Mistakes happen…they’ll never know

all right I'm gonna start right off the bat and say that this piece was hard to make Curves in furniture or maybe even just woodworking in general tend to give a feeling of exceptional skill or something like that we're used to seeing furniture with square edges and straight legs that's how wood gets cut most of the time in straight lines so it makes sense and when we're able to kind of manipulate the wood to bend and curve it gives the idea that an incredible amount of work and skill went into making it and it almost feels unbelievable and I'll tell you that at least one of those things was true for this piece it's certainly why some of my earlier designs Incorporated large curves and bends which I was able to achieve by stacking bandsaw cut curved plywood it was the simplest though extremely time consuming way that I found to achieve the unbelievable look without the incredible amount of skill and funny enough this exact piece ended up being the most successful YouTube video that I have on my channel and the only video that I have on my Channel with over a million views so I figured it was about time to make a new version and pay homage to a piece that helped me jump start my YouTube career and what better time than now when I'm kind of jump starting my old YouTube channel again the only difference is that this time I have a bit more skill and I'm going to be making a better version I want this one to really feel unbelievable and give the appearance of being solid hardwood but let's not get ahead of ourselves the first thing we need to do to make a curved piece of furniture is to actually make a curve and to do that we need a couple things I used flexible plywood sometimes called bendy ply or wiggle wood or I've seen it called wacky wood also which let's be honest are perfectly accurate and needlessly hilarious names but whatever you want to call it I layered it up to match some three-quarter inch Baltic birch plywood the unwacky kind which would be used for the flat sections and I made a bending form out of MDF we have a big vacuum bag that I've used for some veneer table tops in the past but this was actually the first time I was doing a bent lamination with it and I wasn't exactly sure how it was all going to go so I made extra sure nothing would shift around as I was getting it all situated and sure enough I was able to get everything into the bag without a problem and every time I use this thing I'm amazed at how much pressure this little vacuum pump can create pretty wacky if you ask me to make sure I gave everything enough time to harden I left it in the bag overnight which meant I got to come in the next morning kind of like it was Christmas except it was a sad weird Christmas where instead of getting a Super Nintendo or something and being surrounded by family I was alone in a cold wood shop taking a bent lamination out of a vacuum bag but it came out looking like a curved piece of plywood which is exactly what I asked Santa for Merry Christmas to me thanks sad weird wood shop Santa foreign needed to do from there was make a few don't try this at home table saw cuts to trim the edges on the curve and get it nice and square get the curve nice and square that doesn't make any sense but I guess at the same time it actually makes perfect sense foreign you might notice that seemingly out of nowhere I am now wearing shorts and a t-shirt as I cut down this sheet of plywood to start making the flat sections of the cabinet or maybe you didn't notice that but the reason for this is because I've been making this piece of furniture for almost four months now this was literally the first thing I did for this project and it was hotter back then but the main reason I even bring it up is so I can use it as an excuse for any mistakes I might make along the way and I'm only kind of joking to be fair repeatedly stopping my progress then trying to pick back up Weeks Later made it really difficult to keep track of what I was doing and what I had already done or what I was going to do next like these dados that I'm cutting here I made these panels then they sat in a corner of the shop for over a month before I did anything else to them and really after that amount of time mistakes are just bound to happen glue UPS they can be tricky daunting intimidating maybe all of the above and this one was really no different but maybe not for the reason you might think for the most part it was pretty straightforward the only thing that wasn't straightforward and if you've ever used a domino you might know what I'm about to say but pulling a domino out of a mortise is sometimes one of the trickiest parts of an assembly I usually like to dry fit an assembly together without glue to make sure it's all going to fit then I'll pull it all apart to actually glue it together and this includes struggling to pull dominoes out because they just fit so dang well which I guess is a testament to how good the Domino machine is but also Festival if you're watching this make a domino pulling tool or someone out there if you're a tool maker make this tool you have at least one sale within the first minute of selling this thing me and then if you extrapolate that out over time that's one sale every minute going on in perpetuity I mean you're a millionaire and you don't even know it yet now here's something I debated for a while before finally landing on how I wanted to do it and it has to do with the order of operations when it came to Edge Banning the cabinet because the cabinet is made out of plywood I obviously would be veneering all of the faces as well as needing to cover up the plywood edges with Edge banding so the question was basically should I veneer the cabinet first then apply Edge banding or apply Edge banding first then veneer the panel I'm not really sure if there's a quote-unquote right way of doing this and as I thought about it I kind of realized there were Arguments for both ways when I use store-bought veneered plywood I obviously Edge Band After the veneer is applied because the veneer is applied before I buy it so easy choice and I like using solid wood Edge banding that I make myself which I can usually get a pretty seamless application but in this case I decided to Edge band first then apply the veneer and that was for a couple reasons first I wanted to chamfer on the front edge of the cabinet so I needed a thicker solid wood front edge so I could cut in that chamfer without exposing the plywood core and this meant that the front edge would be a lot more noticeable on the top of the cabinet if it was glued onto the already veneered panel especially if the maple board I was using for the edge banding wasn't a perfect match to the veneer that I had purchased which it probably wouldn't be so by Edge Banning first I'd be able to hide that seam underneath the veneer basically trade a seam here for a potential seam here either way I was getting a seam no matter how much I try to get it all to match so it really just depends on where I think it'll be the least noticeable that was my reasoning at least I'm not sure if there's a universally accepted right way but let me know if you have any insight on this [Music] foreign speaking of veneer it was time to give it a try and this was my first time using store-bought veneer so I figured I'd get the feel for it with a smaller section on the piece and the angled end panel seemed like a perfect place to get some practice in the past I've always made my own veneer and applied it using various techniques but because of the curves on this piece I wanted to try something different and I settled on using PSA veneer which stands for pressure sensitive adhesive which I got from GL veneer you can tell by the name that they're into veneer so go check out their inventory they have all sorts of good stuff they didn't pay me to say that and I actually bought this veneer with my own money but they do have a lot of good stuff so I figured I'd just let you know anyway PSA is real wood veneer that's backed with a 3M Adhesive that creates a permanent Bond when applied with pressure if you don't stick to this plywood you're going to disappoint everybody sorry not that kind of pressure more of a downward physical pressure rather than an emotional one but after using it on this little test piece that was actually part of the real piece so I guess not really a test I was happy with the results and confident to use it on the rest of the cabinet what's something that's a dead giveaway that a piece of furniture is veneered if you said non-existent end grain then you were thinking the same thing as me and that makes you a winner when Edge banding is applied to a veneered panel the predicament is that the end of a panel will need Edge banding but the grain direction is going to look kind of weird a solid wood board would show end grain and look like this while a veneered panel with Edge banding will look like this some people don't love the way end grain looks on a solid wood panel but I think we can all agree that the more natural something looks the more we tend to like it so the ends of the cabinet have kind of angled bevel Cuts just to give a little extra detail but I wanted to do what I could to make the cut ends look as natural as possible so I decided to make some end grain Edge banding it was a bit of extra work honestly not that much and maybe something that most people will barely even notice but this type of attention to detail is what I think kind of sets some things apart also isn't woodworking kind of weird we do all this stuff to a natural material and make it look about as unnatural as possible then we do all this stuff to make the really unnatural looking natural material look natural again like like what what are we even doing anymore remember at the beginning when I said I made a lot of mistakes and attempted to fix a lot of mistakes during this build well this is about the point where they start unfortunately and the first one was that I cut the dado for the bottom part of the end panel way too long when I cut these dados which remember was almost two months prior to this I was still wearing shorts and a t-shirt and now it's cold and raining I'm wearing pants and a jacket and here's a shot of Chris filming the rain to prove all of that and a picture of me filming Chris filming the rain to prove that I don't know if this rain clip made it into Chris's most recent YouTube video but go check it out when you're done here he's showing it on YouTube today and for the foreseeable future rain or shine anyway since I still have to veneer everything I knew I could throw in a simple patch job and not be too concerned with how it looked because it was going to get covered up down the line and by down the line I mean right now because it was the big day and finally time to veneer the entire curved cabinet how exciting I was able to get 24 by 96 inch sheets of veneer and my curved cabinet was around 16 inches wide so that worked out but almost 120 inches long so I obviously had to come up with a strategy for how I was going to cover the entire thing and make it look the best knowing that I would have a couple seams after some careful strategizing I decided to cover both the inside and outside of the cabinet with two sections of veneer one long section and one short section the inside face would get the long section on the bottom so that it would wrap up around the curve and end on the underside of the top meaning the seam here would never really be seen unless you decided to stick your head into the cabinet and take a look I can see the scene and the outside face of the cabinet would be the opposite where the long section of veneer would run along the top and around the curve to the underside where the seam would end up being underneath the entire piece which you wouldn't be able to see unless you were an ant with a flashlight and the nice thing about the PSA veneer is that it's fairly easy to cut and apply I was able to do all of the trimming with a straight edge and utility knife and I just used a piece of MDF with a blunted edge to apply the necessary pressure to make it all stick the whole process to veneer both sides of the cabinet probably took me a couple hours with filming and I didn't have to mess around with stuff like glue or contact cement which was nice and remember the whole Edge band then veneer or veneer then Edge band debate well here's the argument for Edge banding after veneer because the PSA veneer has a paper backing for the adhesive there's a thin darker line underneath the veneer honestly it isn't that bad and if I were using a darker wood it probably wouldn't even be noticeable but for light stuff like Maple I don't know if I were to do this again I might try veneer thin Edge banding if I were a more excitable person I might just jump the gun at this point and glue up the entire cabinet assembly after all I've got a veneered and Edge banded curved cabinet box and vertical panels ready and waiting to be glued in but jumping the gun is a bad thing and luckily I'm not an overly excitable person and we also have a couple more things to do before we can make this a solid cabinet one of which is cutting in the front edge detail which like I mentioned a few minutes ago is a chamfer easy enough the other thing that needed to happen was installing the upper and lower Runners for the sliding door and there are a surprising amount of different ideas and thoughts that I had when doing this like here's a quick thought what do you think of my Oscar Meyer pants and shirt combo I know it's not full Plum but I mean come on that's pretty cool if you ask me anyway like I was saying one of the hard Parts about making these videos is trying to cram in all the ideas and thoughts I have while making these pieces of furniture so just for the sake of experimentation let's maybe try a little rapid fire around here and see what I can get through first thought I chose to use brass c channel because if I cut a Groove for the sliding door into the cabinet I would expose the plywood core and expose the lie that none of this is in fact solid wood the fortunate byproduct of this decision is that the brass c channel looks cool so win-win on that one thought one a the c channel didn't fit perfectly into the groove cut by my half inch diameter router bit so here's a tip use a layer of blue tape to offset the router slightly to widen the groove and the C Channel then fits like a glove another win thought C making grooves for a sliding door can be tricky because you have to consider the depth of both the top and bottom Groove and the lengths of your sliding door tenons to make sure the door can be taken in and out which is why you see me having to trim down the height of the c channel here and that brings me to my final thought because so much of what I do in these videos includes all these different ideas and techniques and packing all of them into one video is almost impossible go check out my patreon page I'm making a second commentary type video for every video that I post on YouTube where I really dive into the nitty-gritty specifics of what I'm doing kind of all the stuff we just ran through but hopefully at a more reasonable pace and maybe in more detail so if you like that kind of stuff definitely go check it out or if you just want to help out the channel and help make sure I can keep making these videos that's a great way to do it too and thanks to everyone on my patreon so far I really can't even tell you how much the support means I guess the best I can do is just say it one more time thank you I sincerely appreciate it I've said it before and I'll say it again but Milling is boring it's boring when you're doing it and it's even more boring watching somebody do it but if you edit it just right it can be one of those oddly satisfying moments so here's my formula for an oddly satisfying and interesting to watch Milling section in a YouTube video start with rough lumber the rougher the better quick shot just enough to see how rough it is sprinkle in a little slow-mo you know for the drama cut to the planer showing one pass going from rough to clean now a quick shot looking at a wonky Edge to apply what I'm going to do next which is on the jointer jointing one Edge wide shot into a close shot now jump to the table saw for one final cut preferably the most wonky Edge getting trimmed nice and straight and and on that final shot two clean boards getting pushed together and the seam virtually disappearing okay be honest after watching that are you feeling pretty satisfied and is that feeling of satisfaction maybe a little odd to you totally fine if it is honestly it's preferred I glued up the panel for the drawer fronts and sliding door the shot we're watching here on October 6 2022 and now this shot where I'm getting ready to cut the panel in half was done on January 8 2023 so over three months between the two of them shorts and a t-shirt have now become pants and a jacket and I even did my bi-annual assembly tabletop flip and during this period of time for the life of me I had forgotten whether or not I used dominoes in the panel glue up that I did a minute ago and as I started cutting into the panel to start shaping the sliding door I got progressively more and more nervous that I was going to make a cut and expose a domino the sliding door was the entire height of the cabinet and the joint where the dominoes may or may not have been was centered on the panel so there was really a pretty low risk of cutting into one while making this door which maybe gave me confidence that may or may not have been false confidence of course I could have gone back and looked at the old footage I had shot because I did film that glue up but at this point what's done is done and really ignorance is bliss so I carried on without checking and I'm purposefully not showing the footage of that Globe to you right now because I'm building suspense so you keep watching right will he cut into a domino is the entire piece ruined by one mistake you'll find out tomorrow or in a couple minutes same wood Time same wood Channel so on to the drawer fronts where the first thing I did was cut a miter onto one end to create the kind of wrapped Corner drawer front look I was going for and sure enough I cut the bevels for the miter and once again no dominoes were exposed I was beginning to think past Sean did Future Sean a favor by leaving The Dominoes out of the glue up though I had one last crucial cut to make before I was absolutely certain I was out of the woods and that was to cut the drawer front panel right down the middle to break it into two drawer fronts which certainly would expose some dominoes if they were in fact there so after cutting an angle to match the vertical panel on the cabinet I could make that Final Cut which actually consisted of two cuts the first long rip then one last small cut to free them from each other and sure enough there they are you can't see my face in this shot but I imagine it was something like this but no use dwelling on the problem there's only time to fix it and I almost was able to get away with not doing anything since I was gonna inlay some brass along the edge of the drawer fronts but even with that it looked like The Dominoes were still gonna show a bit so I did some small patching to cover them up the best I could knowing that the brass would end up making this pretty hard to notice once it was all in place foreign [Music] looking back on the mistakes I made during this project I'm at the point where they kind of seem like no big deal like right now as I say this after the fact they happened I fixed them and moved on but in the moment they can stop you in your tracks and kind of take the wind out of your sails this end panel was one of those moments for me maybe worse than exposing The Dominoes and the reason this one felt so bad was because it started to change the design of the piece and how it looked which is kind of the most important thing how it looks what happened was I first built out this end panel so that the drawer fronts could have something to slide around and the drawer slides would have something to connect to at the front of the cabinet and my initial design was to have the drawer fronts just barely in set from the outside face of the end panel but when I cut the end miter on the drawer fronts I cut it too short by the thickness of the material that meant that my drawer fronts were now going to be shifted three quarters of an inch in from where I initially wanted them and honestly that kind of bummed me out I considered a lot of different options and Alternatives most of which included remaking the door and drawer fronts which definitely wasn't something I wanted to do at this point so I kind of just stared at it long enough to convince myself it looked fine or maybe even that it looked better and that way I could move forward sometimes you just have to look at things from a different perspective or maybe just trick yourself into getting it done though you'll see at the end it really isn't something anyone would notice if I hadn't said anything wait a minute is this are you am I making drawer boxes here oh man the only thing more boring than watching someone Mill wood is watching someone make drawer boxes come on Sean okay okay I know maybe there are some of you that do want to learn the ins and outs of making a drawer box and do I have good news for you because if you like drawer boxes and if you're interested in Woodworking and learning woodworking go check out our video project courses over the past few years we've put together what we think are some of the best online woodworking courses out there each course guides you through the entire process of building a piece of furniture and hopefully leaves you with plenty of new skills and techniques that you can apply to your own designs and if a piece has drawer boxes you can rest assured that we go into every detail you need to know to get them looking and fitting just right so go check out our website see if any of the designs speak to you and give it a try if you're wanting to improve your woodworking all right pitch over and easy as that we have some drawer boxes ready to go now I'm no stranger to messing things up when using a CNC machine I'm confident with just about any tool in a wood shop but when I press the go or start button on a CNC I'm almost never fully confident it's going to work properly so to no one's surprise I messed it up this time too but to my surprise I didn't mess up the actual CNC work it was another stinking Domino that decided to pop up out of nowhere and ruin my day once again this time it may be one of the most visible spots on the piece right in the middle of the handle for the sliding door because I knew that there were dominoes in this glue up at this point I had thought I figured out where they were and knew that I wouldn't cut into one but sure enough here we are so once again I racked my brain thinking of different ways to fix this and I ultimately decided to just double down on my newfound CNC skills and use it to cut another pocket that I could then fill in with Walnut and then re-cut that handle recess if I left the piece as it is right now I think it would look cool curved Maple cabinet with Walnut grain matched drawer and door fronts it's pretty sweet but I would argue that adding maybe 10 more in small details near the end of a build could potentially change the way a piece looks by many times that and that can go either way unfortunately it could make a piece look many times better but could also make a piece look many times worse details can be tricky like that so adding the last few details to this piece was definitely one of those situations I had a good looking piece of furniture but I knew it needed that last 10 percent to get where I really wanted it to be and I had two details that I figured would get me that 10 percent the first was a groove cut onto the top edge of the bottom drawer and the bottom edge of the top drawer so I could inlay some brass that would run the length of the drawer fronts and turn the corner around the miter and I would say that was good for maybe seven percent then a bevel cut on the top edge of the top drawer and the bottom edge of the bottom drawer which I sanded to create an almost large rounded look to the drawer fronts and I would say this was the remaining three percent then I wanted the brass detail to continue across the sliding door and across the handle recess I just cut for maybe an extra little five percent and on top of that I was hoping the brass would help cover up the repair job I had just done for the exposed domino in the handle recess so one last Groove to be cut and oh what's that you screwed it up again awesome good for you the panel just barely got away from me on the router table and I got a well he cut there's kind of no better way to say it so another fix was in order a light cut to widen the groove in that bad spot then I could glue in the brass with a thin spacer to fill in that wider section add that to the list of things on this piece that nobody will ever notice but I know they're there and until I slowly forget about all of them over time I'm going to think about each mistake every time I look at this piece which actually helped me never have to look at this piece again and buy it from me selling furniture is actually one of the hardest parts about making furniture for YouTube videos couple that with being a horrible salesman and that's a recipe for a room full of furniture in your shop so if you or someone you know is interested in this piece mistakes and all go check out my website and let me know if you're interested like I said I'm a bad salesman which is probably why I've been dwelling on all the mistakes but I promise it really is a great looking piece stick around to the end and you'll see how it all comes out you know if I hadn't made a single mistake on this piece I still would have learned a ton I was doing stuff I had never done before with the PSA veneer I was experimenting with a new take on an old design with the bent lamination curve and I didn't even get into this part but I tried new drawer slides push to open no less but maybe the best thing I learned was to always Soldier on and as the piece comes together and all those little details now become part of the bigger picture the memory of all those mistakes it's already starting to fade shine up the brass and the patch dominoes start to disappear add some finish and I forget about the bad cut on the door add a pop of color and that's all anyone's gonna notice and on top of that I look at this piece right now even remembering all the mess-ups and I think it's one of the best things I've made and on top of that it has so much more value to me because of everything I learned while doing it and hopefully it can bring value and happiness to someone else in the future so I guess the takeaway is no matter what you're gonna make mistakes that's just what happens when you do stuff like this but mistakes can be fixed and as long as when you look at the finished piece it makes you forget about the mistakes even just for a split second you succeeded so go make stuff make mistakes fix those mistakes wear full Plum and come out on the other side proud of all those mistakes that you've overcome [Music]

Channel: Shaun Boyd Made This

Views: 502,617

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, modern bench, modern coffee table, bent lamination, bent furniture, curved furniture, curved wood, bending wood, modern furniture, bent lam

Id: jjFaiIU5Its

Length: 30min 31sec (1831 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023