WHEN THINGS GO WRONG! Making Scaffold Board Dining Table & Bench Seats

[Music] in this video I'm going to be making a dining table and a pair of seat benches using some salvaged scaffold boards as a commission for a client the client sent me a few photos of the kind of thing he wanted and also some dimensions to work to this video was shot about a month ago when I was based at my old workshop and it was the last project I did before moving and unfortunately it wasn't a successful project which is a bit of a shame stay tuned to find out why I bought some 8 foot long reclaimed scaffold boards from a seller on Facebook marketplace and these were too long to get out of the door so the window seemed like the best option the seller said that these has been kept indoors in the dry and I wanted to see what the moisture level was of the wood so I checked with my moisture meter and it was showing 8% which is surprisingly dry that means it's ready to work with straightaway which is great I spent some time choosing the best bits of the board's for the tabletop and the bench tops and they marked up where I wanted to make some cuts to get the pieces down to a more manageable size in my small workshop and then I made the cuts with the circular saw the scaffold boards were all cupped pretty badly which is pretty normal for scaffold boards that have been allowed to dry out the best and quickest way to resolve this would have been to plane the concave side first to get a perfectly flat face and then thickness playing the convex side to flatten it and get the thickness nice and consistent the problem that I had though was that these balls were 8 foot in length and I just didn't have the infeed and outfeed space to be running these through my planer and doing it by hand with a hand plane would be possible but quite time-consuming so I decided that I would flatten it after I assemble it instead before I could assemble it I made sure to orient the board so that the grain pattern alternated arching downwards then upwards then downwards then upwards this will help to keep the tabletop flat over time as the wood expands and contracts with seasonal changes once I was happy i mucked up the faces with a triangle so that I could refer to this later to make sure that the boards were in the right order to get the edges of the board straight I'm going to use the track saw normally I'd use the table saw for this but again I don't have in feed or out feed space to be able to cut the length of the sports so it's much easier to bring the sword to the workpiece instead I just trimmed off a few millimeters from each of the edges that would be later joined together with glue to join the boards I'm going to be using dominoes and here I'm marking up where I wanted to add them double nodes aren't needed for strength here would glue on its own would be more than strong enough but I'm using Domino's to help keep the board's aligned with one another a biscuit joiner would do exactly the same job but I don't like my biscuit joiner as I find it to be an accurate so I reach for the Domino instead I used 50 millimeter by eight millimeter Domino's here and applied glue before pushing them in place one of the things I really like about the Domino is that it takes all of the stress out of glue ups whenever I use it I find that everything just goes together nicely without any hassle I added parallel clamps both underneath and on top of the tabletop so that the clamping pressure was applied evenly on both sides and when I ran out of clamps that were long enough I doubled up to shorter ones which is pretty easy to do with these parallel clamps I've got a nice bead of glue squeeze out at all of the joints I could then follow exactly the same process of straightening edges with the track saw and joining pulls together for the bench seat tops which comprised of just two of the scaffold boards for each bench after waiting for the glue to dry I took the tops outside in the garden where I had a bit more space to work and first I cut the tops to their final lengths using a speed square to guide the track saw the next job was to get the tops flat and as you can see from this shot this would take a fair bit of effort to do I'd start by removing the high points on both sides of the tabletop I marked them up with a pencil so I knew which areas to remove material from and for this I used my cordless hand planer first I took some heavy quite rough passes removing about two millimeters of material with each pass and then I adjusted the planer to take more shallow cuts so that I could start to get things smooth I needed to get the tops as flat as possible but I also wanted to try and retain some of that rustic character on the boards so it was a bit of a judgment call on how far to take this and I'm using the edge of my tracks or track to check for flatness down the length of the top here you can see that the top face is now pretty flat not perfect but flat enough and next I could flip the top over to do exactly the same on the underside of the tabletop removing all of the high spots to remove any marks left by the planer I reached for the belt sander next and this heiko key belt sander is new to me I started at 80 grit sanding diagonally to the wood grain to help flatten the top and even out any ridges and then I sanded with the direction of the grain at 120 grit to get it nice and smooth belt Sanders remove a lot of material very quickly and you can see that from how full the dust bag was after sanding just one face of the tabletop next I swapped to a 120 grit sanding disc and sanded with my random orbit sander to remove all of the sanding marks left by the belt sander i sanded the edges a bit too but tried to leave some of the character and then I did a final sanding at 180 grit I need to stain the wood to get the desired color but because I'm working with pine here I was conscious there has a habit of soaking up the stain unevenly so some areas get darker than others and you get kind of a blotchy effect that looks a bit rubbish here's an example of what I mean by that so I decided to apply a shellac sanding sealer first before applying the stain which would help to seal the wood and stop that blotchiness occurring that just got rubbed on with a cotton cloth and I'm applying it as a very thin coat trying to apply as little as possible once the shellac dried I sanded at 240 grit sardine nib and I thought this would also help the stain to penetrate the wood after blowing away the dust I started to apply the stain and I'm using a walnut dye here once that was dry I then decided to add acrylic spray varnish as a hard-wearing topcoat that would help to protect the wood from hot plates and wet glasses I then D nipt brushed away the dust and applied a second coat I left it to dry and when I came back a little later I gave it a bit of a scratch test with my fingernail and I was shocked to find that the finish just lifted right off so what I think happened here is that the shellac sealed the wood too much which meant that the stain couldn't penetrate the wood properly so both the stain and the varnish that I applied after was just sitting on top of the shellac which made it kind of fly Koff with very little resistance this was a stupid mistake on my part I really should have tested out the finish on a test piece rather than doing the entire tabletop and benches perhaps I should have diluted the shellac down before applying I don't know but it was silly of me to try something that I haven't tried before on a big Commission project like this one so there was only one thing for it I had to sand the finish back down to bare wood fortunately though because the finish hadn't bonded properly to the wood actually came off quite quickly and easily so for my next attempt I decided to mix the stain with some shellac and I'm using a different type of shellac this time because I'd run out of the shellac sanding sealer that I used previously and I couldn't buy any locally at the time because it was out of stock I'd also run out of walnut stain so I bought what I could find locally which was a dark oak stain it was a pretty similar color and then I could crack on with the job because I was in a hurry to get this one done because of my impending move and I really needed to get this one delivered so that I could start packing away all of my tools this time I tested out the finish on a scrap piece and it worked really well none of the flaking issues this time around so I went ahead and applied it and I was really happy with the finish the shellac and stain left a really flat finish that looked really good in sunlight and there was no blotchiness either so the shellac and stained together seemed to work great before I got around to having a top coat of varnish the table legs arrived by delivery and I'll talk more about those later in the video so I set up the table onto the legs with a couple of clamps holding things in place because the client asked for a couple of photos to see how it was looking and this is where things went from bad to worse because after sending the clients and photos unfortunately he wasn't happy with the color of the wood I got straight on the phone to him and he explained a little more about what he wanted he used words like almost colorless natural less saturated colors to describe how he wanted the wood to look he also mentioned possibly trying out blackening the wood with a torch so there was only one thing for it more sanding i sanded back to bare wood again I tried out multiple different combinations of finishes working with what I had to hand but also popping out to places like screw fix to buy some different stains to try out I also tried using a blowtorch to childr would followed by applying the stain and I thought that looked pretty good but after taking photos of lots of different combinations of finishes and sending them to the clients I got the impression that he really wasn't keen on any of them so I was pretty stressed out by this point I had quoted the client for two days of labor and I had already spent four days working on it and that's without the time it would take to install and fit the legs and they still haven't got a decision on what finish to use eventually the finish that the client settled on came from lots of experimentation on my part what I did was I applied a dark oak stain directly onto the wood which did result in some blotchiness but the client didn't seem bothered about that so that's what I went ahead with and I followed that up with lightly charring the stained wood with a blowtorch and that helped to remove some of the saturation from the color in the stain it went from having a slightly red tint to having more of a gray almost greenish tint to it it was a pretty subtle change but honestly I was just keen to get this one done I never wanted to sand anything ever again at this point I then applied a top coat of water-based varnish for a hard-wearing finish and because the wood had some knots and imperfections in it I was careful to remove any excess varnish that pulled up inside those with a bit of tissue and finally a rub down the benches using some formal steel wool and a tiny amount of Clare fry wax just to help lubricate the steel wool this will help to remove any Sheen left by the varnish as the client wanted a matte finish finally I could look at installing the legs these are called trapezium legs and I bought them from a supplier via eBay they seemed really well-made but I had one concern with them which was that the small fixing holes wouldn't allow the wood to expand and contract with seasonal changes so I decided to drill out the holes wider using a step cutting bit making the holes into slots would have been an even better solution but it would have taken more time which I didn't have so I set off on this the legs also came with some screws but I didn't want to use them I wanted more of a solid fixing because these tables and benches are going to get dragged around the floor from time to time so after marking up the positions of the holes I drilled out some pilot holes for some threaded insert nuts they're easy to fit using an allen key and I'll show you how I secure the legs shortly the client asked me to install everything to a storage lock up close to his house as he was away traveling at the time this 2.2 meter tabletop and bench seats was a really tight fit in the back of my van and had to go in diagonally with the front seat bent forward I did originally think that this was going to need to go on the roof rack I wrapped the legs in some towels just to protect them in transit I also put some cardboard down onto the concrete floor just to protect the paintwork on the legs I secured the legs using some m8 bolts and washers and they form a really secure fixing and then I used some furniture polish which has some beeswax in it to clean it up and it also leaves a really nice smell which i think is a nice touch to give a good first impression when the client sees it so what initially looked like a simple project ended up being a really challenging one everything was great up until the problems I had with the finishes I chose but that was my fault first I shouldn't have experimented with finishes on a commission without trying out on a test piece first that was very silly secondly I should have made more of an effort to clarify exactly what color and finish the client wanted before even getting started and thirdly I shouldn't have taken on a commission like this just before moving home it just made the whole job unnecessarily stressful this should have been a two day or fifteen hour job but I ended up spending about thirty five hours on this one in total including the time it took to install not only that but I also wasted a lot of time and money going to get various finishes like shellac which isn't cheap and from wood stains and I was limited to those that I could buy in my local area because I didn't have time to buy them online and wait for them to be delivered in the end though the client was actually really happy with it and that's nice but the downside is that I made quite a big loss on this one because the client wasn't prepared to pay any more than the amount that I originally quoted him perhaps I should have been more persistent at least to recoup some of the money that I spent on additional finishes to achieve the look that he wanted but to be honest I just wanted to draw a line under this one move on and get on with packing things up and moving home hopefully you can learn something from my mistakes I know that I've learned a lot on this one this was the second of two recent Commission's that were really challenging for different reasons the other project being the walnut dart board cabinet which was also very difficult so by this point to be honest I felt completely exhausted and fed up with doing these types of one-off custom Commission's when you're working on a job for our clients and things don't go according to plan it really does take all of the fun and enjoyment out of woodworking and it just becomes a job so at the moment I really just want to work on something that I want to make but unfortunately that doesn't pay the bills I won't be working on anything for a while now anyway though because I need to set up my new workshop and there'll be more videos coming about that soon please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already you can also support the channel on patreon if you'd like to receive early access to my videos exclusive content free project plans and cut lists and a name credit at the end of my videos thank you for watching you [Music]

Channel: Rag 'n' Bone Brown

Views: 59,706

Rating: 4.9534636 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, uk, british, youtuber, rag, 'n', bone, brown, keith, salvaged, reclaimed, wood, make, making, how, to, ragnbonebrown, diy, dining, dining table, scaffold board, scaffold board table, scaffold board bench, scaffold board furniture, scaffold board project, reclaimed wood projects, reclaimed wood table top, metal legs, trapezium legs, salvaged wood projects, rustic, rustic home decor, rustic furniture, rustic furniture diy, rustic furniture making, rustic furniture ideas

Id: Lh7okp-NDdY

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019