The Surprising Truth About Working with Scrap Wood

hey this is Chris at Forest furniture and in today's video actually plan ahead for once and it almost completely ruins the project I'm starting to notice a repeating pattern in some of my more recent videos in one I'll get a Big Slab to build some kind of big piece of furniture and then in the next I'll use the leftovers to make something a little smaller the leftovers from these big Elm slabs became a desk the leftovers from the walnut dining table became a hall table and in the last video we used two Walnut slabs to build a big L-shaped desk so to keep the streak alive obviously today I'm going to have to use the off cuts from that one to build something new in this video now I guess I subconsciously must have finally picked up on this trend because in the past I would always finish whatever big project I was working on and only after uploading my video would I walk out into the shop see an offcut sitting there and think to myself hey I bet I could build something from that but this time literally the day after I rough cut the slabs for the L desk I threw together a quick form and got this chunk going actually I'm looking at the date that this clip was recorded right now and it was December 2nd 2022. and there it sat while I built that entire other desk celebrated the holidays ringing a New Year got divorced remarried had three more kids I got a haircut it was a busy five weeks all right I might have made some of that stuff up but anyway I really did get a way earlier start on this one compared to how I normally work which you would think would be a good thing right but as you're going to see pretty soon it backfired big time all right that sounded way too dramatic I don't want to string you along so I'm just going to come out with it right now basically I'm an idiot and I did maybe the dumbest thing that I've ever done at least woodworking related and that is I created a top that's essentially a mirror image of what I needed and wanted it to be now in my defense a minute ago I talked about how I got an early jump on this slab and how much time had passed between when I poured the epoxy and when I actually de-molded things but what I didn't mention is that during that five week period I built the entire base for this table actually real quick here's the exact moment that I realized I messed up so while I was building the base which you'll see in a couple minutes the slab was pretty much out of sight and out of mind and here's why that's important so if you saw the last video on the L-shaped desk you'll remember that the slabs had these huge shallow spots on one side and that pretty much dictated what had to be the underside of the top well had I been thinking about that I could have avoided everything that you're about to see so I guess this is kind of a perfect storm situation on one hand you have the fact that I'm an idiot and then you pair that with the fact that the shape of this top is asymmetrical and you got a disaster Bruin actually to try to make myself feel better I was trying to think if I've ever built another asymmetrical top and I don't think that I have built rectangles circles even shapes like this but those are all symmetrical honestly most of the time that I build anything I'm not really 100 certain what the top side of the top is going to be until pretty late into the build I mean I usually have an idea but for the most part I kind of take things as far as I can and then I choose the prettier side as the top that didn't make me feel better I still feel like an idiot but whatever that's the problem so now let's see if I can fix it all right so I knew I was gonna need to remove a ton of material so I took it down to Street tree Revival and threw it up on their wood whiz to make short work of it and we started by removing the least amount of material that we could from what will eventually be the underside then we flipped it over and now you can see the big issue which is this huge Lake of epoxy on what should be the top side and pretty much the only solution at this point was to just keep surfacing it until all the epoxy was removed and we were left with wood the problem with this as you might have guessed is that now I have a slab top that's only about 5 8 of an inch thick which is not ideal for a slab top and actually before we go any further it might help to quickly explain what this piece is so I'm calling it a rich person's side table and that's because as a side table it's kind of gigantic for example in a normal sized house for normal people like me you can see that it's way too big to use as a side table so a rich person's side table and for a normal person maybe a coffee table or some sort of corner table I'll get the solution so the obvious way to go to make something thicker would be to add more wood to the bottom the problem with that is slabs are pretty unique so the chances of the woods color matching is not very likely that is unless as my buddy Liam pointed out to me you actually have a second off cut from a sister slab not only did he drop that bomb of knowledge but he also brought me this monster birdhouse what a guy anyway so now the next problem to deal with is the sister slab offcut is smaller than the top needs to be and the solution here might be a little counter-intuitive but since I can't make the extra slab any bigger I'm going to make it smaller by cutting it into a bunch of chunks and then by arranging all of the pieces in specific spots the grain orientation should match and from any angle other than below eye level with the top hopefully I can get it to look like one thick chunk so not a perfect solution but the best I had and honestly I highly doubt that many people who see this table will ever know that it's Hollow on the underside except that probably 99.99 of people who see this table will see it in this video and very few people will see it in real life so I guess I take that back basically everybody's gonna know that it's Hollow on the underside all right crisis averted we've cleared every hurdle right of course not so this solution should give us pretty much the best match in terms of color that we can possibly get but it's literally impossible that the grain is going to match up so basically you're gonna see a very visible line where the two slabs meet it's unavoidable so rather than trying to avoid it let's just steer or lean into it there's a saying I think maybe it originates from the world of programming or technology and that is it's not a bug it's a feature basically means that something might seem like a mistake but it actually exists for a good reason and it was created on purpose like autocorrect I'm sure we've all been frustrated at some point in our lives by autocorrect but it's there for a reason I swear if my wife tells me to feed the ducking cat one more time duck king cat what even is that like a cat that's king of all ducks anyway even though nowadays that term is mostly used in programming or Tech it definitely applies to physical Real World objects too probably my favorite example is the think small marketing campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle it's considered one of the most successful and influential advertising campaigns of all time and was based on the idea of emphasizing The Beatles small size and feel efficiency as selling points rather than trying to compete with larger and more powerful American cars being small wasn't a bug it was a feature but anyway what I'm trying to do here is gas myself up into believing that everything I'm doing is actually improving the table and that no compromises were made and it's not working all this fixing aside if I could just go back in time I would just not make a slab with the wrong side up so I'll admit it it's not a feature just like the Volkswagen it's still just a bug you know I'm realizing that so far this entire video has basically been me highlighting how terrible of a woodworker I am but I swear I'm actually not that bad I mean I don't think there's ever been a project where I haven't made at least one mistake but this one is definitely out of the ordinary you know normally it's pretty small stuff and the reason I mentioned this is because I don't know if you know this but I sell woodworking plans and obviously if I'm going to teach people how to build things like this dresser or this desk or this whatever this is would probably be helpful if I clarified that I'm not a total buffoon So to that end I want you to know that I'm not a total buffoon and if you're looking to build any of those pieces or this coffee table or this chair and ottoman we can help you do that and I'll throw a link in the description so you can check it out now I'm going to stop myself from saying that the table top is looking good at this point but relative to where we were a couple minutes ago the table's looking pretty good at this point there's still a lot of touching up to do to really make it pop but at least it's far enough along that we can start building the base of the table so I'll be the first to admit that the base of this table is pretty simplistic and I would say that I have the most fun when I'm building more extreme pieces stuff like this and also admit that it didn't help that while I was building this piece I was watching Sean build probably the coolest thing that he's ever made where he got to basically throw the book at the piece so definitely go get subscribed to his channel so that you can check out that video that said I think that this piece that I'm building here does have something going for it that most pieces I build don't and it's something that could really be beneficial to you so if you're already an expert woodworker feel free to tune me out but if you're either an aspiring woodworker a beginner or even intermediate I think that you'll find the next few minutes very eye-opening and that's because as you're going to see this piece requires a lot of technique but it's all very simple to understand conceptually the entire thing is essentially two panels and a floating shelf but if you can see and understand how it all comes together which you will I think it kind of pulls the curtain back and will help you wrap your head around pieces that look much more complex but really aren't now the first thing I'm doing is probably the simplest of all and that's making my three panels in fact it's so simple I'm not going to bother insulting You by explaining it your eyes will tell you more than my mouth ever could and actually more on that topic later but I want to take a risk and do something that goes against pretty much every one of my Natural Instincts and that is tell you about something that I've been working on in the background for a couple months I'm the kind of person who plays things pretty close to the chest I don't really like to mention anything I'm working on until it's basically done but I've been working on designing a product and we're getting really close to the manufacturing phase so I feel like it's become real enough that I can mention it all right so what is it a mechanical pencil and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you're going to need this pencil you don't it's not going to make you any better at anything it's a pencil but the reason that I wanted to make it is whenever I'm being creative I like being surrounded by objects that inspire me and make me happy and a mechanical pencil is something that I reach for literally hundreds of times a month so it just kind of felt like a no-brainer to me so I wanted this to be a really nice pencil that you can use in the workshop and the look I was going for is chunky ergonomic and beautiful so I drew up a bunch of Concepts and landed on these two a square design and a triangular design and after prototyping both out of wood the square felt better to me now the real version will not be made out of wood it'll be solid brass American made very high end very high quality and I know this is not something that I'm Gonna Get Rich doing but it's a passion project and kind of a bucket list item that I wanted to get to experience so we're getting very close to going into production and this is going to be a very limited run at least to start so if you think you might want to grab one I'm going to put a link at the top of the description that you can click that way I'll be sure to notify you the second that we go live and thank you for indulging me on this and listening to me ramble okay so the only special thing that I did there was I split one of the boards down the middle that way when I join them in a miter the grain will flow around the corner that's what this triangle is helping me keep track of and then to keep with the theme of easy to understand next I'm going to cut a 45 degree bevel on the inside corner of my two panels so that I can eventually glue them together into a 90 degree corner not always the easiest thing to actually do but definitely easy to understand now before I actually glue them together next I need to cut a dado or Groove that our Shelf is going to go into and the tricky part here is that it needs to go all the way from the miters that we just cut but stop somewhere in the middle of the panel so rather than cutting it on a table saw we're going to use a router lately I've been ordering Lumber online which has led to people sending me a lot of questions and me saying that I would talk about it in a video so here is me keeping my promise to those people I've bought Lumber three different ways first is where you go to the lumber yard and pick through the piles and I would say that this has the potential to be the best but also the worst of the three if you have to get really specific pieces it's probably the best but it's rare that you're going to be the first person picking through the piles so you're often buying stuff that other people didn't buy and the other two ways are kind of similar and kind of different and that is will call and ordering online so with both of these options you don't get to pick specific pieces but in my experience overall the quality of the wood is nicer I'd say that online is a little bit more expensive but they're a lot more catered towards serving smaller purchasers like me and probably you obviously this is going to vary from place to place but whenever I do will call I kind of get the feeling that I'm bugging them because I'm ordering such small quantities you know I'm building one dresser not doing custom finished carpentry on a hotel and since they're really set up for larger quantities ordering for small amounts can be really inefficient take this piece for example for these two panels I wanted seven pieces that are two inches thick eight inches wide and 18 inches long but that's not how you buy lumber you order using something called board feet which is really confusing at first and another topic for another day but for now just know that the pieces that I want would come out to 14 board feet so with will call if I order 14 board feet I don't really know what they're gonna send me they could send me two boards that are 63 inches long which is 14 board feet but would only allow me to get six of the seven pieces I needed but if you order online you can get really specific with what you want and order something like this so the wood is more expensive but you don't have to over buy by as much which kind of offsets things so I'm not going to say that one is the best it honestly kind of depends on your personality and what your local suppliers are like I just said that I would share my experiences and those are my experiences and they're not a sponsor but I'll throw a link in the description to the place that I've been using online in case it helps anybody all right this is probably going to be the most confusing part of the build so I'm going to talk about what I'm doing in a lot more detail and that is making and installing the shelf so if you only remember one thing from this video This Is It order of operations that's one of the key differences between a mediocre and a good woodworker hold everything else constant and if you just change the order you do things in you can make life way easier on yourself alright so the Shelf is going to be this quarter circle shape with a heavy round over and it's going to slot into the grooves that we cut on the panels a minute ago so the first step is cutting the Shelf nice and square that way the inside Corners are going to match up nicely with the inside faces of the vertical panels that we already glued together then I'm going to Mark about three quarters of an inch along the two inside corners and this is where we need to create the tongues that are going to go into the grooves on the panels and I'm also going to draw an arc just to help myself keep track of things now I'm going to use my router table again to cut rabbits on the top and bottom faces of both inside edges to actually create the tongues and I'm just going to work my way up slowly until I've got a nice tight fit and since the grooves are stopped I need to cut the tongues shorter to match by the way if you found that last little section where I stopped talking to be relaxing I just created a new channel where I don't talk at all just nice relaxing woodworking so if you're into that give it a look after this okay this is where things start getting confusing all of that order of operation stuff comes into play right here you remember that the Shelf is supposed to be a quarter Circle but basically I need to cut part of the circle before gluing up and part of it after so we're going to shape two-thirds on either edge of the shelf and leave the middle portion shaped like this for now so I'm going to go through the entire process of flush trimming and cutting in our round over and while I'm doing that we can enjoy a few more seconds of nice calm relaxing routing here this will make it better okay so why did we do this because next we're going to glue our Shelf into place and in order to get really good clamping pressure on it and a clean joint I want to have those flat spots foreign and then a few hours later when it's dry we're going to run through the entire process again to shape the middle third so basically you could shape the whole shelf before but it would be a lot harder to do a good clamping job on the glue up or you could shape the entire thing after but then it's going to be pretty much impossible to get your router on the last three inches or so of your shelf now I'm sure somebody could come up with a fancy way to shape this last little bit but there's no need when you can just use order of operations all right so we're back at the top and as you'll recall the underside of this thing's pretty much a poop show but I'm still going to try to make the top look as good as I can so here I'm doing all of the touch up work needed on the wood and epoxy and that includes patching wood filling holes in the epoxy with either CA glue or this hot melt wax stuff and while I'm doing that I've got a question for you and I purposely waited until late in the video to ask this because if you're still around at this point you're in a self-selecting group of people who I think really care so here it is at the top of the video I mentioned how I'm in this pattern of build a big project do something with the scraps big project something with scraps and so on so do you like these scrap projects or would you prefer to see me well scrap them for lack of a better word and just stick with the bigger builds actually before you answer that and speak of the devil these aluminum plates are scraps from the desk as well just like the slop basically if you saw that one I made these plates with six mounting points and then realized that two of them would be impossible to get to so I just cut off those sections of the aluminum and well here they are nothing goes to waste okay back to the question so I know the knee-jerk reaction would be to say keep doing both because the thinking is more is more the thing is a lot of these projects take almost as long as the big stuff so if my bandwidth is basically a new video about once a month that means over the course of the year I'm foregoing doing a lot of the bigger stuff by doing these smaller pieces so on one hand I like the design Challenge and I like the idea of things not going to waste and I guess at the end of the day the real question is assume I'm only going to put out 12 videos this year would you be happier seeing six big projects and six small projects all big projects nine and three I guess what's the sweet spot and I know a lot of times people respond to this stuff and say something like don't worry what people think just do you man and I get it and I agree with that to an extent but at the same time if 95 of my viewers agreed that they'd rather only see the big builds because they enjoy those more then I'd be pretty foolish not to listen to that and let's be real if it weren't for you watching me this would be a hobby instead of a career so I really do want to get a better sense of what people like that way I can continue to grow and improve okay I think that pretty much sums up the question so think on it and let me know in the comments and also regardless of what sized projects you prefer thank you for taking an interest in my work no matter how big or small and if you listen to all that and you're still not subscribed that's your choice but I'd appreciate it if you clicked that little button and help me hit a million we're getting close okay so here I've got an off cut from the top and three off cuts from the base and I'm figuring out what color of Rubio Monaco to use so on rockler's website they have like I don't know 15 different colors but I've only used two the pure which is the no color added version and charcoal which is the close to Black Version and the reason I'm not just using one everywhere is because Walnut slabs tend to be a little bit more red and walnut hardwood that you get from a lumber yard tends to be a little bit more yellow in other words they don't match so I know that I'm going to use pure on the top and on the base I'm trying different mixtures of charcoal and pure and ended up going with the 100 charcoal which on camera just kind of looks like I'm painting it black but in real life it's quite a bit deeper and more nuanced looking for the top I'm just going to do my normal process with two coats of finish and then I'm actually going to take things a step further by adding a nano finish on top so until a few months ago I hadn't heard of Nano finishes that said for the past five years every 24 months or so we take our cars to get ceramic coated which is kind of like waxing your car on steroids and if you're at all familiar with that I think that's a good way to think about Nano finish on furniture it'll give the piece a slightly deeper Sheen but more importantly a longer lasting and more protective top coat so I bought some of this N3 stuff to see what it was all about and the plan was to do this the day after putting my finish on so I pulled up the application guide and then Blacktail told me this the first thing you need is a finish that is completely cured already for Rubio you needed to cure for at least one week before applying the N3 yeah that's what I thought so basically that was on January 26th and this video needs to be out on the 31st so it had to delay things by at least a week which means I'll share my full thoughts and opinions in the next video but for this one when you see the beauty shots in a minute just imagine that it has a bit more luster and a lot more protection I guess I've been building furniture for about 10 years now and I don't think I've ever built a single piece where I haven't messed something up usually it's little stuff some tear out here a glue stain there that kind of thing but this one was different and hopefully a unique enough situation that it doesn't happen again but just in case I guess the bright side is now I have a reminder so anytime I think I'm feeling too confident or I feel like things are going too well I can just take a look at this bright Maple ring so that I can remind myself Chris you truly are an idiot thanks for watching and if you don't want to hear me talk bad about myself go watch one of those silent videos same projects but a very different vibe see you in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 646,631

Keywords: black walnut table, diy epoxy, diy epoxy table, ecopoxy, epoxy art, epoxy river table, epoxy table, how to make epoxy table, how to make river table, liquid glass epoxy, resin table, river table, slab furniture, total boat epoxy, live edge table, live edge slab table, dining table, river dining table, slab dining table, epoxy dining table, modern dining table, expensive wood, bookmatched wood, river table epoxy, foureyes furniture, blacktail studio, Coffee Table

Id: FUOWftCS7-w

Length: 25min 54sec (1554 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023