Nobody Uses Wood Like This, and I Don't Know Why

hey this is cam with blacktail studio and this week i whittle myself a table base for a top that i made from wood that was actually destined for the furnace and then i see just how disturbed all of you guys are with my very first blacktail rorschach test stay tuned i know i do a good bit of satire on this channel but this week's episode really is sponsored by keeps that's not something that i just slipped in there to see if you guys were paying attention like i sometimes do but more on that later anyway the piece of wood i'm using is this chunk of black walnut from gobi walnut and it actually looks kind of cool right here but it was pretty messed up it had tons of cracks tons of shakes tons of checks basically all the different wood defects there are this piece of wood had all of them and so goby said they couldn't really sell it and their shop is actually heated in the wintertime by a wood furnace from all their off cuts so they were going to burn this chunk and so i am going to try to repurpose this give it a second life as kind of a cool bistro tabletop if you are a woodworker there's a good chance you have a chunk of wood similar to this sitting in your shop right now it's one of those pieces that we tell people has a lot of character and if you don't know character and woodworking generally means stuff you don't want it means they're rotted areas it means the cracks it means the checks all the things that make this piece of wood generally unusable in traditional woodworking however if you're a little patient and you can be a little bit creative you can actually make something pretty cool from a chunk of wood like this and we're going to do that through the use of my band saw if you haven't figured out what i'm doing yet is i'm going to be book matching this chunk of walnut which all that means is i'm going to be cutting it right down the middle and what happens is when we open this up like a book it forms a sort of a mirror image of itself and normal straight grained traditional pieces of wood that you would use in woodworking may look fine if you bookmatch it even pretty cool however if you get these character pieces with all the knots and swirling grains and cracks and voids and rots all of these form mirror images of each other as well which gives it a really really cool effect we had some fun on instagram and the youtube community tab finding out what everybody sees in this image because so many people saw so many different things and nobody saw what i saw which i thought was bizarre although maybe it's not that bizarre once you finally hear what i saw but anyway that gave me an idea some of you might know at the end of these videos i like to have a call to action whereas i say hey if you made it to the end of the video say this word at the start of your comment and i'll know you made it all the way to the end and this week we're going to do it a little bit different meaning the word at the end is going to be just what you saw in that image there or the finished image of this table but i also want to see if anybody can guess what i saw and i'll have some hints throughout this video that'll be part of the teaser to keep you watching the whole video i'll give a series of hints throughout the video but i want to see if anybody can guess and if they can guess i'll send you something kind of cool i have a kind of a cool piece of wall art that i made a while ago for no particular reason and i also offer these consultations on my website where i can help people with woodworking questions or business questions or we can just hang out for 30 minutes so if you want the wall art you can have that if you want to hang out and chat via google meet for 30 minutes we can do that too but that is going to be the call to action at the end of the video if you missed it over my ramblings all i've done so far is i joined these boards together with wood glue and i did use dominoes to help line things up if you don't own a domino don't worry about it wood glue would be plenty strong enough then i went and i sealed it all with a clear epoxy and filled all the voids with the jet black super clear epoxy and i know that sounds like an oxymoron that's just the name of the brand and i will include links to everything in the description below now we're going to let that set for a few days let it cure while i work on this base and if you want to skip ahead at any part of the video or you want to go back i do have time stamps where you can scroll along the bottom and see the progress of the whole project so if you want to see how that top ended up go ahead and skip ahead now but i do think this power carved table base actually turned out pretty cool i'm going to be using one of my favorite jigs and this is just a really simple bandsaw circle jig and i didn't invent this there's plenty of youtube videos out there if you search them for bandsaw circle jigs i just made a pretty basic one and i did find a way to mess it up though and this was a new one to me and i've used this jig a lot but it's always been with thinner stock and this like two and a half inch chunk of walnut started to pinch on the blade and i didn't know what was happening i had to figure this out over the next like hour or two and it started to smoke and bind up and it was almost stopping the blade all together so i aborted this project mid cut came back and it took me like i said a little while to figure out what was happening but what actually happened was there was so much friction going on that it was actually melting the bandsaw tires and i have never had that happen and i have cut a lot of smaller circles than this on there before so it took a little bit of a trip to woodcraft to get some new tires i ended up replacing the blade too because it had been several years since i had replaced this resaw king blade kind of a bummer but in the end i was able to complete the cut and i don't think at this point i'd even figured out what the problem was because i shouldn't have made that basically that same cut there but this is how we're going to start our power carved table base all right hint number one for what image i saw in the book matched boards i saw an animal but the animal was not the rabbit from donnie darko although i really liked that guess from quite a few people on the youtube community page also worth noting if nobody guesses what i guessed i will give the prize to the person that just makes me laugh the most so keep that in your back pocket at the start of the video when you saw that a hair loss prevention company was sponsoring this week's build you probably thought exactly what i did when they first reached out what a perfect ambassador for hair i come from a time when it was not only acceptable but encouraged to mock your friends and tell them everything that's wrong with them and since i started losing my hair when i was about 19 my friends reminded me basically every day just how bold i was until i finally admitted it around age 21 or so and finally just shaved everything off it took a little longer than i would have hoped but luckily for me two-thirds of guys experienced some form of hair loss by age 35 and i really feel like i'd be doing my friends a disservice if i didn't share the same courtesy with them now that they showed me when i started losing my hair unlike in 2001 when i started 2001 i can't be right really unlike in 2001 when i started losing my hair today people actually have options and luckily for my college buddies keeps is affordable enough even for most current college students and you get treated right from home so if you're ready to take action and prevent hair loss go to keeps.com blacktail or click the link in the description below for 50 off your first order that's k-e-e-p-s dot com slash blacktail the chunk of wood i'm using here is about a four inch by six inch thick chunk of black walnut and i cut a three degree angle on the bottom and a three degree angle on the top and this is going to help it taper from the outside on the base and end up in the center under the table and this is kind of by design meaning that if i tried to make a perfectly symmetrical table i am just not good enough at carving that it would look natural it's not done on a lace so i no way i could carve a perfect tulip base by hand so the more intentionally asymmetrical i can make it the more natural i think it'll look in the end and just removing the bulk of that material with the band saw so it can save me some time carving later and this is my domino xl putting a big 12 millimeter by 140 millimeter domino right down the center of it and this is just going to help keep everything lined up for my glue up which i'm going to be using epoxy for this glue up and this part here i'm pretty sure is not supposed to be how the dominoes used but that's how i came up with and it actually worked pretty good in the end had it clamped down and then just pushed it straight into the base and it went in perfectly straight so what's the problem but if you do decide to do this just be careful because you'd probably hurt yourself or maybe even worse break the domino you'll notice i did the best i could at lining these grains up to run parallel with each other from each section and this is because all wood is going to continue to expand and contract across the grain seasonally so if i mounted these perpendicular to each other there's a really good chance that you would get some cracking and separating between these two pieces and i even did the best i could with that vertical shaft section although i don't know how necessary it was with kind of a smaller section like that also mounted it backwards right there so luckily it wasn't too fast wasn't using super glue or anything got it mounted in the right direction had to get a little bit creative with my clamping style here and this is probably there's probably a name for this i've never done it quite like this before and took a little bit of tweaking but in the end i actually got it pretty good some of you might know that i have a long time supporter in my channel with cut saw carving tools they make these amazing carving discs and this is not a cut saw this is an arbor tech turbo plane and since this video is not sponsored by arbor tech or cutsall i'd reached out to my contact at cutsall who happens to be the owner and said hey will this offend you if i try this new tool out and he said absolutely not because i'd love some feedback of what you think of it because here's the difference is think of a cut saw as a really really aggressive sandpaper and think of the arbor tech as a really really weak planer so the harbor tech removes chunks of wood and the cut saw basically removes fine bits of wood and that's the best way i can describe them i think they both have a purpose they're just very very different so i did like the arbor tech i thought it was a useful useful tool i plan on using it again but i will finish this project up with the quetzal carving discs i think you guys would be delighted to know that over the years i've had an outpouring of support for my neighbors from a handful of people here in the youtube comments there have been a number of people that have said how much my neighbors must hate me and if i was in their hoa they would get me kicked out or arrested for making so much noise and so much dust and i think that's very sweet that people care so much about my old neighbors my current neighbors even though they've never met them so i do want to address that now if i can first off all the places i've lived my neighbors have jobs it's fantastic they leave in the morning they come back at night i work all day they never even know what i'm doing so the noise thing doesn't really matter because they generally stop by five to seven pm at night and i have doors so i generally close those doors too but as far as the dust i generally clean everything up i have leaf blowers i clean the neighbors yards i'll clean the sidewalks and my house now i actually don't really have any neighbors we have kind of a big lot so there's no neighbors to be offended and i really really do appreciate the outpouring of support that you guys have given for my neighbors over the years the tool that i'm using here is called a spoke shave and i don't use this nearly often enough i'm going to start using this more because this was the perfect tool for smoothing out those high spots and the look i was going for was kind of an axe handle look where it wasn't you know round it wasn't oval but it was just that nice kind of smooth contour and the spokeshave worked really well for that i had a few other tools that i used i liked these cut saw rasps they work really well i also use some regular rest but these don't get dull they don't clog very easily and they do a really good job of removing a lot of material in a hurry i do recommend wearing gloves if you're going to use them because they are so sharp they can actually wear it on your hands pretty quick all right hint number two for what i saw in the book matched image it was a mammal that weighs anywhere from 22 to 82 pounds according to wikipedia and that's for the small females up to the large males and i'm not going to be a super stickler about this but try to keep it to one guess per comment if you copy and paste 50 different guesses in the same comment i'm just going to say you don't win even if you accidentally had the right guess in there so let's show some youtube ethics and keep it to right about one guess per comment this next bit is something i probably could have done earlier on but i do think that it's best to wait to the very end to do it and what i'm doing is i'm just hollowing out the underside of this just concaving the underside of this table base because as someone in a past video pointed out this is exactly how coke bottles do it or coke cans or cereal bowls or plates basically anything that sits on a flat surface has just kind of a smaller lip because it's much easier to make that smaller lip flat than an entire wide flat surface so that's what i'm doing is i'm just making it so only thing that's going to be touching the ground is this small about two inch ring at the very edge of the table for the underside i didn't do any additional smoothing or sanding on that concave section i left it with that kind of rough textured look and this was for a couple reasons first thing is i actually kind of like the look of that textured look but second and much more importantly i really didn't want to go any further than that it would have been so much work to sand and smooth that out as smooth as this part here for something you're never actually going to see so you can call me lazy but i would really prefer if you said that i went with the artistic touch on the underside anyway the finish here i was using rubio monaco i ended up sanding to 400 which is higher than i normally go and i thought it would actually be a lot more impactful than the 180 grit that i normally go to and in the end i don't think i actually liked it quite as much so in the future i'll probably stick to that 180 or 240 that i normally do on my tops i had another larger project to take to create a woodworking this industrial shop that i go to in southeast portland which by the way i said northeast last time because it's north of me and someone that was local pointed out it's actually southeast so up at creative woodworking in southeast portland and i had a couple minutes to spare on my 30 minute minimum so i brought this top up so they could process it a little bit faster and a little bit better than i could do it at my house because i would have probably ended up having to use my drum sander and i hate my drum sander it's my least favorite tool it just takes forever and doesn't leave a very good finish so gave it just a few passes on their wide belt planer and here's what we got starting to look kind of cool and kind of spooky really there are a couple downsides to using wood with this much character and one of those is that it just takes a ton of time to make it look good there are so many little gaps and pits and cracks that needed filling because i ended up having to remove a fair amount of wood here and that just left so many of these little pockets that was impossible for that epoxy to penetrate so i probably spent as much time on this small top as i do you know an eight foot table top of relatively clear wood in terms of filling these little cracks and imperfections so what you saving money you lose in time and i think it's worth it in the end i like to have a mix of the nice clear clean wood and some of this more character pieces i went back to my bandsaw jig to cut out this circular top and i made a couple mistakes and the first mistake you probably saw there is i didn't cut a small enough circle i just missed the edges so i had to move my pin come back cut a slightly smaller circle and then i realized that it really wasn't smooth enough and i probably should have expected that but the band saw is just not a precision machine when it comes to like get delivering a finished cut and there's all those kind of bandsaw chattery marks so i've had this idea in my head for a while and i apologize for not having a more detailed view of what i did but i basically just drilled a hole in my outfeed table put that same pin and let this circular top rotate on that pin against my router here and this gives a essentially perfect finish so i think it could be really cool to set up a series of holes so i could cut huge circles with great accuracy using my router table and that perfectly flat out feed table so i might try maybe making a video in the future on creating a good repeatable jig using that outfeed table and a pin that can rotate on my router table this edge profile i'm doing is something a little bit different i don't really ever see people do it and i'm not sure why is i'm doing a larger round over on bottom and a smaller round over on top and it's a three quarter inch on bottom followed by a quarter inch on top and i think it's pretty cool there's nothing wrong if you want to do just a quarter inch and quarter inch or half inch and half inch but i think this makes it look a little bit more interesting and a little bit more unique and i would love to know from you guys what you think in the comments if you like the edge profile or if you think i should have went with something a little bit more traditional tip three i see a primate anyway if you're liking this build if you want to see more videos like this one of the things you can do is you can subscribe to my channel which yes it's awesome for me but it will also tell youtube hey show me more woodworking stuff show me more builds show me more stuff that i can fall asleep to whatever reason you watch my videos if you subscribe it'll tell youtube to show you more stuff just like mine and it's as a bonus for me it really really helps my page out so if you don't mind if you think i've earned it i would appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button right now when it comes to mounting these tops to the bases i have to be a little bit creative and that's because i don't always know that this top for example is going to stick with this base forever so i don't want to recess it and make it flush mounted in there so it can only ever fit on this base so what i've done is i've sourced these metal discs pre-cut and i get them on i think it was like ebay and they're eighth inch thick also be careful when you're using the drill press without having it clamped down so i buy these on ebay eighth inch thick and i drill a few holes and this allows me the flexibility to move these around from tabletop to tabletop the downside is that you have to use screws and i don't love using screws i even made a whole video about not using screws when it comes to attaching large table tops it's a little different for these small table tops the screws are going to be just fine but i do prefer threaded inserts and bolts whenever possible so all i did there was drill the holes in the appropriate pattern added some countersink so the table is going to sit flush to it and then just added some number eight wood screws and it's a really simple and really quite secure mounting system so i really enjoyed this project i thought it was a lot of fun but i don't want that to skew your answer to the following question and that's pretty simple is do you like projects like this do you enjoy these kind of character tops with the power carved bases things like this and it doesn't do me any good if you lie to me just to be nice and i promise it's not a troll thing if you say it's not for you it's just that you guys are the viewers you're the customers you're the clients and i want to keep making content that you actually want to see so let me know in the comments if you love this project if you hate it if you just maybe don't care one way or the other and that will really help me tailor my future videos to what you guys actually want to see also as some of you might know i like to give a little bit of credit to people to make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comment with what you see in that book matched image and like i said earlier if it matches what i see you'll want a prize i'll send you either that art piece or we can have a video chat as always thank you so much for watching please subscribe for more videos just like this one

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 2,021,980

Keywords: angle grinder carving, chainsaw carving, diy end table, diy side table, electric wood carving tools, end table plans, kutzall, power carving, relief carving, simple wood carving, video to help you sleep, wood carving, wood carving for beginners, wood sculpture, woodworking projects, diy bistro table, bar height table diy, sculpted wood, bookmatched table, unique woodworking projects, scrap wood projects, walnut bistro table, scrap wood ideas

Id: 8oEFp06wJ5E

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021