This Detail Saved THOUSANDS $$$!!! Nickel Gap & Beam Installation

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey what's up guys we are on our modern contemporary monster house I'm not sure what else to call it as you can see I've got a mountain of Poplar trim All Around Me here I've been slicing and dicing on a project over here that's coming out pretty well wanted to show you some details in this video for a lot of you guys who do this professionally you know that details can take absolutely forever especially those very simple contemporary details I've got this long foyer here and we've got nickel Gap tongue and groove that's going on the ceiling and you'll notice about every eight feet it changes directions and it's all cut at a 45 degree angle I've actually been kind of dreading this aspect of the project for months because I thought I was going to have to fit every piece perfectly tight to the wall and not use any scribe molding thankfully it was able to talk the architectural designer into using this so I'm part way through now I've got a lot of tips and tricks that I've used on this installation that I want to show you so first off I want to address the question I get asked a lot whenever I use the term nickel Gap this is actually what we call nickel Gap it's different from shiplap the profile is a little bit different some of you might remember a couple summers ago I actually did a house with two miles of nickel Gap just down the street here so this is the same profile same material except it's stain grade and it's in Poplar the biggest difference with nickel Gap is it's got a tongue and groove and then you'll notice on the front here you've got a gap that's a little bit thicker than a nickel and that's why they call it nickel Gap it's a little bit different from shiplap shiplap actually has a rabbit on the the ends and it overlaps which requires you to face nail it with nickel Gap when you're nailing this on the wall you just nail through the tongue and then whenever you put your next piece on it covers up your nail hole so you have no exposed Fasteners so before these big projects I always submit a quote or a bid for the job with what it's going to cost and it's a big deal for me to try to do this work in as cost-effective way as possible and sometimes the simplest details can add a ton of time to the project so a couple actually about a week ago we were on site and one of the designers wanted to take all of this nickel Gap and pre-stain it reason being then is if it expanded or contracted we didn't want to have a basically raw wood showing through on here so I actually mixed that idea and the reason was we've actually got this house completely acclimated the woods been in here for a while and if you look at the way this goes together it's only going to at most expand or contract probably a 30 second and that's just going to create a shadow line we're not going to have raw wood in my opinion so we didn't do that that saved me a ton of time otherwise we would have had to have had the painter come in pre-stain all these grooves and it just would have made the whole process a lot more difficult so whenever I have to bid these jobs and I've got a ton of cutting a ton of pieces to install the first question I ask myself is am I going to be able to batch cut these pieces meaning am I going to be able to set up a stop block and just cut a bunch of pieces at once to the same length and install them because that's going to greatly affect my labor if I have to measure and cut every single piece it's going to take a lot longer and if I have to measure and cut every single piece and have to tweak Some Cuts make recuts and things like that then it's really going to take a lot longer from a labor perspective so when I was look looking at this print I knew that this had the potential to take a ton of time because all of these pieces are intersecting with the wall at a 45 degree angle so long story short we were having a conversation a week ago going over the details for this ceiling and I try to be respectful but sometimes I have to push back a little bit whenever I realize that I can save a lot of money with a simple detail so this is a piece of scribe molding very basic about a strong eighth inch thick and this guy right here saved thousands of dollars of Labor just on this area the reason is is it allowed me to have the ability to batch cut these pieces and not have it be crucial if I'm not getting everything nice and tight so I can cut really fast and then I'll go back through and install a piece of scribe molding later if we actually come over here you'll notice in this area I've already got the Scribe mold installed and it looks fantastic so by not having to perfectly measure and cut every single piece it saved tons and tons of hours of Labor so batch cutting is going to save a ton of money ton of Labor right well how in the world are we going to batch cut these pieces if they're running diagonally at a 45 degree angle it's actually really simple let me show you how that works I was actually able to cut basically a whole section at a time like this without coming back up to measure anything to get started batch cutting all we need is one measurement to start off with so we're going to pretend a little bit that I'm starting here that this isn't already up we're going to start at the corner and work our way out so I've got my starting piece right here here now we can start batch cutting so we'll get started by pre-cutting a 45 on one end now we'll take our piece that we're starting with and we're going to put it in line here on one side if I'm not blocking that so that's in line and the nice thing is we've got forgiveness because we're going to use our piece of scribe molding and I'm going to make a line right there now I can come over here on this side and we'll batch cut the second piece okay so now our second piece is done now it's time for our third piece I don't even need to move the saw I'll just flip the board over get that one started now I'll grab my second piece do the same thing again line it up right there we'll come over here to the Long Point and then the short point on our next board Mark that again [Music] cut that one more [Music] flip line it up mark it all right there we go so here we go then I've got my starting piece here piece number two piece number three and piece number four everything's lined up again thankfully we will be able to use the piece of scribe molding over the end here so if we're not absolutely perfect it's no big deal but this is absolutely crucial if you want to get something like this done efficiently to be able to batch cut number one but then also to be able to have that measure of forgiveness by using a piece of scribe molding I've got nothing against trying to fit something like this perfectly tight I can do that if somebody wants to pay for it but we just have to educate the client the designer the Builder and let them know that hey this detail if we want to do it that way it's going to cost a lot more so each of these boxes has about 25 pieces whenever I price out a job like this I've learned to count the number of pieces that it's going to take and I know approximately how long it's going to take me to install to cut measure install a piece onto the ceiling if I can batch cut and there's some degree of flexibility with the measurement usually I can count on about 10 minutes per piece just as a general rule now if you take an install like this and I have to precisely cut every single piece measure it and cut it it's going to double the labor so it's not a matter of can a client like this afford to pay me to do that of course they can it's more of a question of can we take that labor and put it into another detail so they're getting more for their money so whenever I brought up the option of saying hey we could create a very simple scribe molding that's gonna go with the profile that we're installing it's going to look great and it's going to save a lot of money they're going to usually go for that because they would rather get more bang for their Buck than just spend an exorbitant amount of money on one detail just so they don't have to have a piece of scribe molding so you guys saw how fast I cut this now imagine this compared to going up on the scaffolding pulling out my tape measure measuring each piece at a diagonal which is difficult to get a precise measurement down cut up or you have to have a helper involved takes a ton of time so usually whenever I have details like this that I have to bid out that are just extremely intricate what ends up happening is I put a number on it a dollar number and it's going to seem super high to the Builder super high to the homeowner but the reality is with that number I'm not making probably even a profit on it sometimes I'm losing money and the homeowner thinks they're paying a ridiculous amount of money so whenever we value engineer these details we can meet in the middle where I can install it in a reasonable amount of time make a profit and the homeowner gets the best bang for their Buck hey guys so we're actually a couple days forward in the future right now and you'll notice that the beams are no longer here series of events transpired that caused the beams to be removed I'll cover that more towards the end of the video but there was one more thing I forgot to mention before in the when we shot this the other day this scribe molding there were a variety of reasons I pitched this that we wanted this and I forgot to mention a key Point why you want this scribe molding is because it gives you a perfectly straight edge for the painter to cut his paint too if you don't have that you have all these little notches in the nickel Gap and whenever it's stain grade it's really hard for the painter to cut a line and get a nice looking transition between the wall and the nickel Gap so putting that scribe molding on there gives you a nice straight line to cut to all right so enough talking about how to efficiently do this let's get to cutting some wood these are some beams and these are breaking up the sections where the direction changes on this shiplap we've got this broken up into sections you'll notice over here I've got a lot of forgiveness underneath these beams so that was another thing that helped me be able to production cut all these pieces really quickly so you'll notice here in our foyer area it's got our diagonal nickel Gap noted and then there are four beams one two three four and then down here they've got the specs on what I'm supposed to do for those beams so we've got a quarter inch rabbet detail on the bottom here and the beam is assembled flush across the bottom so I'll just be taking a piece of three quarter by three quarter blocking and putting it on here and that'll allow me to nail this Center piece up into the side beams so the reason we have this rabbit detail on our beams is because it actually matches the baseboard this is our baseboard and it's got a quarter inch by quarter inch dado on here so if we come down here and look at the print you'll see up here I've got my baseboard profile with the dado detail and then down here on my beam detail it's actually a rabbet but it still looks like that same dado that I have on my baseboard getting set up to make these beams I'll need to make a rabbet on one edge of the beam to do that I use this little fence that'll attach to the Dewalt compact router I keep this on my van all the time I actually use it quite often and then I've just got a mortising bit chucked into the router I'll take a gauge block and I want a quarter inch by quarter inch rabbet so I'll set my offset there at a quarter inch and then it's pretty handy because you can just flip it over and you can set your bit depth at a quarter inch as well so I've got some pieces pre-cut a little bit longer than what I know I'm going to need and whenever I select these I need to make sure that I'm accounting for any defects in the material so I'm grabbing it I'm looking at it if I've got any chunks out of any of the edges or anything I want that to be hidden and also a lot of times you'll have some planar chatter on one side of the board it's going to not sand out quite as easy so I want to make sure I'm putting that side towards the inside of the beam so this is my good side so I'm going to flip it over this is going to be my inside and I'll be running the rabbit detail on the inside here so I've got these positioned with the inside ugly side facing up I can grab my router and go ahead and put this rabbet on the edge so whenever you're going to be taking a quarter inch by quarter inch rabbit out you want to do that with a climb cut otherwise you're going to risk taking a chunk of material out so I want the bit to be going clockwise into the material that way the bits pulling the wood in and it's not going to rip a chunk off so we'll go clockwise with a bit down and then we'll push it back and that'll give us a really good cut foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign s for our side beams there's a lot of different ways we could get these cut I just grabbed my stair gauges here and I'm going to use those because a lot of times the drywall is tapered and it's got different things going on and this is going to make it really easy to get the length and the angle of the cut perfect all-in-one shot so to do that I'll just take this up here we'll slide it into place and then you just kind of loosen these push it in really firmly and tighten them up and then that'll conform to the angle of the drywall go ahead and do that on both sides I think this one's going to be good nope go ahead and move that as well again pushing nice and hard looks good there looks good here so I can use this to cut my side pieces now so while I was up there I didn't show it but I always try to mark an r or an L on either side to keep straight which side is left and right so I don't get it flipped around whenever I'm doing this so we'll just align the top of the gauge which is the ceiling and I can go ahead and Mark that and I'll carefully go down here to the other end trying to make sure I don't move it and we'll mark that as well so I want to match up my shadow line from my blade onto the pencil Mark and you'll also see I've got my two pieces stacked on top of each other I'm going to cut these at the same time just be careful not to move them so that looked pretty good now I'm going to be careful to squeeze this together and slide it down cut it's probably getting a little long all right so next I want to match the angle of the salt of that pencil line but before I cut these I want to just feel down there and make sure that those are still flush and they are so I'll go ahead and cut this now I can tell you that unfortunately one of these has a bow in it and I think they're actually going the opposite directions because I wasn't paying attention to that I can figure that out by flipping this over in putting them together and actually they're decently straight nothing too bad there so we should be fine whenever we put these up on the ceiling these are about seven foot long so I'll probably still have to scribe them to the ceiling this is one of those things where do as I say not as I do comes in comes into play you'll notice we just don't have a lot of room in here with all this trim our table saw ended up right here and there's a very expensive patio door behind it which is not a good idea so I've actually been opening up this glass door whenever I want to rip stuff you don't want to have glass like this behind your table saw so we'll get this moved here soon but uh for now I just kind of have to have it right here thank you even when I'm doing paint grade work it's still very important to sand stuff five millimeter stroke on this ETS 155 makes quick work on Poplar [Music] now if we get up close here you'll notice we've got some very sharp edges with some splintering going on here that's not great if you want a really good paint job you just want to take a piece of sandpaper 120 grit and just soften those edges real quick doesn't take long but makes all the difference in the world for the final finished product the next thing we're going to do is put some blocking on the inside of these sides of the beam the reason for that is we want this bottom piece to come across perfectly flush whenever we install that to do this we'll just use a three-quarter by three quarter nailer piece that we'll nail on here I do like to glue this in it's probably not necessary but it just ensures that things aren't going to move around maybe we won't get some paint cracks and stuff like that so just a little bit of glue smooth it off with my finger I want to make sure that I'm in an inch on both ends so that I don't run into my blocking that I've got up on the wall and then I just create a little gauge block here that I'll use to get this in the perfect position so start this off right there and I'll just keep moving down the line and what this gauge block is going to do is it's ensuring that the thickness of my bottom board which will go right here is just going to be perfect so that's all I'm doing foreign Pro tip before you start nailing this on make sure you've got inch and a quarter Nails in your nail gun I can't count how many times I've grabbed my 18 gauge nailer and had inch and a half Nails in it and I've nailed the piece on only to flip it over and realizes that I've got tiny little nails sticking out everywhere so you only have to do that a couple times until you learn all right guys so you always hope you won't have to scribe it but you end up always having describe it got these up there there was kind of a hump in the ceiling so the biggest key is you want to get it in position tack it in place and make sure that your ends are Level across that way whenever you scribe both sides you're taking the exact same amount off of both sides and it goes up the same on both sides and stays level so I'm just using my easy scribe gonna just do a pencil line on here and probably rip this off on the table saw just go along there like so not a big deal the other side alrighty okay so I've got my scribe cut cut cut and then I went ahead and softened that top Edge I like to do that whenever I'm mating a painted material up to a stained material so I don't have that super sharp edge so now we'll just kind of go in at an angle here hopefully everything looks good nail it in the center then I'm just going to put a nail on both ends I'll come around and do the same thing on the other side as well trying not to damage drywall too much slinging stuff around here foreign just need to get the measurement for my bottom piece here I'm going to take my laser I'll try and remember to link this in the notes it's the lake a disto D2 I got 83 and 7 8 strong so a little tip whenever you're fitting parts of basically the center part of a bean beam in I like to ease the edges real nice that way it'll slip up into place a lot easier than if you leave sharp edges so at this point we're ready to install this I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to put a little bit of glue down both sides just so everything stays connected really well after I nail it in place because it is paint grade that glue line is going to want to crack up way up in that rabbit you won't really see it but the glue will probably help combat that cracking a little bit so just gonna smooth that out we'll go ahead and nail this in place okay up we go hopefully I got my length right that's a little tight our drywall tapers down I think right there so I'm going to switch ends and try and put this end in first I'm like go go in a little bit easier yep so basically what was happening right there is this corner bead was tilted out so it wasn't allowing it to go in so that looks really good don't even need to clamp it together and just squeeze it together by hand make sure it's pushed all the way up and I'll add a couple of 15 gauge just to nail it home completely nailing here on that blocking that I had we'll squeeze this together thank you out of nails so guys we're all done with this beam it finishes off really nice nice and flat all the way across the bottom here this dado that I have here or rabbit it serves a couple purposes one it cohesively integrates with the rest of the trim package here I've got the baseboard we have this detail on a few different parts of the trim package but also if I wanted to make this beam flush all the way around I'm I'm going to deal with a hairline crack here so by creating this rabbet or this dado look here it removes that issue of expansion and contraction and it's just a nice looking feature on the beam so basically we shot this video a couple of days ago and I had these beams installed they looked fantastic I was really happy with them was eating supper that night got a text message basically saying hey those were supposed to be stain grade beams and I had used finger jointed Poplar I don't know how I could have made that mistake I immediately doubted myself and figured I screwed up and so the first thing I did the next morning I came in here and I ripped them out and was planning on putting stain grade beams in homeowner ended up wanting a different look anyways but if we go over to the print over here I was telling cameraman Aaron about my situation the next day and he said well the print did say they were supposed to be painted so if you look down here we've got our beam detail right here and you'll see that it says painted materials so I ended up being off the hook on that wasn't my screw-up after all still going to get paid for doing it but uh just one of those things that happens in construction so I'm happy with how it looks now I think it looks great either way but a little bit of drama on this one so hope you guys have enjoyed the video I'm going to keep rocking and rolling I've got a lot of this scribe molding to trim out around this room but it's looking absolutely fantastic let me know if you've got any questions in the comments we'll have a lot more videos coming from this house so stay tuned [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Insider Carpentry - Spencer Lewis

Views: 61,335

Keywords: insider carpentry, finish carpentry, nickel gap, nickel gap millwork, beam installation, nickel gap ceiling, tongue and groove installation, t and g installation, ceiling beams, ceiling beam installation

Id: D84rb4Mc0LE

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023