makin' rustic wall art outta old weathered wood

so today's project is going to be a fairly simple one I've got these four pieces of wood right here and what I'm planning on doing is I'm planning on cutting them up into approximately one inch thick or maybe inch and a quarter slices all the way down and then I'm going to take a good look at those slices and pick out a few of my favorites and see if I can build some sort of rustic wall hanging art piece out of them now a lot of people might look at this wood and just think it's ugly old wood and not see much potential in it but this is the exact kind of wood that I see a lot of potential in so anyway I'm gonna go ahead and get started and I guess we'll see how it goes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so it turns out that it's not going to be so easy to cut this wood into slices after all most of us just turning into small pieces like these but I actually did get one slice that I really like and that's this one right here so with any luck I'll be able to get a few more slices like this and be able to make something out of this wood [Music] [Music] [Music] so before I began this project I mentioned that it would be a fairly simple project to do well it actually turns out it's not gonna be so simple after all I will say if I had a band saw cutting this wood into slices would be a lot easier but the wood really isn't cutting up like I imagined it would be but that's okay I'm just gonna do the best that I can with my chop saw and try to get as many slices as I possibly can and see if I can actually do something with all this wood that I'm cutting up [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I ended up cutting up about half of the wood that I had and I still have this here to cut up if I need it but at this point I feel like I've cut the most interesting parts out of this wood and I also feel like I've got enough to work with so I'm gonna go ahead and start arranging these pieces here and see if I can find some sort of design that might look good hanging on the wall [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the basic layouts all done now these pieces going around the outside are the frame pieces so they're all going to be mounted to a piece of plywood to hold them all together and these two pieces in the middle are the center pieces so they're not gonna be attached to plywood that's attached to the frame what I'm gonna do is once the frames built I'm gonna go ahead and attach wires to the back of the frame and then suspend the two Center pieces from the wires so the other thing about a piece like this is I'm not going for pinpoint accuracy in any way as far as like spacing between the pieces or anything like that this is just something where I'm just looking at it and sort of just making minor adjustments according to what looks good to me but you're probably not gonna see me with a tape measure measuring between the pieces and going for pinpoint accuracy because with wood like this an art piece like this it's just simply not the goal but anyway I'm gonna go ahead and mount the frame pieces to the plywood and then move on from there [Music] okay so I'm just about ready to start gluing everything down and stapling everything but here's how I'm gonna do it I'm actually gonna glue everything in place first before putting any staples in because if I just try to take one piece put the glue down and then I slide the frame over to the edge and I put the staple in then everything else is gonna move so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna glue everything down first then let the glue tack up for a few minutes then once the glue has a few minutes to dry then I can easily slide the frame over to the edge and start putting the staples in and then none of the pieces should move so I'm going to be using 5/8 inch staples which should be plenty long because I'm only going through one backer board for now which is a quarter inch so that'll get plenty a bite to hold the pieces in place and then later on I'll be adding a second backer board [Music] [Music] so I'm getting ready to install the second backer board now the 1st backer board I have the grains going horizontally and the second one I have the grains going vertically and that's usually what I like to do is alternate the grains but you'll also notice that I held the second backer board in from the first backer board about a quarter of an inch all the way around and that's because I'm going to be grinding both of the backer boards back so that they're not as visible from the side and it just makes it a lot easier to grind them back when I have the second backer board in from the first backer board [Music] so I'm finally ready to put the finish on the piece so I'm gonna be using as our clear antique flat polyurethane and lately this has been my favorite polyurethane to use I actually really like the look of a flat finish on a rustic piece of art like this I just think it looks so much better than a satin or a semi-gloss finish and in most of my videos I usually only show one coat of the polyurethane being put on but the reality is is that I always do two coats and a lot of the times I do three coats and on a piece like this I'm probably going to end up doing three coats and the reason is is because there's actually some loose pieces and you probably can't see it from there but right here I can actually wiggle this piece right here so by really working in this polyurethane and brushing it at different angles and really letting it soak in and putting three coats on it'll actually almost act like a glue to help hold some of these loose pieces in place [Music] [Music] so as I was cutting up the wood that this project started out as and that wood was crumbling underneath my saw blade and breaking up into little pieces I really had to question myself as to whether or not this was a project that I actually wanted to follow through with but once I saw my first centerpiece I knew that the wood had real beauty in it and at that point I made a commitment to finish the project no matter what challenges I may face so one of the things that I really enjoy about doing a project like this is being able to take some wood that maybe other people had forgotten about or didn't notice or didn't see much potential in and being able to repurpose it into a piece of art and even though doing a project like this has its fair share of challenges I actually learn a lot from doing each one so that makes each project well worth doing so anyway that's it for now and I hope to see you guys soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well hey guys me myself and I here just kick him back out for the project having a little bit of h2o so even though the project had its fair share of challenges I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to work with a couple of really great guys so Mead is the camera work on this project and myself did the editing and I did the carpentry and I think what makes a really great team is when everybody has the same goal in mind thinks alike and is really just on the same page so cheers to you guys for sticking with us till the very end take care now you

Channel: scott oconnor

Views: 72,479

Rating: 4.6450939 out of 5

Keywords: art, scott oconnor, rustic, wood, woodwork, woodworking, wall art

Id: PBlTSnqNB20

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018