Texas Stars: Easy 45 Degree Angles, No Jigs! Easy Woodworking Project

hello everyone welcome to another Texas Star build video in this video I will be showing you how to make this star using a maximum of 45 degree angles I made a previous video where I made that style of star which looks very similar but they're slightly different that one uses 54 degree angles after making the video I realized that some of you might have a miter saw that only goes to 45 degrees and I actually did end up getting a few comments like that so I thought I'd make this video I did some math I figured out the angles so if your saw only goes to 45 degree angles then watch this video and I'll show you how I made this so the first step will be to find yourself a 1x4 this is a piece of SPF from my local hardware store nothing fancy but I did find a piece with no knots and uh really nice and straight so looking forward to using that I have made these with pallet wood in the past and that works great too just takes a little bit more uh labor to take a pallet apart and straighten the boards and all that next I'm going to take my secret weapon here which is uh a trial star that I made we will be setting the saw at 45 degrees for the first cut so let's go ahead and do that and this is the saw that I'll be using it's a 12 inch Bosch with the articulating arm I had a few people ask me about this no I'm not sponsored and yes it is an awesome saw and I'm super happy I got this it also does some ridiculous angles including going up to 60 degrees but as mentioned earlier a lot of people don't have a saw that goes beyond 45 degrees so start by setting your saw at 45 degrees make the first cut as far over as you can to the end of the board and then I'll show you how far to measure for the spacing see you after making that initial 45 degree angle cut measure five and a half inches over and make your next cut at 45 degrees as well and you're going to do that five times until you have five pieces which is five pieces to one star and to make it a little bit easier what I like to do is find out where that five and a half inches is where I'm going to cut and set up this thing over here that's just a stop block so every time I slide this piece of wood over there I'm getting the same length each time a benefit of doing this is you can cut a whole bunch of them at the same time without having to mark down every five and a half inches so if you're making like 10 stars for example that's going to be 50 different pieces to mark down if you don't have a stop block so that can just you know make your life a little bit easier once you get your five pieces cut you're going to change the angle of your saw to 31.5 and I I know this from trial and error and from my secret weapon of course which I love to refer back to so that will be for the second cut and the third cut 31.5 degrees and to know where to cut that 31.5 degrees I measure this Edge which is 4 inches and 7 8 long basically you're measuring from the point to the corner here so that's four inches and 7 8 and then I go over here and I mark it over here at 4 inches and 7 8 and that's where I'll be making my first 31.5 degree angle cut and as you can see I've got a really nice stop block here it's just the leftover wood from cutting the 45 degree angles and I set it so that every time I put a piece in here that the saw will be at exactly 4 inches and 7 8 for each cut and uh by doing this the piece of wood stays in place and it's a lot safer than holding it with your fingers because your fingers would be getting way too close to Blade and it would be way too dangerous so this is what I like to do and sometimes I also use a piece of stick to kind of hold that in so let's go ahead and make those first cuts and uh or I guess it would be the second cut and then I'll show you how to do the third cut foreign looking shape so all we're going to do now is flip it over and make the third cut at 31.5 degrees and we're going to do that to all five pieces so I've got all five pieces cut here and it's really important to do a dry fit and see how the angles are lining up especially if you're planning on cutting like 10 Stars because if one star isn't lining up quite right then all 10 of your stars is not going to be correct and you're going to kind of recut them and it's going to be real pain in the butt now although you set your saw up right and all the angles should be correct sometimes you go to put it together and it's not quite lining up properly and you get a gap like that now there's several reasons that this can happen I find that one of the main reasons for me is that I'm using such a large saw so it's a 12 inch blade and you're going to have a lot more Flex going sideways when cutting with a larger blade as opposed to like a 10 inch blade the other thing is you're dealing with a lot of different angles and any minute um imperfection in the cut will basically magnify the error in the final product I hope that makes sense also when placing this piece in here it's not a perfect hold right so when I'm slicing there's the force of the blade is is pushing the wood this way and you are getting I don't know if you can see that but let me see here yeah you probably can't see it on camera but there's maybe like a half millimeter of movement in here so that will that's enough to throw your angle off just by a little bit and when you're when you're fitting five pieces together those minute errors add up to make a large gap in one of the pieces so how I fix that my saw was at 31.5 I changed it to something that looks like it equals maybe like 31.7 going this way and that will be just enough to to shave this corner off on every single piece but like by like maybe less than half a millimeter and I also slid this stop block over by about a millimeter if you just leave this in place and try to re-cut it with a different angle it doesn't quite work so you got to slide your SL your stop block over about a millimeter before you recut all the pieces so I'm going to go ahead and recut them and uh although I say the saw is set at 31.7 my angles that I'm getting in the end with all the you know the flex and movement and potential inaccuracies uh with the saw flex and all that um I'm probably still getting 31.5 because that's the math behind making the star where these angles are at 45 degrees as opposed to your traditional star being at 54 degrees anyhow this stuff can get pretty complicated but uh let's go ahead and recut those and see what happens actually before I start cutting I thought of one more reason why the angles can be off sometimes it's a very simple one sometimes you just get a little wood chip stuck in here or in here between the piece and and the fence and uh you know you might not notice it and that's enough to throw everything off so just thought I'd mention that okay all right I'm gonna go ahead and cut this and I'll just cut it off camera and then show you the end result so that actually went quite well I only had to shave off about half a millimeter or so and as you can see the final piece here slides in very nicely much better than before so that's just a pro tip there I wouldn't want you guys to cut a whole bunch of them and find out they don't quite fit and you know kind of freak out and get annoyed right because it can be very annoying when your angles don't fit so I hope those tips can help you out a little bit and for the finish I'm going to start by sanding all the pieces with a 150 grit sandpaper and then I'm going to apply my homemade vinegar stain to give it a similar look to this it will be slightly different as you saw at the beginning of the video because I do end up using a router to put a chamfer on these edges if you do want to see how I stained this star check out my channel there is a video on how I made this exact one here it's titled Texas Stars assembly and stain uh as for the stain itself I am planning on making a video on how to make that stain so you can have some of your own homemade stain so the first thing I do is Brew myself a cup of tea and that's what I'll be using for part one of the stain so I usually just put two tea bags in 500 mils of boiling water and then I let it Steep and cool down so it doesn't burn me and I'm just going to pour a little bit into this cup that's probably all I'm going to need probably a lot less than that actually and part two of the stain is this homemade vinegar stain that I made here so like I said I will make a video on how to make this and just pour a little bit of that in here so part one we start with the T and basically just take a regular paintbrush and brush it on together and now that I brushed the T on all five pieces I will switch to my vinegar stain and brush this on and I've put some gloves on so I don't stain my hands because this stuff can stain for quite a while so same process just wipe it on and you can see the uh the stain starts to react with the tea almost immediately there and uh yeah look at that and creates that weathered look which I really like and there we are all five pieces stained only took a few minutes the stain will darken as it dries so we just need to leave this sit overnight and uh see what it looks like in the morning 12 hours later and the stain is dry it didn't get as gray and weathered as I thought it would it's more of a brownish kind of color I do find that when using the stain with pallet wood like I did on this star I get more of that gray effect I feel like the stain penetrates the wood a lot deeper than when using new wood like I did here so I think I need to add a little bit more character on this so I'm going to pull out the torch and just a little propane torch one of these things here and I'm gonna see if I could just add a little bit more character to this so I actually really like the way that looks I'm happy I did that uh quite a difference from just the stained one and I think when all five pieces are done it's going to come together quite nicely so I'm going to go ahead and do the rest of them off camera and then I'm going to be setting up my router on my router table and chamfering the edges and the bit I'll be using is a 45 degree chamfering bit I actually ended up sanding each piece first with a 320 grit sandpaper and then I wiped it off with a rag and then went to the router foreign [Music] and now that the routering is complete I'm going to go ahead and glue it together put a backing on the back of it to make it stronger and staple some twine on the back that'll give us something to hang it with all right okay once you get it where you like it just leave it there and let it dry surprisingly the the parchment paper kind of holds it together when the glue leaks out the back of this and uh so it usually stays put by using wood glue rather than hot glue gun you have several minutes to adjust your star and line everything up whereas when you're dealing with the hot glue gun it dries within seconds and I find you just don't have enough time to line this thing up properly and uh it just throws everything off so I definitely recommend that you use the wood glue as opposed to the hot glue gun but really you can do whatever you want that's just how I do it so after about an hour the glue is dried the star can be a little bit delicate so be careful then I just flip it over use some more wood glue to glue the backing to the back of the star and this will give it a lot of strength this is just a 1 8 inch hardboard and uh I think I bought a four by eight sheet years ago for about 15 dollars not sure what it costs now and then I use my air gun to put some finishing nails in there if you don't have an air gun uh don't worry about it just put a weight on top and let the glue dry and it should be plenty strong and the next step is putting a twine loop on the back to hang your star I just use whatever cheap twine I can buy from the dollar store and I just staple it onto the back as you can see here I'm folding that bottom part up that gives it a lot more strength so it's not going to slide through those Staples and that's all done that ends up being really strong and there it is a Texas Star made with a miter saw that only goes to 45 degrees it actually turned out really good I think it's a really simple process of making these Stars I thought the previous video I made was the easiest way to make a star but I think this way is actually even easier probably going to go with this process from now on so I took a few notes while making these um let's just take a look at the size here so this is made with a 1 by 4 and with this process I think you can get a maximum of looks like 13 and a quarter across there and as for height it looks like 12 and three quarters and one thing I noticed when looking at the scraps let me just get my scrap wood here these were the scraps when cutting those uh five and a half inch pieces so I kind of feel like we could probably go a little bit smaller so let me just show you here so this would be the scrap pieces when cutting one of those five and a half inch lengths so you know because of the cost of lumber I'm trying to um be cognizant of my waist here so we could probably go to five and a quarter possibly smaller you could go smaller if you wanted a smaller Star as well so um probably not a big deal for some of you but uh I just thought I'd mention that um the total length of the 1x4 that I used for one of the Stars uh was 31 and a half inches um but yeah like I said I think we could probably reduce that so technically with one eight foot one by four you could make three of these and I also want to show you the difference from the Stars cut with 45 degree angles on the miter saw versus the 54. so the thing that I noticed is it kind of just looks fatter for lack of better vocabulary there this is the one cut with 45 sorry 54 degrees and it looks each piece looks kind of longer and more slender and if you stack them on top of each other you'll notice the main difference I'll just move my camera here which is with the 54 degrees the star goes straight across you can see the there's a straight line going here whereas the 45 degree one on the bottom you can see it kind of goes downwards so technically my previous video makes a more geometrically correct star but hey a star is a star right I think this one uh I actually kind of prefer the look of this one and technically it uses less wood because these pieces are shorter now let's compare it to this star here because this was also done with 54 degree angles on the miter saw and uh surprisingly enough like it looks quite a bit bigger but this section here if you measure from here to here is the same as here to here so you can see that making the Stars on a saw that goes to 54 degrees you get a larger star let's just measure that here so this one was 13 and what did I say 13 and a quarter across and this one is 15 and a half so substantial difference there in the end I don't know what size of a star is good for you I don't even know what I prefer but with the cost of wood I'd probably go with this one if I'm making stars with pallet wood I might go with this style if I only have a saw that goes to 45 degrees then I would go with this one so obviously everything kind of depends on everything anyways I am definitely rambling at this point so I'm going to go ahead and end this video uh if you like the video please subscribe and like and share and do all that fun stuff thank you

Channel: Savvy Builds

Views: 152,903

Keywords: wooden stars, wood stars, texas, texas star, how to make a star, make, build, wood, rustic, home decor, pallet wood, pallet art, diy, mitre saw, miter saw, scrap wood, project, art, pine, spruce, stras, star, handmade, 5 point star, 45 degree, 45 degree angles, How to cut angles, how to cut 45 degrees, Christmas decoration, decoration, crafts, Christmas star, ornament, Christmas woodworking projects

Id: -Z0zvfC8rV0

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2022