Let's Build a BETTER Wooden Christmas Tree!

today in the shop I'm building some of these really simple DIY Christmas trees these make really great gifts they're also an excellent side hustle opportunity to bring in some extra cash around the holidays and we all know we could use a little extra cash these days I'm going to be sharing with you my tips and tricks to increase your productivity so you can make dozens of these in a day I'm also going to show you how I build a premium version of these trees using hardwood and some slightly different building techniques this premium version is really going to set you apart from your competitors now for the basic version I just need a piece of 1x3 pine that is 8 ft long and this is enough to do both of my trees all the parts for our trees are going to get cut out at the miter saw I'm going to lock the saw in at 30° and all of our parts will get cut at this angle we'll also be using a stop block to make sure that all of our parts are uniform our First Cut Is to remove the square end of the board since we're not going to need that important note here after each cut we're going to flip the piece over so that the bevel is resting back against the fence of the miter saw here's an important safety tip make sure the saw has come to a complete stop before raising the blade otherwise you might get a nasty kick back and probably ruin another pair of shorts now to build our trees we need the following parts we need one piece cut to 12 in long one piece cut to 6 and 3/4 of an inch long seven pieces cut to 6 in one piece cut to 4 and 3/4 of an inch and six pieces cut to 4 in now make sure that you're flipping the board after every cut so that we have all the angles going in the right direction all right all of the parts for our trees are done now uh but before we get into the assembly I want to take a few minutes to get these sanded down good remove these horrible stickers that they put on the wood uh smooth out all of the sharp edges get everything rounded over so it's nice and finished before we do the assembly my isolating spindle sander is really going to help out here it's only going to take me about 2 minutes to knock all of these out and get all these sanded down and ready for assembly to get started with the assembly first I'm going want to clamp a board to my bench to give me a good flat reference surface also have my glue and some brad nails to put everything together with all right I'm going to bring you in for this over the shoulder look so you can see exactly what I'm doing here first we'll need our 12-in piece this is going to be the bottom of our tree then you'll need two of our 6-in pieces and these are going to make the lower limbs now what I see a lot of people doing is they're struggling here to keep this in in place so that they can get a good tight joint on these lower limbs which doesn't make sense to me because come on we're in a wood shop that's what we have clamps for so I'm going to clamp this in place now that's not going to go anywhere and I can get a good tight joint while I while I put in my brad nails so just going to add my glue to both these pieces and pack them in place now where most people would go from here is take their next two 6in pieces and add the next set of Limbs that's not what I'm going to do cuz actually the most critical part now is the top and if you build the tree from the bottom up you don't have any support to make sure that you get a good tight uh joint at the very top so instead going to move this out of the way and I'm going to take one of my 6-in pieces clamp that here then I take this 6 and 3/4 in piece and it goes right here so I can clamp this and have a nice tight joint and right there we have the top of our tree now I can bring back in the bottom clamp it back in place then take my other two 6-in pieces and I can start working on getting everything aligned here and these joints are have a little bit more play in them now that we have the critical ones already glued together now we can remove our clamp I'm just going to Mark a quick Center Line here here add a bit of glue and Tack it in place there we have one tree and the smaller tree gets assembled in the same manner just with this one the different sizes the 6-in piece is your bottom your 4-in pieces go on the sides 4 and 3/4 goes on the top and the last 4in piece is your base all right so now I want to add a stain to darken these up a bit but before I do I'm going to add some pre-stained wood conditioner now I have a full video explaining exactly why I do this before I add the stain if you interested in that I'll leave a link down in the description below so you can check that out after the stain is fully dried I'm going to add a couple of coats of lacquer to seal this in so while we're waiting on the Finish to dry on these let me show you what I would do differently if I was making these out of hardwood to make a more premium product and for the premium version I have some cherry off cuts that just require a little bit of Milling to get down to nominal size now in case you weren't aware a 1x3 board that you pick up from the hardware store isn't actually 1 in thick and 3 in wide that is the nominal thickness the actual dimensions are 3/4 of an in by 2 and 1/2 I just want to throw that out there so that you understand why I'm Milling my cherry to 3/4 of an in by 2 and 1/2 now if you thought that was confusing wait until you go to an actual Hardware dealer and you find out that they don't use inches at all and 1in board is actually 44 a 2in board is 8/4 and they don't measure anything relative to length it's all measured by board foot which is actually a unit of volume you just blew my mind now here at the miter saw we're still using the 30° angle and all of the dimensions that we used previously are going to carry over we're going to make the exact same Cuts as we did before now that we have all of our parts cut out it's time to take take care of all of the sharp edges instead of doing a sanded round over this time I think these would look a lot better with a sharp shamer instead of that rounded Edge to do this you could run these over at the router table and knock it out but I think I'm going to actually use my small block plane just a couple of swipes on each Edge and you'll be good to go all right so now let's talk about assembly now since this is a premium version I want to do something a little bit different with the assembly I don't want to use the brad nails because I don't want the visible holes in the sides of our trees now we could use a wood filler but it's still going to be pretty obvious that we had some brad nails driven in here so we have to look at another option now we can't really use clamps because of the complex joinery of the tree it's going to be very difficult to get the clamps to apply pressure in all the correct directions to make sure that we get tight joints and for the same reason I don't want to use Dows biscuits or dominoes because it's going to be very difficult to set those up to get the proper orientation to close up the joint so what other option do we have well I've got one more trick that I'm going to show you now all right so this setup should look pretty familiar we've got the bottom of our tree clamped to our reference piece ready to go and our two sides ready to get glued on so what I'm going to do I'm going to add some wood glue onto our side piece just like before but this time I'm going to leave a little space without any of the wood [Applause] glue that's where I'm going to use some of this thick CA glue and dab some of that on [Music] here now I'm going to take our activator spray and I'm going to spray the opposite piece now this is going to create an instant bond with this CA glue and that's going to serve as our brad nails or our clamp to hold this in place while the wood glue dries now we have to use the wood glue here as well because CA glue by itself is pretty brittle and it's not going to hold up over the long term and after a few seconds that's held in place and we can move on to the next piece so I'll assemble the rest of the tree using this technique in the same order as before now when it comes to Cherry it really benefits from a good oilbased finish it's just going to bring out the color and the depth of the wood so I have some osmo here this is a hard wax oil uh this is one of the easiest finishes in the world to apply to apply it I just need a white Brillo pad and I'm going to use that to just scrub the oil into the wood you want to do this very lightly it takes very little of this finish it'll go a long ways once you've scrubbed it all into the wood you just come back with a clean cloth and just wipe away the excess and that's it this is really really simple this is one of those finishes that you really have to try hard and go out of your way to really screw up now these wooden trees are extremely popular both with Woodworkers and with customers and I can see why they're a lot of fun to build and they actually look really nice and these are just a couple of the variations that you can do these two were Pine I did an early American and a walnut stain and of course we have the solid cherry and this one is by far my favorite of the three but let me know in the comments below which one is your favorite the Walnut early American or the solid Cherry make sure you go check out some of my other videos and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Biscuit Tree Woodworks

Views: 157,728

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking projects, woodworking projects that sell, woodworking projects for beginners, wooden christmas tree, diy wooden christmas tree, make money woodworking, christmas woodworking ideas, woodworking tips, woodworking for beginners, beginner woodworking projects, diy christmas tree, wood tree, build a wood christmas tree, Biscuit Tree Woodworks, woodworking tools

Id: bsVu2az250Q

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2023