Woodworking: How to make a waving American flag

as well as a liberal application of pink flamingos scattered throughout my front yard another way I like to make my house look good is by flying the American flag now I've been meaning to make one of these out of wood but for an added challenge I want to make it with the appearance that it's waving in the wind and with some help from the good folks over at Arbor tech I think I have exactly what I need to make this happen I figured I'd start off by designing a traceable template that has a series of Arts down one edge then I'd add a collection of evenly spaced marks that I'll use as offsets when I'm tracing the pattern onto the individual boards for each stripe in the flag I would just line up the starting edge of the board with the next mark on the template and the end result should create a diagonal wave pattern effect at least that's what I'm hoping for then with some power carving and some sanding I'm thinking I can take off those edges so that it looks less like a potato chip and more like a flag blowing in the wind or even a piece of bacon I'd be okay with that too so here we go let's get right into it the first thing I do is I print out my template on a one-to-one scale then after taping it up and cutting it out I can mark the length on a piece of thin stock a cut to length at the miter saw and fasten the template onto it using some craft adhesive over at the bandsaw I cut it out just proud of the line and then I sneak up to that line using the spindle sander I transfer the offset marks by just putting down a knife line and then once I remove the paper I can darken up each of those marks with a pencil a heat gun loosens the craft adhesive and then the template is done now I can go buy some two by fours about five eight-foot two by fours at the Home Center with three pieces being cut from each board this means I'll end up with 15 so I'll have two extra in case I screw up well for when I screw up I've fed each piece through the planer until I got it to the right thickness and by changing the home Wi-Fi password I was even able to get some help from shot buddy number one with all the board's at the right thickness I squared up an edge of each one over on the jointer [Music] and then referencing that edge I could trim them down to their final widths over at the table saw now that all the milling is complete I'm finally ready to start drawing some wavy lines I line up the template and trace the curve on to the board then I just do the same thing on the next one except I slide the template over to the next offset mark and I continue this until I've traced the pattern onto all the boards moving through each of the offset marks on the template once all the boards are marked I'm ready to start cutting them out over at the bandsaw thankfully there's a lot of forgiveness in this project so you don't have to worry about cutting exactly on the line which is a good thing for me seeing as how most of the time I'm about as accurate as Ray Charles at the gun range now with all the stripes cut out I can glue up the panel I chose to use tight bond three because it has a long set-up time which I needed every minute of while I tried to make sure things were flush and square once it's dry I can take it out of the clamps and we're ready to start power carving [Laughter] [Music] the turbo plane from Arbortech is pretty awesome admittedly I was a bit skeptical at first but after messing around with it for a bit I was really blown away this little thing chewed through these two by fours so fast it was amazing was like the wood was melting as I passed it over the top it honestly turned a multi-hour job and in just minutes and another cool thing is that it makes chips instead of dust and in a small shop like I have anyway I can limit the amount of dust being blown out throughout the house it's a good thing [Music] once all the power carving was complete I switched over to a flat death sander and started to smooth things out I finished sanding things by hand sanding up to 220 trimming the edges of the table saw and then the world's worst cutting board was complete so for burning down the stripes I did some experimenting I started with a couple layers of painters tape but got some burn through plus where the tape was set on fire sometimes the glue got seared into the wood so I picked up some of this HVAC high-temperature foil tape this gave me a real nice clean line and a lot less burned through but the problem was that after removing the tape it would leave a real sticky residue that wouldn't seem to come off so I figured I'd combine the two I tried one layer of painters tape followed by one layer of foil tape this gave me that perfectly clean line I was looking for very minimal burned through an absolutely no sticky residue whatsoever so this is what I decided to go with for the next few years of my life I taped off all the stripes that weren't going to be burnt and I very quickly realized that the American flag has a lot of stripes thankfully I only had to tape off six of them as well as around the Union then I started laying down the foil tape and this was even more tedious I had to cut each section and two because the tape was too wide for the stripes as well as that creating curved the lines with the foil was pretty tricky and required quite a bit of persistence but with lots of patience and several bottles of xanax eventually the taping was complete and now it's time to burn down the house now I didn't want to burn it too dark just enough to make the grain stand out and for there to be a good contrast between the white stripes so I kept the torch moving pretty quickly the foil seemed to hold up pretty nicely however if I dwelled a little too long in a spot or wasn't moving fast enough I could see it start to loosen up and even change its shape a little bit so I just kept up the pace and things went just fine and compared to the taping step this one very quickly I made sure to burn the ends and the top and bottom edges then this step was finished for the most part the tape came off very smoothly and left real clean and crisp lines which was awesome but there were just a couple small spots of burn through that needed to be taken care of but those were very easily just sanded out now it's time to mask off where the Union I'll go so I just cut off a large piece of paper and taped it on I sprayed on a single coat of black spray paint and made sure to get the edges - once that was dry I peeled off the tape and I was ready for stars for those I went back to Sketchup and downloaded a flag model into my drawing I resized it until it matched the size of my panel erased the stripes and just printed off the union to scale then I cut out each and every star with an exacto knife and made my own stencil exhausting but it worked now I could hold it up to the panel and trace each star with a pencil I had to fudge it just a bit because the wave and the flag causes it not to be perfectly square but in the end I had a faint outline of the union and I could start carving out some stars [Music] [Music] as you'd imagine this took quite a while but the rotary tool sure made this easy almost enjoyable I found that you really need to either be able to rotate the project piece or to be able to move around it to get to all the angles of the stars also as dust starts to build up it can get hard to see those faint outlines of the stars so I just used a dry paintbrush to clean things off from time to time and that worked fine for a finish I went with a glossy spar urethane the grain and the stripes really popped and it sure darkened up the contrast as well after each application dried I lightly sanded with 220 to keep it perfectly smooth all told I ended up putting on four coats then I added my stamp of approval some d-rings to make it easy to hang up and then I was done here it is in all of its glory I'm super stoked at how it turned out it looks awesome the waves turned out great and really give it that feeling of movement like it's blowing in the wind and if you remember back to the beginning when I cut out each of these boards I saved all the off cuts and glued them up into a second panel this gives me an entirely new blank that I can turn into a second flag that means I get to do all the power carving the sanding the taping the union tracing and all of the star carving completely over again how awesome is that so how do you think it turned out let me know down in the comments and if you enjoyed the video please be sure to give me a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel for additional behind-the-scenes shots and nonsensical clips you can follow me on instagram too well thanks for watching and we'll see you next time take care one table at a time well yeah because we're gonna use this one and we're gonna use that one so we're gonna end up having two flags use a pen so much so the first thing I tried was using two layers of that was that was not me that was the stool [Music] the central vac turning on oh my gosh are you kidding me I realize it was plugged in she's a little bit of pee just came out you

Channel: Fisher's Shop

Views: 188,058

Rating: 4.9700727 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, hobby, shop, craft, diy, how to, make, build, building, maker, home, decoration, home decor, art, wall art, usa, america, united states of america, red, white, blue, flag, country, american, fishers, wood, funny, comedy, arbortech, carved, carve, powercarve, craftsman, woodshop, patriot, do it yourself, fishersshop, fishers shop, household, free, template, plans, sketchup, design, 3d, waving, wave, project, idea, american flag, woodworking projects, woodworking for beginners, woodworking ideas

Id: L10h_c4LKvI

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018