1,455 Days in the Making

thank you Fiverr for sponsoring this video more on that later I've been wanting to make this video for a long time actually 1455 days to be specific basically since the day where I put out a video where I built this piece of a sort of fake Live Edge cabinet thing which was almost four years ago to the day and anyway since then it's been sitting in my dining room where I see it multiple times a day and it reminds me of the one single thing that I dislike most about making furniture on YouTube now I'll come back to this but as you can see here today I've got a real actual Live Edge slab and this species was another first for me and I'm gonna tell you right up front this stuff is hard one of the hardest Woods that I've ever worked with even its name is hard Keisha melanox salon no I know I made it sound kind of easy right there but that's only because I've said it like 30 times now but thankfully you can just call it black Acacia or California Blackwood now I went with this wood for three specific reasons and I learned a lot of interesting stuff in the process of picking it out this tree is native to Tasmania which is a country a state of Australia right fact check back foreign but before I get into that let's just talk a little bit about what I'm doing here so in all the shots you've seen so far I've just been removing the loose bark from the edge of the slab that's going to become my handles or what you'll grab to open the drawers when everything is said and done and then I'm going to make a straight cut to remove the opposite Edge so this was the first of the three main reasons that I went with this slab its width and thickness we're close to perfect for what I needed I know that my opening is going to end up being about 12 and three quarters of an inch and drawer fronts are usually about three quarters of an inch thick and this piece started off at about 14 inches wide and an inch thick which means I don't have to waste a lot of material to bring it down to the proper size now when most people think of a slab they probably think of a piece that's quite a bit bigger than what I'm using here which got me thinking where does a slab become a board and a board become a slab so this is a total guess but I don't think it has to do with the size of the piece itself but rather the size of the piece compared to the log that it came from if that makes sense so like if you had a log with a 48 inch diameter and you sliced it up to create a bunch of 14 inch wide pieces those are boards if you had a log with a 14 inch diameter and you sliced this piece from it that's a slab so then the question is if you went back to that 48 inch diameter log and got this 14 inch piece is that a slab again these are total guesses and I have no idea what I'm talking about so I'm just going to use board slab piece and plank interchangeably when I'm talking about this specific let's go with board okay so earlier I said that there were three specific reasons that I picked this board slab piece and the first we already talked about which was the starting Dimensions were good the next reason was the overall color for the fake Live Edge version of this piece I went with ebonized Oak for the case and a piece of Walnut for the slab and by the way I made air quotes when I said slab there now I happen to really like the black and walnut color combo but I know that it can get a little muddy especially if it's a darker piece of Walnut but despite its name black Acacia is actually quite a bit lighter and warmer in comparison to Walnut and I think it's going to give me some really nice contrast and the third reason and this is the one that I think is actually going to have the biggest impact visually is going to be due to something that I think most people probably haven't heard of and that is something called chatoyance and actually this is probably a good time to pop back over to Big John so he can tell us a little bit more about this wood Acacia is one of the most widespread trees in the world I think it has over 627 types including this one Acacia melanox a lot it's got a really pretty Sheen to it like it's like kind of like a holograph that's right yes if you do squats by this wood you will see how this holographic effect emit that's a geminological term called chatoyance and that describes that iridescence chatoyance gemmacological milotox there's a lot of these trees in San Francisco and Bay Area the Australians came in you know 1840 and the 49ers tried 49. why do you think they brought trees I would have been like started sailing and they're like hey I got my keys I got my wallet oh my scenes yeah I think that was probably the first thing you've brought with you in the form of trade yeah this is going to be a beautiful wood in the future works out for me right exactly I'll take get whoa all right so whenever I'm pouring epoxy I like to do it in two passes first a light pass with total boat high performance slow hardener and then a second pass where I poured to full depth using total boat fathom thick set so that's exactly what I'm doing here and the worst thing that you can have happen to you when you're pouring epoxy is realizing that you have a huge hole in your form and all of your epoxy spills out onto the ground but thankfully that didn't happen to me here but I did run into maybe the most annoying thing that you can have happen to you when you're pouring epoxy and that is when you think you might have a leak but you're not really sure which is what's going on with this crack basically I couldn't tell if it was drinking at all up or if it just wasn't going in because of the surface tension and I sat here with this crack for like two hours and never got my answer so Flash Forward a few days and this is like Christmas morning except the best case scenario is you got nothing and the worst case scenario is you got a leak and I got a leak now thankfully it had done enough to seal itself up as it hardened and my guess is that the brown silicone that I'm removing here would have eventually stopped the epoxy and the crack would have filled up but this was already a bunch of extra epoxy that I wasted and had to clean up so I'm glad that I stopped when I did and it's a pretty easy fix basically after I got it all cleaned up along with a few other little drips here and there I could just mix up a little bit more epoxy and then fill in the crack and now as you can see here no more leak a Christmas miracle okay there's still a ton more work to do on the slab board and it is kind of the star of the show that said every Star needs a Best Supporting Actor and in this case that's going to be the case as in the cabinet and we can't really finish shaping the drawers until we know exactly what they're going into so let's figure that out so I know it's going to be a big trapezoid shaped cabinet with two vertical partitions and the first step into making that trapezoid into a reality is creating six panels now every time I'm making panels I think about the same thing so let me set the stage for you I guess the important thing to know about making panels is it's one of the least fun things that you can do in woodworking in fact if I could be so blunt I'd say it downright sucks it's repetitive it's not creative and you have to do a good job because it determines how well things are going to come together down the road so if you mess it up it's not good so whenever I'm putting panels together I'm always thinking I really don't like this part of a build and then my mind eventually wanders to the question what is my favorite part of a build now I could lie to you and make something up but if I'm being completely honest I don't really have one and to me that's kind of the wildest thing about woodworking pretty much every step along the way kind of sucks going to buy wood sucks making panels sucks sanding you get where I'm going yet somehow you put all of the suckiness together and it's a great Hobby I guess that shouldn't really surprise me though because anything worthwhile is kind of like that maybe it's not fun in the moment but in the end you're happy that you did it you feel accomplished I guess you don't work out because you love moving weights around you do it because it makes you feel good you don't bake a cake because you love mixing eggs and flour you do it because it tastes good you don't raise kids because you love purposely losing game after game of Connect Four to a five-year-old you do it so that you'll have somebody to take care of you when you die anyway as I said making good flat panels is important and it really sets the tone for how well a piece is going to come together and there's a few ways that you can make sure that yours are flat for example on these shorter panels the pieces didn't really have any bow to them so as long as you do a good job Milling you can pretty much just clamp them up sometimes for longer boards though you can't always remove the bow through Milling but there's still a lot of things you can do to fix them one is using something like dominoes dowels or biscuits to mechanically Force the pieces to be coplanar or another option is using something like these Rockler panel clamps which have built-in calls so that they put what I'll call sandwiching pressure on the boards as they dry and honestly if this is a topic that you're truly interested in I'm going to link this video in the description which goes way into it and then for the 99.7 percent of you who don't really care about the technical tidbits of making panels let's move on okay so as you can see here or at least I can see apparently our panels are looking good which means that I can cut them down so that they're just barely oversized at this point and then get into the more interesting stuff so we'll start with making our trapezoid and I think this is probably a good time to talk about the overall design of this piece so as you saw in the first version of the piece the box was a rectangle and the cabinet and the base were both pretty straightforward but with this one I wanted to do something different so obviously the main focal point is still going to be the drawer fronts and the big change there is going to be using an actual Live Edge slab instead of doing what I did on the last one which was angle grinding a wobbly Edge to make a fake Live Edge but I also wanted to put a lot more thought into the cabinet and the base with this version namely I wanted to do a trapezoid box where the angle of the cabinet is carried through the base To The Ground by matching it on the legs and this is what I came up with so in order to make a trapezoidal box I have to use this sled jig thing and mine was getting pretty old and beaten up so I actually decided to remake it for this project and doing this as well as making the bevel Cuts can get really technical so just like I did with the panels for the 0.3 percent of you who are interested in the technical information I'm also going to put a link to this video that covers everything that way we don't need to turn this one into a math lesson now earlier in the video I had mentioned how the original version of this piece always reminded me of the thing that I disliked most about making furniture on YouTube and the reason that I said that is because every time I looked at that piece it made me think about how unrealized it felt to me it always felt like it was a rough idea that I executed at a bare minimum level so that I could get the point across and make a video and the reason that I did that is because at the time I was led to believe that that's how you built a successful YouTube channel by consistently and frequently uploading new videos actually I just went and looked back because I was curious and at that time in a 25 day period I put out four videos now I'm not saying that YouTube was putting out that message just the people who talked about YouTube so that's what we all did and I can tell you now that advice is complete horseshoe frequency and consistency are not key quality is key so a year ago I made a decision to only put out one project about every five weeks or so because that gives me the time to design and build at a higher level and most importantly you get a better video and I guess the bright side of that old way is I have a bunch of old designs that I kind of half-assed to get a video out and now I can revisit and give some of those the proper attention that I think they deserve so another reason that I'm telling you all this is because from time to time I'll get asked for advice from somebody who's trying to become a YouTuber so here is my advice build the projects you want to build and make the videos you want to make and just do it at the highest level you can and try to keep getting better and in the end I believe that quality will be rewarded it's as simple as that you don't have to try to follow Trends and do the cliche YouTube things oh and don't forget to hit subscribe and smash that like button all right so in that last section there I was cutting the bevels to make my trapezoid and without getting into the math the sort of magic of this technique is that on smaller boxes it's completely foolproof and that's because you set your blade once make half the cuts with your piece vertical and half the cuts with your pieces horizontal and you end up with angles that perfectly complement each other no matter what as long as you don't adjust the blade between cuts you literally can't mess it up again that other video goes into all the details but one of the problems on bigger boxes like this one is that one of the panels is going to be so long that you can't cut it horizontally at least for me it's longer than my table Saw's capacity so what I have to do instead is try to match the angle that I had set on my table saw on either a track saw or circular saw that way I can cut the bevel that way and this is something that's really hard to nail in one shot so I always cut it slightly longer than I think it's going to need to be and then do a dry fit and just kind of keep nibbling away until it's just right and this usually takes me three or four tries to dial it in some of you already know this but for the past few months I've been working on creating a mechanical pencil that I plan to do a limited run on and I just got a prototype in hand and there's still a long way to go but I wanted to show you what I've got so far to give a little update so here it is just kidding that's just a Bic here it is now as I said this isn't the finished piece but it gives you an idea of where I'm going and this has been quite a bit more difficult than I thought it was going to be I mean I knew I was going into the unknown but I guess I didn't realize how much I didn't know and on top of that something that I've always been bad at is giving up control so I've been trying to use this project as an exercise in doing that and instead relying on people whose strengths are in areas that mine aren't things like engineering sourcing components packaging turns out there's an almost endless list of things that I'm not good at so when Fiverr reached out to see if I'd be interested in partnering on a video I saw this as a good opportunity to try letting go of something else that I probably wouldn't be good at product photography so first if you've never heard of Fiverr they're the largest Marketplace for Digital Services in the world basically if you're in need of anything from video editing to website creation or even product photography they've got thousands of talented professionals who can help you succeed no matter who you are where you're located or what your budget is so as I said I wanted to find somebody to do product photography for the mechanical pencil so I went on their website and searched a few terms first was product photography as you might have thought and using that term I was finding a lot of really nice portfolios but it wasn't really the style that I was wanting so then I tried the term lifestyle photography and that seemed to put me on the right track and eventually I found this freelancer delur who looked really promising so I contacted him explained what I was looking for and within a couple days he came out to my shop and we did a photo shoot so let me start by saying that dollar was great to work with when we first chatted I felt like he understood what I was looking for he was clear about what I beginning and when he showed up he was really efficient and super easy to work with and not only did he have the technical ability but also creative ideas so that we could take some really good photos which I'll show you in a second and anyway it was just a great experience from start to finish so here are a few of the photos and again remember this is not the finished pencil that'll still improve but the photos themselves are awesome and I hope I get to use Diller again when it's time to take photos of the actual finished pencil so first off thank you delir for the help with this project and also thank you Fiverr for giving me this opportunity you can head over to fiverr.com Chris salimony to check out all the services available to you and also you can get 10 off with the code 4i's 10. I'll throw a link in the description all right so I just did a dry assembly and the case came together really nicely and then you saw me gluing on some clamping calls and the idea here is that they'll help me get clamping pressure like this so with everything ready to go I could glue in my dominoes and then with a helping hand from Sean we've glued the case into a couple of L shapes and then put the two halves together and everything closed up really nicely except for here where the clamping call broke and I was left with this huge gap but don't worry it's only on the top Edge where it's extremely visible okay so what did I learn from this you can save about 20 minutes using your off Cuts as calls but you're much better off spending those 20 minutes making some more robust calls out of some scrap honestly it's probably more like 10 minutes but either way don't be Pennywise and pound foolish actually just don't be Pennywise period don't listen to him either NOFX is a much better choice clowns and punk bands aside I think I can fix this here's what I got going for me eventually this whole case is going to get stained black and as luck would have it the inside of gaps are black so that buys me a little wiggle room right off the bat also dying it black will camouflage the grain quite a bit so as long as I can fill it in with something anything it's going to be way less visible and if everything else fails thankfully it's on the side of the cabinet that's closer to the corner rather than the open part of the room that it's going in so there's that now back when I had made my four panels for the case I made two more that are going to be my vertical partitions so now I have to cut some tongues onto the ends of the boards to fit into those and because when I cut the dados they stopped short of the front that means I also need to trim the tongue short so that the panel can actually slot into the case and then what I'm doing here is probably Overkill but basically I don't want to be able to actually see the partition in the finished piece so I'm cutting out this little corner from the top Edge before I glue them in and I'm hoping between the fact that everything is black and that they end about seven inches before the front of the cabinet this shouldn't be very noticeable I think I got more footage for this video than any other video I've ever made and I don't really know why I did that but you'd think because of that there'd be no way I missed anything yet somehow I didn't film cutting templates on my CNC luckily about a week before Sean had cut and filmed himself cutting some templates and it would have looked exactly like this so thank you Sean I said Thank you Sean how about it you're welcome you're welcome thank you now you've probably seen me go through this workflow before but I decided to switch things up a tiny bit for this one and I think this kind of highlights The crucial parts and the not crucial parts of making shapes like this so the big takeaway in my opinion is you don't have to be as accurate as you would think and the more oversized you leave your pieces to begin with the less accurate you can be so I'm starting off with some pretty oversized pieces and I need to cut this joint right here which is a 35 and a 65 degree angle so obviously I'm going to cut them as accurate as I can but the only actual critical thing is the finished length of this piece I want it to match the length of the cabinet and if I end up being slightly off with my angles what will happen is my legs will be either a little in or a little out from where I wanted them but since my pieces are still oversized I can fix it later by using my template to Route out the shape normally at this point what I would do is Trace out my templates cut as close to the line on my bandsaw as possible and then template route the final shape but instead I tried using my track saw to do probably about 90 percent of the cutting now speaking of track saws I get a lot of questions about why I have two and let me start by saying you do not need two track saws but the reason that I have two is because I had bought the Festool probably about 10 years ago when I think they might have been the only brand making one and then about three years ago Craig who's been a long time partner of the channel sent me theirs so the most common question I get is when do I choose to use one over the other and the real answer is if I'm taking the tool to the wood I use the Festool and if I'm taking the wood to the tool I use the Craig and the reason for that is because I have the Craig track saw set up on this optional work table but the next and probably more important question which is a little harder is which one is better or which would you recommend so let's start with just the facts the festival costs about 600 bucks for just the saw and the Craig costs about 300 bucks so what people always want to know is is the Craig really is good for half the price and the answer is kind of yes and no they both have the same cut depth power wise the Craig has more but nothing that you would notice and all the major features like tilting and setting depths are pretty much the same and as far as cut quality they both give me really good results where I would say that the Festool is slightly nicer is in those touch points and that's hard to quantify but it just kind of feels nicer I guess and because of all that it makes it really hard to tell people what they should buy because it just kind of depends on the person here's a 63 000 Audi S4 and a thirty seven thousand dollar Honda Accord both comfortably seat five both will get you to where you need to go the Audi is slightly faster and the Honda gets slightly better gas mileage which of these would you buy if you want the most bang for your buck or value get the Craig but if you want the one that lets your neighbors know that you've made it get the Festool okay that's kind of a goofy analogy but I think you get my point they're both fine choices and I think you'll be happy with either and end of the day you know yourself better than I know you so here's the real answer and you have to answer it for yourself which of these would you buy that's the right answer for you okay here's a quick little woodworking tip that could save a project that you're working on but more importantly could save your fingers so even though I use my track saw as you can see I still need to template route the curved part of my legs so I use a handheld router to get about eighty percent of the material and then I'm going to use a router table to clear out the rest of it and when I do that it's going to be a pretty heavy cut which can be dangerous and that's why when I see people doing this it makes my butt hooker so if you're ever in this situation what you don't want to do is try to get it all in one pass you should be pushing your piece this way and your bit is spinning this way which is good you want to be pushing against the cutting Force but if what you're cutting is wider than your bit then on this side the blade is going to want to grab onto the material and throw it across the room pretty quickly and violently so what you want to do instead is just kind of nibble your way down until the material isn't wider than your bit and then you can clear it out safely also use something like clamps or paddles or anything that you can to make sure that you've got a really good grip on your piece and that your hands are far from the bit things could still go wrong but if you've got a good grip it's more likely that it's just going to jerk the piece and you'll get some tear out but it won't be nearly as bad as it could be otherwise and sorry if I scared anybody away from woodworking all right so remember when I said that making panel sucks well when making drawer boxes heard me say that it said hold my beer because if you want to talk about the suckiest of sucky it's making drawer boxes and if you want to embrace the ultimate suck use Bloom drawer slides and in the next 52 seconds I'm going to attempt to convince you that not only are Bloom drawer slides the worst but they're also the only drawer slides you should use okay so making drawer boxes isn't ever going to be fun and I don't think I need to convince anybody of that but at least when you use normal drawer slides the math is really easy say you've got a 20 inch opening most slides call for a half inch of room on either side of the box so you just have to build your box one inch smaller than your opening and you're good using Bloom drawer slides and you have a 20 inch opening here's what you need total width of 19 and 9 30 seconds which is made by sandwiching an 18 and 27 30 seconds panel between quarter inch rabbits with 7 30 seconds of an inch of material remaining that's why they're the worst so here's why you should use them these clips basically they have so much adjustability compared to a normal drawer slide that for anything that even remotely enters the world of Fine Furniture I think they're worth the extra effort also they have a really nice action and I can tell you from experience you can spend 200 hours building a nice piece of furniture and when Joe and Jane schmoe see it here's what's going to happen first they're gonna say oh wow this is really nice then they'll open and close one of the drawers notice the soft closing action look at you and say more seriously oh this is really nice and you'll smile politely and agree with them but internally you'll be thinking really that's what you're impressed by and it will be and that's life all right so a few you might have noticed a detail that I skipped over and that was cutting this chamfer around the inside perimeter of my case and it was pretty straightforward other than that it left this weird geometry on the inside corner which I had to take care of with a chisel and I know in these shots it makes it look like the wood is a little bit different where I routed versus where I chiseled but once it's all sanded everything's going to even out and the reason that I jumped back in time to make sure that you saw this is because what we're going to cut next is a matching detail on the inside curve of our base which again was pretty straightforward this time the only weird thing was that I stopped cutting just before I got to the tip of the foot and that's because I'm going to cut it off when I trim my legs to their finished length and adding in little details like these there's definitely a fine line for example on the original version of this piece there were no details which if we go back to what I was talking about earlier in the video is really one of the reasons I felt like I left so much on the table with that design so it's nice to add things in but you just want to be subtle so that you're not distracting from whatever the main focal point is I like to kind of think of it in threes so with this one number one was the Live Edge drawer fronts number two is the overall silhouette and number three are small details like these chamfers and the reason you want to be subtle is I think you run the risk of actually making a design worse if you just keep adding to it now speaking of that main focal point the drawer fronts we're finally to where we can get back to working on that part of this piece and I know we just spent a lot of time on all that other stuff but maybe this will be an aha moment for somebody so I'm going to mention it just because something is the focal point doesn't mean it's where you will or should spend most of your time on this project probably 90 percent of my time went into the parts that aren't the star of the show and yes using an actual slab for the drawer fronts versus what I did on the last one is definitely going to be an improvement but the thing that's really going to take this piece to the next level is all that other stuff and frankly the slab is what it is and there isn't really a whole lot that I can do to it to make it any better or worse all I can do is maximize what I put around it so that it can truly shine and be the focal point that it deserves to be it's like your calf muscles there's people who will work on their calves all day every day but nothing changes them meanwhile there's dudes whose only activation occurs when they stand on their tippy toes to grab another box of Lucky Charms from the top shelf of their Pantry who have calves like Hercules there's just nothing you can do so skip the calf raises and do something that is in your control like wear bright colored hats and glasses if you do that people won't even notice your peony cabs what was they talking about oh yeah so here I'm basically putting everything together so that's attaching the drawer fronts attaching a back which you can see I'm piecing together with scraps since plywood cost as much as gold these days and installing these Figure 8 Clips so that I can attach the base in the cabinet and I'm doing that so that then I can immediately take it all apart to start finishing everything and the first step in that process is days of sanding which I'm going to just boil down to this single five second clip although I guess this part is mildly satisfying to watch this is me fixing that remaining gap on the corner where we had the clamping issue way back when anyway and then for finishing I'm going to start by spraying everything other than the slabs with black polyurethane and my one tip here and I guess this goes for spring any polyurethane but it's just more noticeable with black is a lot of light codes not a few heavy coats in all I probably give every surface five to eight coats and in this shot if you really look at the wood here you can see just how light a single coat is then on the complete other end of the spectrum for the slabs I'm going to use Rubio monocoat and the amount of coats you need with that is right there in the name that said I pretty much always end up doing two coats but I will admit Duo coat doesn't have a very nice ring to it four years ago when I built the first version of this piece it was actually to replace another piece I had built on this channel a different trapezoidal piece called bad Larry bad Larry lived on that wall for about three years then the fake Live Edge cabinet lived there for the past four which makes me wonder how long will this one live there and I don't know but what I do know is whatever does eventually replace it will be something that I build because despite woodworking being expensive tedious messy and not even fun it's what I do and I couldn't imagine a better Hobby thanks for watching and thank you again to delur for the pictures and Fiverr for sponsoring this video and remember to go to fiverr.com Chris salimony to check out the services available to you and get 10 off with the code 4i's 10. all right see you in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 780,403

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, coffee table, slab coffee table, expensive wood, bookmatched wood, river table epoxy, foureyes furniture, blacktail studio, Walnut Slab, Modern Desk, L Desk, Slab Desk, River Table Desk

Id: 1DOIJosHkWw

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023