Hi Everybody! I'm Mike McCrory
and this is Wood U Make It.
In this video, the client is undergoing
a major remodel to their house and for their new kitchen they've asked
me to make a multi-colored wooded countertop for their island.
So, let's get started
I'm aiming for the countertop to be 1 5/8" to
1 3/4" thick, so I need to start with boards that are rough cut to 2". I want to incorporate
some wormy maple, also known as ambrosia maple, but the wood that I have is only 1" thick, so
I'm going to cut it into manageable lengths and then mill it up so that I can glue the
pieces together to have something thicker.
This piece is too wide to run
the face through my jointer, so I'll straighten the edge so that I can run
it through my table saw to cut narrower pieces.
Now I'll glue the pieces together
in pairs and clamp them to the top of my workbench so that they glue up flat.
The client wants their new countertop to be
made from a variety of different colored woods, so while the ambrosia maple is gluing
up, I'll begin milling the other types of wood that will all be pieced
together to make the countertop.
Red grandis is a plantation-grown
form of eucalyptus. It's lightweight, sustainable, and relatively inexpensive.
This piece of walnut is also too wide for
my jointer, so I'll cut it into narrower strips at the table saw.
Then I'll come back to the jointer and flatten one face and square up one edge so
that I can run everything through the planer.
Here's another wide piece that I'll
need to run through the table saw.
The first piece of cherry was rough
cut to 12/4, so I'll run it through the bandsaw to cut off some excess.
I'd rather do that and save the offcut for another project than running it through
the planer and turning it into wood chips.
Also, the sapele that I had on hand was
10/4, so I will trim that down as well.
The ambrosia maple pieces are glued up, so
I'll run them through the jointer and then everything will be ready to be planed
to the proper width and thickness.
I'm not sure if I have quite
enough wood for the countertop, so I'll mill up this ash, as well, just in case.
I'll run all the pieces through the planer
to get them to the same thickness. Then I'll rotate them 90 degrees so that I can
plane them all to be the same width.
Next, I'll cut the pieces into random lengths.
Now I will lay out the pieces into a decent looking pattern. My only constraint was that I couldn't
put the ambrosia maple along one of the edges or at the end because the
glue line would be visible. I want to make sure that the joints
are not in the same location, so that's why
it's important to lay it out ahead of time. I don't have enough large clamps to
glue up the entire countertop at once, so I'll split it into two portions.
I'm turning the pieces 90 degrees so that I can apply epoxy to the edges. I'm going to use TotalBoat
epoxy rather than regular wood glue because I need a long open time
to be able to reposition things. Wood glue remains open for only a few
minutes, whereas with epoxy I could still make adjustments after an hour.
I'm applying the epoxy to one edge and one end of each piece and then I'll place
them together with their adjoining pieces.
I'll use a couple of 2x4s as cauls to help
apply even clamping pressure and to make sure that I don't damage the edges of the
countertop. The 2x4s are relatively soft, but I'll be using a sufficient
number of clamps to make sure there is even clamping pressure along
the entire length of the countertop.
I've connected two 5-foot pipe clamps
together. I was lucky to have 16 5-foot clamps to be able to do this. I was also glad
that I didn't make the strips of wood any narrower because there was barely enough room
to turn the head of the clamp to tighten it.
Then I put clamps across the width. I used more
clamps than what I'm showing here. I think I had ten clamps going from side to side.
The next day, I slid that first glued-up piece over to my other workbench and then
proceeded to glue up the remaining portion.
With all those pipe clamps in the way,
there wasn't any way to apply vertical clamping pressure to keep the countertop
flat, so I just used a piece of wood to tap them into alignment as best that I could.
There's plenty of thickness remaining, so I'll deal with that when I flatten the countertop.
The next day I glued the two portions together. While the epoxy is curing, I'll build
a router sled that I'll use with my router to flatten the countertop.
This is easy to make out of MDF. My only regret is that I should have made the
runners at the bottom of the sled wider so that the router would be more stable when I
was sliding it from side to side. But it worked fine as long as I was careful. That vertical
piece is the runner that I'm gluing on now.
The edge of the router base plate will slide
against this piece that I'm gluing on now.
This countertop is way too heavy for
me to run through the drum sander. And even if it wasn't too heavy, it's too wide. This countertop will be 39" wide when finished,
so right now it's about 41" wide and the maximum width I can handle with my drum sander is 38". While those two halves of the router sled
are gluing up, I will run two 2x4s through
the jointer and planer to get straight edges. These will serve as the rails that
the router sled will ride on.
Now I'll join the two sides of the router sled
together and then it will be ready to use. You can see how the end pieces hang down so
that the sled won't slide off the rails.
The router bit that I'm using has a diameter
of 1 1/8" and the countertop is 84" long, so I likely had to make at least 100 passes, but it
went smoothly with a coffee break in the middle.
With the countertop flattened, I'll trim
it to size. It'll be 39" wide x 84" long.
On the bottom side, I'm
using a 1/4" roundover bit.
Then I'll flip it over and use a
3/8" roundover bit on the top.
Then I spent a couple of hours sanding to remove
all of the marks from the flattening bit.
I'm going to use tung oil for the finish, but
before doing that, I'm rubbing the top with water to raise the grain, and then I'll sand
it with 220-grit sandpaper after it dries.
I'm using pure tung oil as the finish. I
started off by applying it with a brush, but that was going to take too much
oil to spread it around easily enough, so I switched to a paper towel to rub it in. I applied tung oil to the bottom,
as well, but I didn't record that.
I let that soak in for a while, then rubbed off
the excess. I let it dry for a few hours and then I applied another coat. It really brought
out the colors! Tung oil is an easy to maintain finish and is a good choice for a countertop
that will likely get scratched over time.
Here are some photos of the countertop
before it left my workshop.
And then the client sent me some photos after their remodel was finished and their
contractors installed the countertop.
So I gotta ask,
Would YOU make it?
