Making the "Cage" burr puzzle

good morning guys gals and non-binary pals how are you all doing today my name is infrared and welcome to my work now if you follow me on twitter then you will know that i quite like to make wooden puzzles since my job is making stuff out of wood one of my hobbies is making stuff out of wood as well i got from big to uh rather simple ones today i would like to record the process of making a puzzle so i have notes written out for the actual measurements of all the pieces and the word i'm going to be using is this it's called sipo it is some random scrap we had left so you do have some glue marks here so we'll need to pay attention to that when i'm cutting all these pieces to length shouldn't be that big a deal since i've already made multiple puzzles and i do already have a method in place with that being said let's get started now the first thing i do is cut all the pieces to length for the puzzle i'm making today all the pieces are exactly the same length so i only need to change this once what you need to do is pull up this lever and then that disengages a lock here so you can actually push this forward and backwards and then there is another knob here which you can turn it's now all set all the way to the right if i turn it all the way to the left that is around four millimeters it doesn't sound like a lot but if you're making something needs to fit together this is really really important for the uh fine adjustments so i'm just going to put my marilla right there and get roughly the length i need which is 100 millimeters in this case around there ish i now can see i have 103 millimeters now now i'm going to use this knob to get it into place that is done by eye looks to be about right so first i'm going to do a couple test pieces to make sure it's actually right and do remember to always use protection [Music] so so now we have all of the pieces cut to length i do want to talk about my notes here or my drawings i have all the individual piece types and then here i have the amount of pieces needed there's only three different piece types and one of them is already done so i have four of these already at my workbench so i don't uh miscount any pieces the way a lot of wooden puzzles work is based off of a unit size it doesn't matter what the unit is so long as it's the same throughout the entire puzzle for these puzzles my unit is 20 millimeters by 20 millimeters so for piece stack 2 and 3 i have 10 millimeters on each side for both of them which is half of the unit length regardless of what size these pieces are they will always work as long as you pay attention to what your unit length is there is one tricky bit with this puzzle which is on piece type three i need to measure from different sides of the saw blade because the thickness matters this three and some odd millimeters so i can't just do 20 40 i need to technically do 37 or 36 points something already have a way of figuring that out so it's not that big a deal now once again i need to change where this actually is so what i'm going to do now is push this all the way forward the reason i had it all the way backwards is because i was cutting pieces directly in half because and i have personally done this i know from experience if you are cutting something and it were to jam and turn ever so slightly everything that's spinning very fast and a thing that's not moving this whatever you are cutting will get caught and go backwards very very very fast i know from personal experience it is absolutely terrifying so we're cutting something in half have this all the way backwards if you're making a channel cut like what i'm going to do now have it all the way forwards because then you actually do need to push it to the side other than that it is exactly the same i pull up on the lever and i need to have my ruler out actually i do need to lower the saw blade as well but i'll do that separately that's not that big a deal that looks about right so now i'll lower the saw blade and do a couple test cuts to actually make sure this is at the right length and then i can cut all the pieces [Music] so so now we have half the pieces done already it really goes that fast we have piece type 2 which only needed two cuts you can see in this sketch here there's only two which are these two and these i will put on my workbench then i can work on the other remaining ones what these need is the same piece type 2 which is these two cuts as well as on the other side these cuts so instead of 10 millimeters from the outside i got 20 millimeters from the outside and another 20 to make a gap of 40. the process for doing that is pretty much exactly the same so i will do one of these cuts off camera but the second one i would like to show what i do there so now i have all the second cuts done we have the first one that i already did and now turn it over we have the extra 20 millimeter cuts right here now the process is basically exactly the same however i need to measure from the other side of the saw blade which means what i did for all of these pieces is the right side of this cut and the left side or the outside of the wood that is 20 millimeters i can measure that in the outside jaws or the big jaws of my calipers what i need to do now is set the saw blade so that the left side is at in this case 40 millimeters what i can do then is use the smaller jaws of the calipers to measure the inside distance like that i already have a piece of mdf which i used as a as a test piece to cut so i definitely know i have the 20 millimeter already set so that's i'll use as my reference [Music] so now we are finished with cutting out all the pieces now we have to carve out the middle to actually make these fit together for my process is is lowering the saw blade just slightly from 10 millimeters to say seven or eight and then using a planar to make the bottom nice and flat i will show a piece after i covered one of them just to show why i actually do this for these pieces it's relatively simple but for the other piece types we have just carving out the middle here and then we have these two pieces which we need to carve out so here is one of the pieces done and you can see now why i load the saw blade these outer pieces are at 10 millimeters and this middle is lower it doesn't really matter you can if i hold it in the light you can definitely see the saw blade cuts right here so this is why i'm going to use a planar to take off the extra two or three millimeters to make this a perfectly flat surface it's just aesthetics but i do like to make my puzzles look nice so now i have all of the piece type two done this is the easier of the two and i have one of piece type three done what i do a lot at this stage of the build is do a quick test fit to make sure all the pieces will actually fit once i try to assemble the puzzle i can see now that they do fit with a slight wobble however this is okay this is about the tolerance i work with it's much easier to change anything now than after i've already planed these i'm in the process of sanding these so we know that one of these fits and now for the other one you can do exactly the same with all the other ones i made previously since these are all based off of a unit size i know this should be 80 millimeters which is four of these pieces and i do fit together just nicely with very little wobble and finally we have all of that done every single project you will ever do or will always have the boring parts carving out all of these pieces especially the identical ones was just boring but you have to do it so now we can get on to the fun part which is using this now before we start i would like to mention the type of bit i'm going to use this is a 10 millimeter one that's because i just want to carve out the middle piece to make it perfectly flat if i were to take a larger one say this 18 millimeter one then yes i can do one pass and carve out everything but if i'm not careful there is a chance i could just clip the edge and then have this rip through the wood completely destroying it so i would always prefer to use a smaller one and do multiple passes now when working with the router and having to change the bit it is always important to make sure the machine is unplugged make sure the machine is unplugged make sure the machine is unplugged make sure the machine is unplugged make sure the machine is unplugged make sure the machine is unplugged now for setting the depth this is a trick i learned from my boss years ago and honestly it is really really helpful you can use bits this regular high-speed steel drill bits in this case i need a 10 millimeter one so what you do is loosen it push it all the way down so that effectively now it's at zero the bit is touching this piece of wood then you loosen the depth gauge put in your drill bit apply a slight pressure and tighten it again now this is set to 10.0 millimeters it's to the exact tolerance of a drill bit which in metric is one 100th of a millimeter which for wood is more than enough so now i can actually get on to carving out the middle and for that i made this custom jig quite a while ago there's some numbers here there's four which is the amount of pieces you can put in here 20 by 20 which is how big the pieces are and 80 which is technically incorrect because i'm lazy and instead of making multiple jigs i just moved this part over so now it can fit a piece which is 100 millimeters long like that since there's four pieces i can put four in like so and then i can i can use the sides to stabilize myself and carve out the middles just like that so now i have my jig in place i'm ready to start around at the middle and just for this i'm going to take off my glasses and actually wear safety glasses because i'll be kneeling down to get a better view from these for these pieces so the first thing i'm going to do with these pieces is just move a couple millimeters into each side so that when i pass through it all the way there's no chance of any splinters splitting out and ruining the pieces behind here [Music] [Music] yep mistakes happen uh don't actually know what happened maybe this wasn't quite secured well enough but this just flipped out and i need to remake that piece [Music] so an unfortunate mistake on one piece which i have to redo but now you can definitely see why i am routing out the piece instead of just using a table saw because now these two outer cuts are the exact same depth as everything else and if i hold a unfinished piece you could definitely just see the difference and this is the reason i'm using a router just just to get rid of this jagged appearance so that was an unfortunate mistake however i did finish all of the pieces these ones were definitely easier because they only have one thing instead of two cut outs i did go a bit slower than i would normally that's why i didn't film the second half of that just because i wanted to go a bit slower than normal but you can see if i do a quick test fit that the pieces still fit together they are a tiny tiny bit wobbly but that may actually be a good thing once i'm actually assembling this foreign so here is the initial assembly of the puzzle just to see if everything works and everything does it is a really well fitting puzzle and really tight there may be a few individual pieces which are a tiny bit loose i can see a tiny gap there it's a tiny gap there that's not really that big a deal so now what i'm going to do is take this apart once again and then sand all the pieces and stain them so i'm just about to sand all the pieces and i quickly want to show how i do it at first i take the end pieces this is a particularly egregious example with that small black mark there not all of these are that bad and just sand it smooth doesn't really take that long yeah literally that's it uh that black mark was because of the table saw pushing against metal so i can occasionally happen then i have the two ends then done going to slightly break the edges here and on the top as well and that's the sanding done it's not a lot of work but it is a lot of pieces some are easier than others and as well uh with rounding off the edges i am not going to round off uh any of the inner edges here what i'm just going to do is on the outside once like that so this middle one will get caught in there but that doesn't really matter you do want things to be quite sharp so that it'll fit fit properly if they're too rounded it can become a bit loose so for the staining what i'm going to do is use rapeseed oil i'm serious i've used this for almost all of my puzzles now and the reason is if i take a piece of beech wood you can see the left one has been stained the right one has not there is actually quite a significant color difference between the two and that's really all i want i don't need any protection for the wood because it's going to be inside the entire day it's going to be on my shelf so that's why this is good enough and also it's a lot cheaper than actual woodstone so i'm going to do all of this assemble the puzzle once again and finish the video when i'm done and here is the puzzle fully complete i absolutely love how the stain looks it makes everything a lot darker and a lot more dark red color if you look at one of these pieces individually i love this wood and i would definitely like to make more more puzzles with this however i don't actually have that much left over so i do need to be careful with what i make because i may run out of pieces and not easily find replacements anyway i really hope you enjoy the video the plans for this puzzle will be available in the description if you want to make this yourself thank you for watching and i'll see you all next time goodbye

Channel: infrabread

Views: 2,781

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Id: tQI7fqSILwE

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022