Woodworking with Plywood - What You Need to Know!

hello everyone i'm colin kannette today's topic as you can see is working with plywood and there is a ton to know about plywood and working with it so i'm just going to jump right in but before i do i want to remind you if you haven't already subscribed yet now would be a really good time to do that so but let's get started with plywood so in the scheme of plywoods there are a few different varieties and mixes of of different plywoods so first of all there are soft wood plywoods and hardwood plywoods typically softwood plywoods are more used for things like construction house construction whereas hardwood plywoods are more used for building of cabinetry and that sort of thing and how these are constructed there are two types of plywood there is what we call rotary and sliced so rotary plywood is made by a long often a 10 or 12 foot log and it's spinning like on a great big lathe and there is a blade that runs through a 12 10 or 12 foot blade and it slices off the plywood in a thin layer and that plywood runs right over top that blade and it runs out on a table sliced plywood basically has the same thing it has a log but it has a huge blade that comes down and it takes a slice a very thin slice each time and you can tell the difference between rotary plywood and sliced plywood just by looking at it because rotary plywood will always have these what we call cathedral see this area going here we call those cathedrals and you'll see that on rotary plywood on sliced plywood you may get a little bit of an effect of that but basically because you're slicing through the wood each time you're getting much more long even grain so here's three ends of three different plywoods on the far right here this is a construction grade and you can see that the veneers that make up the core are quite wide this is a cabinet grate and you can see that now the veneers are a little bit smaller a little bit better quality and finally on the end we have a baltic birch and you can see that the veneers are much much finer and an even better quality plywood so why do we use plywood anyway what's the uses of it for things like in the workshop for jigs that sort of thing it's a very strong wood it's very stable it's easy to work with and it comes in big sheets so you can use a lot of wood for larger projects for example headboards or maybe bookcases where you've got big sheets of something you can break down a 4x8 sheet of plywood without having to glue up dozens and dozens of oak boards for example it's also much cheaper because on a sheet something like this you only have an oak veneer on the outside the rest of the wood all of the plies are usually a secondary wood like poplar or pine or something like that so there's lots of good reasons to use plywood now when you get your plywood home of course the first thing you want to do is cut it up but if you're making for example a bookcase that might have say six or eight pieces because you've got shelves and you've got sides you may want to cut your plywood so you get the absolute best amount of wood out of that sheet of plywood and one of the things you can do there are programs for your computer i believe there's even some for your phone where you can type in the different types or the different sizes of wood that you need according to your plans or your ideas and put plug that into the program and it will tell you where to make the cuts it's sort of a plywood optimizer i'm not going to tell you about that here you'll have to go to woodwork web i've got the links there you can go and have a look at them some of them are free some of them cost um a little bit for and sometimes you only need them for like two or three months so you can pay for two or three months use of them but you know what they're very inexpensive even if you do have to pay a little bit for them and probably save you that in wood i mean they're they're that good so you can check that out so i can't bring my full-size jig in here i've just made a quick little mock-up so you get the idea how this works so this is a circular saw jig and it's for breaking down plywood and my actual one is eight feet long and you can see why i couldn't bring it in the workshop here to use it easily but the way it works is that you have a little fence here that your saw will ride against and if you'll notice that it's exactly i actually cut this little piece of wood off here when i ran this along here by the way the batteries out of here and you can see that that blade it's actually moving a little bit as i go along so that blade is right perfect with that so for example to break down a sheet of plywood all i have to do is measure out how far i want to cut that and for example i'll just make one mark there and another mark here just an arbitrary mark and i align the edge of that fence on each side of that with my mark on here and now i just going to put a clamp on either side okay so that's clamped down now and the next thing we do because i've just i'm going to ride my blade right along there i'm going to cut off exactly what i want it's that simple but while i'm here quick safety thing um always always always the blade is no more than a half tooth below the material you'll see that i've changed the blade we don't drop the blade down all the way no matter what saw it's always dangerous to do that so make sure that that tooth is just barely below the material and right now i'm not going to cut this but you can see as i run that along and it rides along the fence that blade is going to make a perfect cut all the way along there now when you're breaking down plywood of course you've got grain running this way and grain running this way and that way and so on so you've got cross grain that you're running you always want to be using a cross cut blade for plywood now when you're doing that when you're breaking down plywood and if you have a track saw with a cross cut blade on it you're fine but most of us that are using circular saw blades typically the a framing blade is about 24 teeth and that's a little bit rough for all plywood what i recommend you can get a 40 or a 60 tooth and that makes a big difference when you're cutting down plywood because it makes a much finer cut now depending on how you broke your plywood down you may have broken it down so that it's a little bit on the rough side you may have cut it as fine as you want it's so you're going to use the edge that you cut on it if it's a little bit rough and you're going to want to use your table saw to do some fine tuning on it my suggestion for a blade for your table saw for any cross cutting or working with plywood is this diablo 90 tooth it does a perfect job of cutting on the top side and on the bottom side where the tear out is on a table saw so if that's a blade that you don't have it might be something you want to look at and they're not horribly expensive either and you'll get tons of use out of them so that's just a tip on what blade to use for your table saw one of the things we often want to do is cover the veneers because they don't look very pretty and we can do that by purchasing veneers in rolls in this case it's a natural wood and it has a heat sensitive back so you just use your household iron to apply but you can also find them in vinyl one of the things a lot of people like to do is to cut their own thin wood strips and just glue those on there and that works excellent as well so very often when you're running your wood through a jointer you will get the very end where the last blade that hits it it will hit the end of that plywood and you can see that it's flipped up some of that wood and that's pretty typical but you can avoid that and this works really well to eliminate the tear out on your jointer what you can do is run your wood through for about three inches then stop take it out turn it around and run it through fully again the second way and that will magically eliminate that tear out now the one thing that might challenge you the most in working with plywood is how do you fasten it and that's kind of a perennial question how do i put plywood together it really depends on the plywood and the core and the thickness that you're using now typically when you're using a good quality plywood you're making some kind of furniture you may be making bookcases or cupboards or some other kind of element and there's a few things that you can use you can use glues and if you decide to use glues the best way to use a glue is if you're going to stick something to it perhaps you're going to stick some a couple of sheets of plywood together or something that's going to join like this the best way to do that is to lay a thickness of glue on one surface let it dry the same thing on the mating surface let it dry so let it dry for probably 20 minutes half an hour depending on the glue maybe longer and once it's dry and or or near dry then you put yet another layer of glue on there and that's when you would do either the clamping or some other way of mechanical fastening now let's talk about mechanical fastening for a second so whenever i talk about mechanical fasting and you'll hear me say that from time to time i'm talking about some kind of hardware it might be screws it might be nails it might be air nails it could be some form of steel hardware that's joining pieces together and plywood does have there are some things where mechanical fastening actually works for it let me show you some of those so one of the place for examples i'll go back to my bookcase example here if you're putting shelves for example in a bookcase or maybe you're making a cupboard and it has shelving in it and you for shelves and this is where you kind of have to really think ahead on what you're going to do you could run a dado in there and insert the shelf that way you could also glue that in there you could use just ordinary carpenters glue with the same you know running glue letting it dry putting it in again it's not the best maybe the other thing you could do is very lightly moisten those the dado inside the dado and the edge of the wood and you could use a polyurethane glue like gorilla glue that kind of a glue actually works quite well with plywood because it doesn't tend to soak in like carpenter's glues but back to the mechanical fasteners if it was a shelf and people are not going to be looking under the shelf or not going to be able to see underneath the shelf that's a place where you could use a mechanical fastener like a pocket hole and you wouldn't even have to cut the dado you just have to measure that and be able to put that in there so that's another way of doing that very often for shelves and plywood people will have they might put brackets they might make that you might have adjustable bands in there so that you can move the shelf up and down there's different ways of doing that so you really need to think ahead when it comes to fastening plywood together if you're going to be using an air nailer with plywood these are some pins this is an 18 gauge and you'll notice that the thickness of the pins is quite a bit narrower than the width you'll also notice at the bottom there's a chisel point this is an 18 gauge and the same thing applies it's a little bit wider on the side than it is on the end and in this case they actually put little arrows see those little arrows that indicates the bottom and you can tell that by the chisel point so there's a piece of plywood and typically what we do is we go along and we go clunk clunk clunk clunk and sometimes the pins that we're driving in the air nailers that we're driving in are coming out the side and that's pretty annoying because getting those out is a problem sometimes but in your air nailer this is the way the those pins sit they sit like that they're lined up edge to edge remember that we showed you that they're edge to edge and the chisel point is the bottom the thin part is just like this just like this piece of wood so what happens is the grain in the wood as the nail goes down sometimes a funny grain or glue or something in there can actually bend these thin nails these thin air nails thin pins and it will drive them out they'll come out the side front or the back and that's pretty common if you've got an air nailer you've had that happen to you so the way around that because in an air nailer the pins are sitting like this so what we want to do we want to turn them sideways like this and that way the pins are going to be driven in like this and it doesn't matter if they hit funny grain and go like this because these pins are not going to bend on the edge they're only going to bend on the side and it doesn't matter internally if they bend like that we don't care so when you're doing very narrow wood especially plywood we want to actually use turn the pinner sideways and drive the pins in that way well that concludes my video today on working with plywood and i like working with plywood because it kind of makes you think ahead on how you're going to do joinery and how you're going to finish it all sorts of things like that and as i mentioned earlier in the video if when you're breaking your plywood down you can make a circular saw jig i did a video on that that will be showing up here you'll be able to go and have a look at it if you haven't seen that it's worth going to have a look at because that little jig comes in real handy when it comes to breaking down plywood or any kind of sheet goods so have a look at that i'm colin kanet for woodwork web thanks for watching

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 81,138

Keywords: plywood woodworking, woodworking with plywood, plywood projects, plywood project, plywood tips, types of plywood, plywood quality, buying plywood, plywood furniture, plywood, what is plywood, how to pick plywood, plywood furniture making, birch plywood, plywood types, plywood types and prices, plywood cutting tips, plywood thickness, baltic birch plywood, plywood sizes, buying plywood tip, baltic birch, marine plywood, how to cut plywood

Id: MYxgo4ULPr8

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022