What's up guys? I'm Brad Rodriguez from Fix This Build That and today
I'm going to show you how to make this bent lamination cheeseboard.
It's really cool project with a new process that I've just done and I had someone to shop to help me out
Johnny broke from Crafted Workshop, and we also did a project for his channel tell them about it Johnny? Yeah?
So I built this kind of modern wall art just using some scraps that I had lying around
Really happy with the way this came out nice big statement piece and can't wait to get this hung up my house. Absolutely
So you can check out both of the projects,
I'll show you how I did this right now, and I'll leave a link down below to Johnny's channel as well alright
Let's see how we did it
This lamination is a technique to create curved shapes by bending and gluing together thin strips of wood
I started the build by picking out some walnut mahogany and cherry boards that were all around an inch and a half thick and
20 Inches Long
I planed the boards down until they were smooth flat in the same thickness which ended up about an inch and a quarter
For dried bent lamination the strips need to be an eighth of an inch at most
But at the same time I wasnted them as thick as possible to reduce the number of pieces that I needed to get the width
I set up my bandsaw to make a strong eighth of an inch cut so that after sanding
They would be right at or just below an eighth of an inch
after every few cuts
I would check the edge and make sure that it was still fairly straight
if you start getting a curve in the board from the bandsaw
Take it over to the jointer or use a hand plan to get that flat surface again
I cut down the cherry walnut and mahogany and these pieces were rough on both sides at this point
So I needed to get them flat
I got to test out the new 18-36 drum sander that I got from Jet Woodworking
I changed out the paper from 80 grit to 120 grit which is going to let me go straight to the glue up
we ran the strips through until all the mill marks were gone and this new dust collection baffle on the Sander works awesome because I
Could tell it collected more dust than my old sander there was little if any dust smell in the air
This process could also be done on a planer
But you may need a sled to plane those boards under an eighth of an inch
Now Johnny's friend Grant Batson was here also
And he was stacking all the strips as I jammed them through and it made short work of it
After the strips were milled I split them back into their wood types
Then I arranged them as best as I could from dark to light and overlapped a few pieces of the transitions for an ombre look
~Alright, so if I do that so it kind of 36 inches~
at this point
We started laying out the curve and figuring out what the shape would be to make the form
We settled on a gentle sine wave style curve with four points of inflection over 20 inches
I cut two 20 inch long and eight inch wide pieces of 3/4 MDF to make the bending form
I drew two lines one inch apart down the length of the top piece
Then I split the line up into thirds and put a finish nail at each inflection point to hold a strip for making the curve
We first tried using a strip of wood for making the curve, but it didn't really bend consistently then Grant had a great idea
This is the thing I love most about collaborating with other people
You get some more brains in the shop to help you solve these kind of problems
I marked the curve with the metal ruler and then I glued and screwed the two pieces together
for an inch and a half tall form
To cut the curve for the form I went to the bandsaw
And I just followed along the line in one smooth cut there's no need to stand the form here
I'll be using f clamps to clamp the strips into place
So I drilled a series of one-inch holes in the form for the clamp heads
The holes were positioned so that the clamping pressure would be at a right angle to all the curves
The form is attached to an MDF base to help with clamping
To keep the glue from sticking to the MDF I covered the base in the face of the form with packing tape
Then I screwed them together from underneath
And now comes the fun part the glue up
After a dry run we decided to do the glue up in two stages one half at a time
We got all hands on deck
and then the three of us
Just spread the glue out on the half of the strips
We lined the strips up one by one onto the form and then started clamping the layers into place
working from one side of the form to the other
We used a dead blow mallet to flatten the glue up as necessary
This was so cool to see how the wood just took the shape of the form this bent lamination is really fun to do
After about three hours we took the clamps off, so we could add the second layer and let the whole thing dry overnight
Now apparently I missed a few workouts
So we decided to just actually leave the first layer in place and add the second layer after
sanding the outer face of the first half
We did the hectic glue-up routine again and added the second layer of strips now one issue
We did see is that there were some small gaps where that outer strip of the first layer had been compressed by the clamps
Using an additional strip here without any glue on it or a similar clamping caul would help avoid this issue
We wiped off the excess glue as much as possible and then added some clamps vertically to flatten the glue up before leaving for the
night
The next morning we took off the clamps to reveal the full board
With this many layers in the lamination there was almost zero spring back when we took off the clamps
I was kind of surprised here
But we pried the board off the form of the putty knife and we were greeted with a lot of uncured glue
I wiped and scraped off as much as I could and then we put a fan on it to harden and skin the glue over before
planing
After it was dry
we took it over to the planer for a few passes to clean up the faces
Any gaps that we'd seen before ended up disappearing after we flattened the board and the glue looked great.
I took the board back over to the drum sander for a few passes just to get rid of a tiny bit of snipe that had
gotten there and I got down to a final thickness just over one inch
Then I used a card scraper to clean up the outer edge of that last glue up which had some flat spots from the clamps
Now by the way here a couple parallel clamps make a great knock down end vice
The next step was to trim the ends of the board
I laid the board back in the form and I used a large carpenter square to reference the back of the form and draw parallel lines
for the ends
To cut the ends I used the off cut from the curve of the form to get a solid contact with my miter saw fence
I made some minor adjustments, and I clamped the board down and cut both ends to size and this method works really well
So make sure you keep those off cuts from the form
To finish the edges I used a sixteenth of an inch roundover bit and went around the top of the bottom of the board
I rounded the corners my hand and then sanded the whole board up to 220 grit
I raised the grain with water in between grits you can see that technique in my edge grain cutting board video and I'll link to that
above and in the description
Finally we were ready for the payoff
Oiling the board I use straight mineral oil here for the first coat and just watch that grain come to life
~ Acoustic guitar strumming ~
After the first coat I finished the board off with the beeswax and oil mix that gives the board a great sheen and some extra
Water protection. I'll have a link down below in the description to all the items that I used for this board
Now this was a great project to understand bent lamination.
The same steps and techniques can be used to make all kinds of different curves and shapes
I'd love to hear in the comments what you plan on making with your vette lamination project.
I want to give a big thank you to Jet Woodworking for partnering with me on this build.
That Jet 18-36 drum Standard made this project possible I'll have a link down below in the description where you can find out more details about it
if you're new to the channel
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What you think about it. Until next time guys get out there and build something awesome!