Purple Heart Torsion box table

hi everyone i'm joey now torsion boxes have been around for ages and i've never really put the fact that you could make torsion box and furniture together it just hasn't really computed in my brain before and after seeing some of the work by nathan day furniture makers in australia where they're making these massive four five meter long dining tables in this kind of style that really made me want to have a go and this is what this is so i'm not trying to rip anyone off with design i'm just trying to have a go and see how it works and stick around at the end and you'll see some of the things i should have done could have done better etc uh some lessons learned um now a little bit of context i'm locked down here in auckland where i was while i made this and so i'm stuck with what i have in my workshop that is one big piece of purple heart after working with purple heart in this way i wouldn't ever choose to do it again um any other type of wood would be fine now also someone's going to say something about the price of the purple heart for whatever reason it's not that expensive here the piece the one piece of purple heart i used for this job uh today would cost about 340 dollars uh when i got the piece of wood about a year two years ago maybe it was um it cost about 200 so it's not outrageous price here i don't know why so this is what it is i can't do much about that otherwise stick around and then we'll talk about it afterwards so i was aiming for the tabletop to be 60 mil thick finished so i ripped a bunch of 50 ml strips of plywood assuming for five mil veneers on the top and bottom i could work out my placements and using a dado saw dado blade i could make all the cuts for the halving joints for the torsion box inner which actually worked out pretty damn easy [Music] the torsion box went together pretty easily uh there's a little bit of finagling to get this first piece to line up and after that each piece went in relatively painlessly so so i added some solid purple heart blocks in each corner and this will be what the legs attach to further down the road right next to cut the giant piece of purple heart that i have it is a piece of 250 by 100 and it's not super straight but not too bad so there's just enough material in here to get my four legs out of and cut the veneers for the top and bottom of the top so i had to straighten it out a little using a little slit it wasn't too bad and the only problem really is that this piece weighs a ton so it's just very difficult to move around [Music] from there i could straighten it up cut a parallel base and work out how to go about cutting veneers off it so i found the biggest blade i had my bandsaw it looks old-ish it's got a little bit of surface rust on it but it hasn't done that much work but it pretty much felt like i was trying to cut through this with a butter knife because man this wood is hard and it took me a long time to get these veneers cut probably the better part of a day really i spent on this cutting eight veneers man you can just hear the amount of tear out that's happening in that cleaner geez so luckily i left a little so i could carry on and go into the thicknesser so i still had to take about a mil or two mil off maybe and that took quite a while the purple heart does sand quite nicely it just takes a little while okay so i think i have a plan this is my bottom veneer you can see i've traced out the pattern of the torsion box because i don't want to glue the whole lot which would be an easier solution mainly the problem there is that i've just mixed up my glue which is um plastic resin glue and i don't think well i've only probably only just got enough glue i'm not sure but that's all i have right now and because uh auckland city is locked down at the moment i can't get any more so this is what i've got um so i'm gonna try and film as much of this glue up as i can but we'll see what the plan is is to glue this put the torsion box on lay up the veneers on the top and then sandwich it down to my workbench which is a torsion box and glue both sides at the same time and let's see if it works all right it's all clamped up wasn't too stressful in the end you'll see these little orange packers in the middle of these um strong backs and that's just to provide pressure into the middle of the panel and the sides are clamped so you actually end up bending your strong backs which is kind of the whole point to provide some extra down force but these little packers really help to [Music] push down in the middle of a wide panel alternatively i suppose you could drive wedges in but you end up pushing your strong backs to the side it's a bit of a bit annoying so now i just have to wait until tomorrow for this all to dry i suppose i can get on with making the legs [Applause] so okay there's a couple of ways i can go about veneering the edge i could just flush trim my veneers down to the torsion box and then throw my veneers on and they're all going to be five mil thick and you're gonna see a five mil edge or i guess i could put veneers in there and then flush trim down to the veneer and again you're going to see five mil edge what i'd like to do is hide the join as much as possible so when i put a small round over on the corner all the joins are going to disappear so i've got this set got the set here of bearing dye or these are yeah well bearing expansion packs for this rebate cutter whatever you want to call it router bit now the problem with these is that these kind of bearing expansions i only get smaller than the cutter and what i want is the bearing to be bigger than the cutter so i've found this bit that used to just be a flush trim bit um and i can use one of these bearing expanders and kind of jerry rig it on to there so that means my cutter is three mil smaller than the bearing so when i run this along here i'm going to end up with my veneers consistently sticking past my torsion box by three mil [Music] with the table top mostly ready i cut some strips of purple heart and i'm re-baiting the five mil edge veneers to fit inside and around the edge of the table i thought it would be fun to try and put in grain veneers on the end of the table and it would kind of look like four big planks these are super delicate to work with but it did work in the end i was really impressed with my first go at it [Music] with the edge veneers glued on and all sanded back roughly it was time to start thinking about how to attach the legs [Music] i think years and years ago i tried some aloof joinery and don't recall i don't really don't recall it but i thought i'd give it a proper crack here and yeah it's really an interesting type of joint it takes a little bit of thinking but once you get your head around what's going on it's really actually very simple [Applause] [Music] so [Music] mm-hmm [Music] [Music] first go here was just slightly tight so i could just shift the fence on my saw a very small amount and then come back and give it another crack [Music] so [Music] so the last real job here is to clean up the top and there's a few issues there's some tear out there's some lipping between two different planks and i'm very um well cautious about using a regular plane so i've broken out my granddad's old 112 i just watched a quick refresher video about how to set it up and i think i've got it going pretty good essentially it's just a big scraper plane and let's see if it goes so [Music] okay we're making shavings so a step [Music] [Music] okay well i'll be here for the next couple hours right you can see i've masked off the end grain because um especially with whenever you mix black glue up uh the black just sucked into the end grain and it's very difficult to almost impossible to sand out the black because it just gets sucked in it's not so bad on the straight grain you can pretty much sand it out like anything else so i'm just using epoxy with black oxide there we go any whole fire there and i just want to make sure that all the legs are square and then it looks like it's doing something though bubbles and coming up this one squeeze that everywhere which is good so it's time for the first coat of clear i'm using meritone that's a professional grade water-based polyurethane it dries very quickly and in the conditions i had was drying probably a bit too quick but anyway between coats we could get a good nice dusty sanding which is what you are looking for when you're sanding a clear coat you want all that nice dust to show up otherwise i just threw a few more coats on after that and she was done okay thanks for sticking around to this point so let's talk a little bit about the rubber struck outside my window so what did i learn about making this up well first and foremost i learned that this form of torsion box design is super strong this table is so strong um [Music] i'm definitely going to use it and i'm definitely going to suggest this kind of construction to my clients one because it saves on timber and at the moment timber prices are through the roof and so anything we can do to turn one plank into four planks four planks is a good thing and it's going to cut down on costs that way the other thing is that it really does away with obviously the need for stretches and things like that and this day and age it seems to be more and more common to want that look of a clean look and this is about as clean as you can get and i'm really impressed with the way it's gone together the leg joinery i was a bit iffy about whether there's enough strength for that malouf joint to work i think perhaps the purple heart being so hard has helped me in that cause but the legs are definitely on there i mean they're as strong as any leg i've put on any table i'm really impressed with how that how that went i actually thought when i started this that i was kind of dreading making the torsion box because i thought that would be the the longest part and that would be the hardest part to do with all those harbinger joints but that i mean i did that whole thing in probably an hour and a half with filming time and so super that was so easy i'm not going to be deterred by that the fact that i had the dado blade that i can set up that i think is really the only way to do that quickly so what are the things i'm not so happy about well the purple heart itself caused me some problems there's bits where i've had some tear out explode out off some of the edge when i was trimming the edge veneers there is tear out in the top itself which i've been able to mostly get out i mean i've learned a lot about working with purple heart and that it doesn't like to plane at all it really doesn't even like to be scraped with a scraper um it sands quite well and it cuts with a blade quite well but not a not a planar blade that you know if you actually use a cut a cutting tool it's pretty good um as long as things are pretty sharp when i was scraping it i would go maybe six passes with a scraper and it would be dull i'd have to go re-sharpen it and come back and it just got old really quick whereas the sander actually even though the sanding discs wore out quite quickly it was more aggressive than anything else and i i found that the best option with the purple heart i would definitely not almost certainly not do do it again with purple heart it's just too difficult to work with something like ash or walnut would be great cherry it would be awesome with so other things i didn't quite like i because i'm in lockdown i had to use water-based polyurethane because that's all i had and i know because of the grain structure of the purple heart it would have been so much nicer to have a hard wax oil something like osmo it would have felt so much nicer and because it just it sounds so smooth and as as good as you are with the the polyurethane it's not going to be as smooth as an oil finish anyway it's still pretty good the other thing i was not really sure what happened the joinery on the legs was dead tight before i glued it up and then after glue up the glue lines seem so obnoxious and in your face and part of it is possibly because i use black glue but that is knowing that the color is going to darken significantly and that's something i wanted to talk about as well is that the color i don't really want a bright purple table although this isn't as bright as i've seen purple heart go from here it's only going to get darker and i'll show you a reference now of the color i would like it to get to and it will eventually it just needs some more time in the sun so that's it that's my experiment i've learned a lot i hope you maybe learned something along the way and i will see you on the next one thanks for watching you

Channel: Joey Chalk

Views: 31,799

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Id: Li4burUhU2g

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021