degrees we get a great cut so we don't have a jointer in the shop but that 60 tooth blade on the table saw gives us a clean edge for us to glue up and I keep saying us but Matt Matt basically did this whole project himself it was a tremendous amount of work effort I really needed to ask him how many hours it took in total now it's like unboxing here in Christmas morning and one more pass on the planer just to get the glue off he wasn't really taking any thickness off the board at all lots of glue when a surface this large but it's not that kind of glue so everybody can relax and so on the very bottom there there's another piece of plywood and one more on top and so I love comments from other woodworkers and this is a true statement you never have enough clamps okay and we let this dry overnight now to get a 60-degree trapezoid corner or a triangle cut you need to set the blade at 30 degrees and so we took special care to make sure that it measured out exactly at 30 degrees because all these pieces eventually have to get glued together to form a perfect triangle and you can see over on the back bench the series of those fresh trapezoids that he cut with the individual pieces of wood now here's the sandwich that he's just gonna cut into three pieces and ultimately these sandwich pieces are going to represent the very small triangles that'll go in the center of each section the cuts never end so in order to get that small triangle Center he first made this initial cut on the edge to give him that 30-degree angle or overall 60 degrees and then he'll go through a second time to actually cut the dimensions of the triangle and I have to tell you I was watching him do this and you have to really measure this thing like five times and test it to make sure that your cuts before let's say in this particular case this this diamond or this triangle Center come out with the exact dimensions that you need so that everything can glue up together tightly and you'll see what I mean here in a minute and there's that triangle Center with walnut and Tiger wood on the very top this one will be maple and here's the cherry with the tiger wood on top now he's showing the walnut piece here so three different color combinations for the center and then you'll get three different color combinations for the trapezoids and everything's laid out here now on lumberjacks you'll have to see the pattern which they detail and how to actually glue these pieces together in order to give you that 3d look and before glue up this is what one section will look like so the second part of this effort is going to be building a jig so that he can actually do the glue up of these triangle pieces because if you think about it there's really no easy or great way to put clamps on these things to hold them together so you've got to provide some support against those 60 degrees sides so that you can actually squeeze them together and in order to do that you had to have this jig so he's just using MDF to create a couple blocks like this and that's the frame shown here and so it worked out pretty well but you have to have this frame and actually we use some packing tape here these are all that cut pieces at 1 foot in length these are the combinations in which you will have to glue them together ok I'm gluing up my first triangular log it's two walnuts maple and a cherry Center with the tiger wood triangle in the middle and I started to mention the packing tape it's a very shiny tape that we had to find something we thought about duct tape but the packing tape didn't take up a lot of space and it prevents the glue from really attaching so we we watched how difficult it was to actually remove a triangle from the jig but the packing tape makes it a lot easier in fact I think he had to pull out the wooden hammer a couple of times to give it a whack to free it up from the actual jig but this wound up working pretty well one of the other things that he noticed when we started to see the assembly take shape is that the MDF for as thick as it is tended to flex a little bit with clamping so we wound up having to use clamps on the sides on the top to squeeze everything together and so he did a pretty good job figuring this out just to get the engineering right to get a good clamp and you can see the glue finally squeezed out in the center there so here's the individual logs and the other thing that he really tried to do was keep him numbered so that he could follow the pattern that they had to be assembled in order to give you that 3d shape so with a little standing here just to knock off the glue not trying to take down the dimension here at all just trying to keep it flat on the belt sander really hard to do with hand tools this is a really difficult difficult project all right it's time to cut these up into little hockey pucks make sure to number each one of the patterns one two three four five [Applause] and six and each one of those again different combination of woods so really important to keep him sorted out he also made an observation we thought about trying to cut this on the table saw the blade would almost go all the way through the height of these triangles but it takes off a lot of material he was trying to get as many of these cuts as possible so the bandsaw just removes less material and it wound up giving him more of these triangles to work with all right I just cut them all up I was able to get 15 little pucks out of the one foot length cubes that I made as you can see they need a little bit of sanding before I could start putting them together I'm gonna go ahead and start doing that it's gonna take forever but you know all in all they look pretty good it's the last jig and remaining MDF I'm gonna creep two of these to hold this all together it's roughly five inches in total and I'm gonna cut out everything in here what I'll do is we'll basically grab this corner and it'll tuck in there nice and grip it clamp will vents a couple clamps here and it wolves it all a nice straight even like make sure to number them and lay it all out before you even start gluing it all up this is Rho a and Rho e still even with a layout it's really difficult to see how that pattern is going to come together and you definitely need the jig in order to again do anything with these triangle shapes to get it all squeezed together to get it all locked in pretty tight so it's a pain in the butt and once again this whole project took just a ton of time working on at part-time and weekends I think overall it took a couple of months to just create this piece so here's the individual rows laid out and if you look you can start to see the box pattern kind of fall out you have to look at it for a second then you can see those white boxes and the dark walnut boxes kind of stick out and then just clamped up to pull those rows together now one of the things that we didn't wind up showing in the video is the selection of the border and to get it trimmed and Matt wound up going with walnut on the perimeter and just after getting it cut and adding those walnut borders this is what the product looked like and it took because as best he could in terms of cutting on the bandsaw there's still a lot of high spots that need to be ground down so there was a lot of sanding that had to take place with this thing and it was too wide to fit through the planer and he and I talked about it and we were worried about the planer actually taking chips off but look at the pattern it's amazing it really looks fantastic both the close-up and far away I mean the detail is just amazing on this piece and we are really looking forward to hanging it up on the wall it's just above the mantel at the cabin right now what a great addition thanks to Matt hey we really hope you enjoyed the video was a lot of work Congrats to Matt and thanks for watching

Channel: The Family Woodworker

Views: 778,300

Rating: 4.9100671 out of 5

Keywords: Insane wood art, 3d wood project, optical illusion art, 3d pattern art, Advanced wood project, sick wood art

Id: 7y2swN51qcQ

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019