- Hey, what's up guys. Welcome back to the channel. I've got behind me, a full
table of Miter folded shelves, mantels, columns, all kinds
of stuff for the project that I'm getting ready to start. This is a video that's
gonna help you a ton. If you can master this technique, I'm gonna give you 10 tips
and some of my secrets to give you Miters that
look like they grew together without using any exposed fasteners. All you need is tape. So we'll dig into this video. You can see how to make floating
shelves, mantels, columns, beams, all kinds of stuff, just using tape, and it'll
look like it grew together after you're done. (swooshing)
(glass shattering) Rule number one of
successful Miter folding over cut your bevel cuts or Miter cuts. So the most important thing
is for our outside edge here to come together nice and tight. If you cut your bevel cuts
at exactly 45 degrees, you'll find that you don't get a really nice tight outside corner. This can be caused by a number of reasons. Your cut might be slightly inconsistent. Definitely, if you undercut your Miter, if you're shooting right for
45 degrees and you undercut it to save 44.8, it's definitely
not gonna be tight, but then also you're gonna be using glue, and that glue is gonna
build up a little bit. And by over cutting your
Miter to 45.5 degrees, you give that glue somewhere to go. And it ensures that outside
corner stays super tight and diverts the glue towards the inside. I get asked this a lot, if you should cut at 45 degrees or 46? 45.5 is the sweet spot for me. 46 is fine, but I find
it's a bit too much. Definitely don't get
too close to 45 though, 45.5 as ideal. Law number two of
successful Miter folding, use a digital angle
gauge to set your bevel on your table saw. So this is a WCSI gauge. There's all kinds of different makers of these digital gauges. Typically they have magnets on the bottom, and what you wanna do
is orient your magnets towards the saw blade, and then set it down on
your table by the saw blade. Now go ahead and raise your
saw blade all the way up. And make sure that your
digital gauge is zero. If it doesn't read 0.0, press the zero button,
(clicking) and that'll zero
(bell dinging) at zero degrees, in case your base is not level. Then simply slide it over. And the magnets will
catch on the saw blade, and you can tilt your
blade over to 45.5 degrees, and you can get a very
precise reading this way. And I've found it's the best way to ensure I'm always cutting at that
exact 45.5 degree angle. See, there we go. So that brings us to our third law of successful Miter folding,
which is cut precisely. This is where most amateur
woodworkers or hobbyists are gonna struggle the most. Most people who work in the
industry for a long time, and do a lot of cutting, have kind of a sixth sense
on how to machine wood in a very precise process. But with MITRE folding, we've already talked about
getting your bevel set precisely. The other key is straight lines. Whenever your Miter
folding something together, you want those two edges
to be perfectly straight. If they're not perfectly straight, then whenever you go to fold it together, it won't want to tighten down
equally in certain places. If it's not a nice
straight cut the whole way, or if there's a bow in the board. A couple of tips on cutting precisely. Number one, break down your sheet goods into manageably sized pieces. Before you rip the bevel onto them. Whenever you rip pieces that are close to what your finished
dimension is gonna be, that's gonna allow you to
keep that piece held down nice and tight to number one. The table saw base and number two, keep it tight to your fence. If you're trying to put a bevel on a big old sheet of plywood that might not be perfectly flat, you may find the different
parts of that sheet, do not want to sit down
nice and tight to the table. If you're ripping a really long board, and you're having to stand
way back and push it through, you might find it's difficult to tell if you're making good contact
with the top of the table. So do whatever you need to do to ensure that you're machining
your wood really precisely for a floating shelf like this. One of the easiest ways
for me to ensure that is to break down the
larger sheet of plywood into smaller pieces, and then rip the bevels after that, you can also utilize a track saw, a track saw is gonna keep
a perfectly straight edge. And the other beauty of a
track saw is it's really easy to keep that track nice and
tight to your sheet good, the whole time as you run
the tracks all across it. It's a little bit more difficult
with a table saw at times. So you may want to switch up your process depending on the size of material
that you're working with. So don't be afraid to
break your sheet goods down to smaller, more manageable sizes. Don't be afraid to use
a jointer or a track saw to give yourself straight
edges to start with, and then always be aware that if you don't have straight edges, it's gonna be a little bit more difficult to get that perfect Miter on those pieces. That brings us and ties
us into tip number four. And that is, use a saw
on oversized pieces. You may find that you have to say, make some floating shelves
that are 80 inches long.- Now it's a little bit
tricky to get this bevel cut on the end of all of your pieces, whenever you're using a table
saw that only has a fence that goes to 48 inches. And that's where it's
nice just to break out the track saw for those bevel cuts on the ends of your floating shelves. So a lot of times what
I do is I'll just plop the whole sheet of
plywood down on my table. And if I need 80 inches long, I'll put that 45.5 degree bevel on the end of both pieces. And then I'll take it
over to the table saw, and make my narrower rips,
and that works really well. The thing that that
does is it also ensures that your length is perfect
with all of your pieces. And that is especially important whenever you're going
to be doing a long shelf with a finished end cap, where the Miter fold
wraps around all sides. If you don't have your
length exactly the same, it makes it a lot more difficult for everything to come together perfectly. That brings us to law number
five of Miter folding, which is use the appropriate
tape for your application. Now, what I've been doing right here is Miter folding unfinished plywood. So I have a little bit of
forgiveness on what tape I'm using, because I'm gonna
be able to sand it afterwards. That allows me to use a tape, that's gonna be more sticky, might even pull the grain up a little bit. And if it leaves a little
bit of sticky residue, that's not a big deal because
I'm gonna sand everything with an orbital sander again, anyways. Now I've been looking for the
perfect tape for Miter folding for a long time. I've tried a lot of different tapes. I prefer strapping tape,
whenever I'm using raw material. It's so much stickier. It has more flexibility, so it'll kind of flex whenever you're folding things together. And I find that that extra
flex in elasticity in the tape gives that joint a much
tighter pull together, whereas more of a
traditional shipping tape that is not reinforced, like this fiberglass
reinforced strapping tape, or some might call it filament tape. This stuff does not have the elasticity. And it tends to actually, if that Miter is not perfectly aligned, the tape will pull off and
let loose from the work piece. Now this fiberglass reinforced
tape that I have here, you can tell that it's reinforced tape 'cause it's got these little lines in the tape of the filament. This stuff is sticky, and it's elastic, and it does not like to come off. So it works great for a
raw material application, which is what I'm typically doing. But if you're doing a
pre-finished material, that's where you gotta be
a little bit more careful because you could end up with this possibly messing up your finish, or leaving that sticky residue on your pre-finished material. So you gotta be aware of that, but I've looked for a long time. I've done a lot of different
things with Miter folding, with standard heavy duty packing tape. You can do it, but in my
opinion, there's a better way. And that is a good quality,
very sticky strapping tape. Now with your tape, you
might be thinking, all right, I'm gonna go on Amazon
and get some of this awesome strapping tape
that Spencer recommended, and get one of these awesome
tape dispensing guns. (clears throat) In my experience, these guns are fine for
standard shipping tape, that is not reinforced, but whenever you try to put
this reinforced strapping tape on one of these guns, it is
a nightmare to try and tear. It just doesn't work very good. So I found one of these
tape dispensers on Amazon, and they are amazing
for either filament tape or your standard heavy
duty, clear packing tape. So all you gotta do (tape ripping) is pull it out and it's
got this cutting blade. It's nice and close here, and it just tears off really easy. So again, if I can get a
little bit close up here to the camera (tape
ripping) it just pulls out, and then you can see on the back here, it just pulls and tears. The other thing I didn't mention yet about the typical clear tape
that is not reinforced, again, let me show, (tape ripping) you can see here clear tape
versus the reinforced tape. Whenever you're trying to tear this clear standard tape off your beams, what'll often happen is
it'll actually tear and peel, and you get these annoying little pieces that are left on your beam,
or whatever you're doing. And you just spend a lot more time picking and trying to peel this tape off. Now, of course, as always guys, if you're finding the video
helpful and the tips helpful, you can support the channel
by purchasing these items through the links that I
will put in the video notes, or in the very top comment
underneath the video. Highly recommend this dispenser. They're less than $10 a
piece, absolute no-brainer. And then this tape again, I've tried a lot of different tapes. This is from Amazon, comes in a four pack. I will link that also. It's been very good stuff for me. Guys, I do want to give
a disclaimer on the tape. I do really like how sticky this tape is, but I did pull some off right here. It actually pulled up the veneer. So, you know, just be careful. The longer you leave it sit, the more it's gonna stick. And pull it off slowly, that way if you see that
it's starting to pull a piece of your corner,
or something like that, that you don't rip a
chunk of the veneer off like I did here. So it's a two-edged sword
is tapes great in some ways, maybe a little bit too much in others. And then, you know, standard
clear tape like this, you know, it's never
gonna be strong enough to pull a piece of veneer like that, but then it's got its
own pitfalls as well. So just be advised. You gotta be careful. It's not perfect. And test it out before you use it. This is gonna be a Miter-folded mantle. Let me go ahead and tape this up, and then we'll move on to tip
number six for Miter folding. But this is gonna show you again, a couple of things that
we've already talked about, the importance of precisely
cutting your pieces to length, and then the importance of
having a very straight cut on these bevels. You can, a lot of times, if you
don't cut it very precisely, you'll end up, you'll put
these pieces together, and you'll see gaps in certain places. And what that's gonna do is it's not gonna apply really good pressure to the Miter whenever you fold it up. So here I've got my pieces lined up, and again, this tape dispenser, it's nice. It's very precise. We'll pull that out, (tape ripping) and just move right on down the line, and it's gonna be really nice and sticky.
(tape ripping) (tape ripping) Then the nice thing
about this tape dispenser is once you get to the end, it's very easy to cut it right
where you want on the end. Tip number six is gonna
be whether you're doing a Miter fold on a floating
shelf, a mantle, a column, or a beam, use interior
blocking to keep it square and to keep the spacing the
way it's supposed to be. So here we've got the top
of this mantle taped up. The next step is to flip it. So I just let it fall down
the edge of my work bench. Now you'll notice since we cut this thing at 45.5 degrees, my spacing on the front
right here is gonna be more than back here, 'cause
it's gonna want to come in. So one of the things that you
do to keep everything square and spaced properly is
to use interior blocking. (wood scraping) So this might look a little bit different, depending on if you're
doing a beam or a column, or whatever it might be, floating shelf, (drill rattling) but I cut blocks and I measure exactly what the inside width
of this center piece is. And then I cut blocks and
we're gonna fasten these blocks on the inside here. And that's gonna keep
everything nice and square and spaced exactly like
it's supposed to be. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) (drill whirring) (drill whirring) Now with the blocking installed,
when we go to fold this up, it gives us a nice positive stop that's gonna keep these
pieces at 90 degrees. The other thing we do often
is add glue to these blocks and that also adds some strength. One thing that you wanna watch out for is whenever you put these blocks in, don't make them the full height of whether it's a beam
or a mantle like this, because you're gonna need to
install a cleat on the wall to actually hang this thing from. So I wanna make sure if I'm
gonna use two-by material of some kind to hang this thing on, I need to be an inch and
a half away right here, plus a little bit more for scribing. So always keep that in
mind to keep your blocking back a little bit. But as you can see now
with that as a guide, I can fold this thing up, and everything's gonna be almost exactly where it needs to be. Tip number seven, the
glue that you use matters. So here I've got Titebond
III and I've got Titebond I. A lot of you know this already, but for those of you that don't, Titebond III has a longer set
time or, a longer wet time. It's going to allow you
to have more working time before it sets up than Titebond I. That might be important for
an application like this. The other key thing that Titebond III has that Titebond III doesn't, is this is a much thinner viscosity glue. It's much thinner, so
whenever you're applying it to these Miters, if you don't have it spread
out quite perfectly even, you push the things together. This is runnier, so it's
gonna kind of naturally take the path of least resistance. And I find it allows
miters to come together a little bit better and easier, whenever you're doing Miter folding. And I also, I learned to love Titebond III whenever I was doing a
lot of Lock mitering, because whenever you
lock miter or something, you don't have a lot of space, you don't have any space
actually inside the joint, so you need a glue that is very thin. So Titebond III works great. You can certainly use Titebond III. You're just gonna have less working time, and it's gonna be a little bit thicker, so you're gonna have
to be mindful of that. I can do good work with Titebond I, but my preference, it's just easier for me to go with Titebond III, just don't wipe it on your
clothes because if it dries, it's not coming off. One of the reasons I use Titebond I instead of Titebond II
is because Titebond I will wash out of my clothes whenever I wipe it all over myself. Now before we get to tip number eight, I'll go ahead and just
start gluing this thing up, so you guys can actually see these tips in action in real time here. Just try and get a decent amount of glue. Again, the nice thing
about Titebond III is that if you over glue it a little bit, since your bevel cut is at 45.5, and you've got some really
sticky tape on the other side, that's kind of sealing that outside edge. All of that glue is gonna be diverted towards the inside of the joint, and you're not usually
gonna have very much of it actually seeped through the
outside of that corner joint. Now that being said,
whenever you're doing this, you don't want to get crazy with the glue, and over glue it, because then it will start
to come through the tape because it just has nowhere else to go. And it just takes a
little bit more sanding and it can be a bit of a pain on the back end after
you take the tape off. So I like to just smear
this around with my fingers and the other thing you can do is just pop your pieces up and that'll
kind of naturally divert and spread all that glue around. Again for some added strength, go ahead and put glue on your little blocking
partitions in here, and that'll help stiffen
up this whole thing, and ensure that all of these long Miters stay together for the long haul. (wood rattling) So to keep everything together, often I'll just take
(tape ripping) a piece of tape and run it over the backside here. And that kind of acts as a clamp just to keep everything
(tape ripping) nice and tight while the glue sets up. Okay, tip number eight is don't be afraid to use some pin nails. Now I could try to put this end cap on just with tape so that we wouldn't have any exposed fastener holes, but the reality is a 23 gauge
pin on stain grade material is gonna disappear as
soon as that painter runs a little stain over the top of that hole. You're really not even gonna
know that it's there anymore. A little bit different
on pre-finished material, but for these end caps, I've done it before
where I've taped one side and folded it in. I find I can get the best alignment whenever I just wait until the end, and line everything up at the same time. And we'll just shoot a couple of pins. (pin nailer clapping) (pin nailer clapping) (pin nailer clapping) Now we'll flip it around
and do the other side. (wood thudding) (pin nailer clapping) (pin nailer clapping) Regular viewers of the
channel are probably wondering what I'm doing with this Ryobi pin nailer. After I got that new Milwaukee pin nailer, I got accused in the comment section of being a brand loyalist, and that the Ryobi was just as good. So I went ahead, I bought
one of these Ryobis, put a battery adapter on it. I've been using it in the shop, nah, it is adequate. That's the most I'm
gonna give it right now, but that's what's up. I'll probably have a full review of this versus the Milwaukee in the future, but that's why I've got this gun for now. I succumbed to the criticism
of the comment section. Another thing that you
can do in place of using a pin nail, 23 gauge pin nail is to use these Collins Clamps. These come in really handy also. The benefit of these is they do apply some additional clamping pressure, but most of the time, if I feel like, if I don't need that, I'm just gonna put a pin
in it and be done with it. (clamps rattling)
But these are a good option also. After I've got everything together that is gonna bring us to tip number nine, which is burnish the edges. Now you want to do this in my opinion, whenever your glue is still wet. I think you get a little bit better result if you burnish the edges
whenever the glue is wet. Reason being, especially
with Titebond III, once that glue is fully
cured, it's extremely hard. And if you try and take a round
object and burnish that edge after that glue is dry,
there's no give to it anymore. So whenever that glue is wet, it kind of just allows
everything on that corner just to compress a little bit, and it'll make it look like
that thing grew together. So I just turned it over. I'm gonna just real quick, look over this thing and make sure that I can't see any gaps on the corners. And I'm looking at this thing
and it's perfectly tight, again, with a really good quality tape that's nice and sticky, and has a little bit of elasticity to it. I find those corners
just seal, and stretch, and pull together really well. So now I'm just gonna take a round object, it could be a screwdriver. This is a square drive Kreg bit, nail set, whatever it is, and just lightly go over the corner. The other advantage to
using a heavier duty tape is that this tape is thick
enough and strong enough. I'm not gonna cut the tape
by hitting this corner with my burnishing device, you know, while the
tape is still on there. So I'm gonna do this to all
of my outside corners here, and even on these corners
where there is not any tape, sometimes it's even nice,
whenever your glue is still wet, just lightly hit it with the sandpaper. And that dust from the, the sawdust from the sandpaper
will mix with that glue and it'll fill any voids
that might be there. (sandpaper scraping)
So just a very light sanding. I don't like to round
over the corners a ton, but I also don't like a extremely
sharp crisp corner either, because that tends to not
take stain really well. And if it gets dinged or bumped, it gets damaged a lot easier. So I like to just
(sandpaper scraping) very lightly hit it with the sandpaper. All right, time to wrap it up, and tip number 10 is
hire yourself a good CPA because you're gonna need them with all that money you're making. This technique is one
of the best techniques that you can master as a carpenter. It requires very little tools. It can be performed in the
shop or on site very easily. You can accomplish a Miter fold using Miter saw, table saw, track saw, tools that are available to everyone, and it's fast. Another benefit is you don't
have a bunch of nail holes, a lot of guys, and it's
really sad nowadays. I've got a, this is gonna
be a column right here. It's a nine by nine column. A lot of production trimmers would just be trying to do that onsite, put some glue on it and shoot
25 nails up every corner that the painter then has to fill. And you're gonna see
them through the finish, and all of that. There are no exposed
nail holes, almost none, maybe a few 23 gauge pins here and there, but just makes flawless work. So if you haven't used
this technique before, you've got to try it, whether you're a professional, homeowner, it will yield great results. And just with the few, the 10 tips that I shared in this video, that's really all you need
to get you well on your way to mastering this technique. So I hope this video helps. I've done other videos
on using the Miter fold for beams and columns. Look for those videos on my channel. Also I'll try and put them
up above in the cards, check those out as well. I use this technique all
the time, and it's great. So hope you've enjoyed
watching this video. I've got to load all this stuff up and get it to the job site. So have a good one and we'll
see you in the next video. (upbeat electronic music)
