(upbeat music)
Marc: The first thing I'm going to work on
today is the legs, I've got this 10 foot piece
of 8/4 alder that's about seven inches wide.
It'll be perfect we can get two legs
out of each cut by cutting it in half,
but in order to start working with
this I've really got to cut it down.
It's way too big and just too heavy.
So, I usually use my circular saw for this type of task.
You want to make sure that when you cut this you
don't just let the fall off literally fall to the ground.
What that's going to do is actually pull off a large
chunk of the wood at the end of the cut,
because you haven't had a chance to actually
sever the fibers before the weight
of the piece pulls it down to the ground.
The easiest thing that I find to do
is to set up a couple of extra stands.
I have my little roller stands here,
and they're set about an eighth of an inch
below the bottom surface of the wood.
So that when I cut this it'll drop but it's only
going to drop about an eighth of an inch,
and that's not enough to break the wood and tear it out,
but it is enough to support it, and stop it from
pinching the blade and stop it from actually tearing out.
It's much safer and I get a much cleaner cut that way.
I'm going to probably lop these off at about
30 inches giving me about 3/4 of an inch extra
space so I could trim them down to size later.
All right so each one of these boards now
represents one leg, we just need to rip it to width,
glue those two pieces together,
and we'll have the thickness that we're after
for a nice sturdy mission style leg.
What I'm going to do is actually
mark the board at 3 1/4 inches.
That extra 1/4 inch is going to give me the breathing
room that I need in case there's any error in my cut.
I probably will screw something up so it's nice to
know I've got an extra 1/4 inch to work with,
but of course you need a board that's wide
enough to accommodate that excess,
so keep that in mind when you buy your lumber.
I'm actually going to cut this guy down on the band saw.
I find that to be the easiest simplest way
to deal with these large heavy timbers.
If you use a table saw it's perfectly fine.
I'd recommending jointing one edge first.
Make sure the board sits stable on a flat surface,
and go ahead and push it through.
Just be very careful, make sure you have
your splitter installed on the table.
You could use a circular saw just make sure
you've got a straightedge, and every
thing's clamped down and secure.
You could even use a jigsaw if you have one
and you don't have any of these other tools
you could certainly use that to cut these down.
But however you do it just be careful,
and make sure you give yourself a little bit
more than three inches, because we're
going to need to be able to plane everything
down and smooth it out later on.
Our finished thickness is three by three.
Using the band saw I cut the rough
leg stock down to 3 1/4 inches wide.
Now I've just finished jointing one face on each leg half,
and it's time to glue these guys together.
(smooth jazz music)
♫(lyrics) Yeah baby put on
♫that glue that's what I'm talking about
♫Put on lots of glue spread that glue nice and thin
♫Yeah put those leg heads together
♫Tighten down those clamps
♫and some extra clamps if you're feeling saucy♫
So just a quick dose of reality I was looking
at all of my legs halves and I noticed one
that has this really really big knot.
That's actually in fact, it's a pretty deep hole as well.
So this could be a stability issue aside
from the fact that it just looks ugly.
I'm not going to be able to put this
on my leg unless I can do something with it.
The key is to fill it with epoxy so that it
actually is stable, and then I'm going
to actually face this to the inside.
It's going to be on the inside of my leg joint,
and we'll never see it but it's still stable.
Let me get some epoxy over here.
I already had the resin I just added the hardener,
and incidentally these little Dixie Cups were
something really cool that Nicole got me.
I think we got how many?
600 a bag of 600 for about five bucks
that's a pretty darn good deal
and you don't feel bad about throwing them away.
When I get this good and mixed I'm going to
pour the epoxy into the hole give it a chance to seep in,
and I'm going to let this sit overnight.
Tomorrow I'll clean it up make sure it's nice
and flat, flush with the surface,
that should be enough and then I can glue
my leg together, problem solved.
Okay, and I was about to go in the house for
the night and let my epoxy dry overnight,
and then I realized uhoh my hole does go all
the way through, and my epoxy is leaking oopsie.
Generally what I like to do is
just use tape, blue tape is fine.
If you've got regular masking tape you can
use that too, but just plug up the hole now
that I've wasted epoxy, it's all good.
That should be good enough shh don't tell anybody.
After six to eight hours I remove the legs from the clamps.
Now I forgot to remove the glue before it
set up so now I'm paying the price.
Since these legs still have a lot of extra stock I'm not
concerned about the damage I'm doing with the scraper.
But removing the dried glue is an essential step
to keeping my jointer and planer blades in good shape.
I use a pencil to place some indicator marks on
one side, and then I joint that face.
You might notice throughout this video
that I'm wearing a pair of gloves.
Normally I do not condone wearing gloves in the shop,
but in my opinion a pair of cold bare hands
is much more dangerous than a pair of gloved warm hands.
But if you do any work with the drill press
or any tool that requires close encounters
with the business end of the tool,
I recommend taking off the gloves.
After one face is jointed nice and flat I turn
the leg 90 degrees and joint the adjoining face.
Be sure to place the previously
jointed face against the fence.
Three to four passes should do the trick.
Next I use the planer to square up the leg,
and make the remaining faces flat and parallel.
Once the leg is square I run it through the
planer once on one side, then once again
on the adjacent face before lowering
the cutter head for the next cut.
This ensures that my leg stays square.
I use my miter saw to cut the legs to length.
I start by attaching a zero clearance
auxiliary fence using a scrap piece
of plywood and double stick tape.
This will ensure a tear out free cut.
Before taking any measurements
I clean up one end of each leg.
I then place a stop lock 29 1/4 inches away from the blade.
Placing the freshly cut ends against the stop
lock I cut each let to the exact length of 29 1/4 inches.
Now you can see here I've selected
all of my boards for the table top.
Everything looks good, I like the way the grain
looks together, and what I'd like to do is
gang them up clamp them together,
and then actually cut them at about 73 inches.
I'm giving myself about an extra inch just for error
and things that I may confront, problems I may have.
Now it's a good idea if you have extra-long
boards to move them left or right whichever way
necessary to avoid any flaws, any knots or anything.
I got a big knot on this side so I just push my board over
a little bit more so that when I actually cut these
down we're going to get that knot out of there.
So a few different ways you can approach this,
again you could always use something like a
jigsaw and just zip across and trim each piece.
You could do each piece individually on the
table saw with a miter sled or a crosscut sled,
and if you have a sliding compound miter saw
you could just zip them off that way too.
Unfortunately, I just have a 10 inches compound
miter saw so I can't actually clip these down.
Each board's about six or seven inches wide.
One really cool option, I don't know
if you guys have ever seen these.
This is a clamp and tool guide it's basically got
a built in clamp, and it's a straightedge at the same time.
So you space it for your work, set it up,
it was a little bit short there, bring this
little lever down and boom you've actually
got your pieces clamped together,
and you've got a beautiful straightedge right there.
So you could take your circular saw
or even a jigsaw and get a nice straight cut.
The system that I prefer to use which is a nice
luxury to have is Festool Circular Saw System.
Doesn't require any clamping, you essentially lay it down.
This edge marks exactly where the blade's going to cut,
and that's what I'll demonstrate right now.
I use saw horses to catch the boards
as they fall well most of the boards.
(table saw whirring)
I like to double check and make sure I have enough width.
I give myself about four extra inches.
Now when doing a wide tabletop like this
you are almost going to confront this issue.
That's how to joint this face, how to flatten
the face without cutting it down to strips
that are small enough to fit on our jointer.
I've only got a six inch jointer so if these are
over six I'm going to waste a lot of material,
or I'm going to have to do a lot of gluing back
together when it's all said and done.
So for me the best thing to do when you're
at the lumber store pick the flattest straightest
boards possible, and then this way when we
get them back to the shop we can
actually avoid using the jointer altogether,
and just pass these a couple times through
the planer and get a relatively flat board out of it.
When we join everything together if there's
a little hump here or there we can pull it down
with a clamp, and if anything persists even
after the glue up at that point we could just
sand everything nice and flat.
If you're good with hand planes
you could do that method as well.
I give the boards a few passes on
each side to clean up each face.
Since I want the top to be as thick as possible once each
of my boards has two clean faces I stop planing.
After planing we head to the jointing.
Jointing extra-long boards can be pretty tricky.
So I like to break up the process into three steps.
First I establish a nice stable edge that's
pretty close to 90 degrees, one or two
passes up against the fence does the trick.
Now that I have a nice stable edge that won't
rock too much I joint the board deliberately
away from the fence so that I can focus
on my downward pressure and balance.
I find that I get a much straighter edge this way.
Then take my last pass right up against the
fence just to ensure a perfect 90 degree edge.
I finish up by making sure the edge is perfectly square.
After jointing I clean up the last edge at the table saw.
I only remove the material that's required
to clean up the edge no more no less.
(twangy music)