Marc:Today I'm going to serve myself a big,
heaping spoonful of humble pie,
as I bring some of my favorite projects back into
the shop and see how they faired over time.
(groovy brass music)
I remember when I first started woodworking how
disappointed I was when I noticed that joints
that were nice and smooth and flush,
and felt perfect when I first finished them, a couple weeks,
couple months later you could start to feel little ridges,
and it just didn't feel as perfect as it used to.
I was really disappointed to find out that
my projects were doing this, and I actually
thought it was something that I was doing wrong.
Then there was a point where I was at David Marks' shop and
we got to see a lot of his things that were in his home,
and the projects that I've seen on the show,
stuff that I've really admired.
I would go up and touch them and all of a sudden I was
like, "Wait a minute, I can actually feel ridges here,"
and it brought it to light that this is normal,
this is the way things happen with wood.
Wood never stays still, it's by nature going to expand
and contract, and swell and come back down.
There are going to be times when joints that normally might
feel smooth decide to lift, so that they actually are
expanding at different rates and you can feel those ridges.
I have a ton of examples of that here.
Part of my goal here today is to make sure that you
understand that a lot of these things are normal, and you
have to expect them to happen, and anticipate them happening.
We'll also go over some things that are not normal, and what
we could have done to prevent those things from happening.
First up is a mahogany barstool,
it's actually David Marks' design.
Really great design, I think it looks great,
it's very sturdy and its held up really well over time.
The two areas that I'll point out that could be
potential issues, and where you should expect issues,
are first of all the joints of the little footrests here.
They're not really jointed to the
legs with any sort of wood joinery.
We used these brass dowels that connect them
with just glue, otherwise it's a butt joint,
so you can't expect it to be perfect forever,
you're going to see some separation here over time.
That's exactly what we have.
It's hairline, it's very, very tiny, but it's there.
You have to be aware that that
may occur with this type of joint.
The other thing is, since it's brass and
this material is wood, they're going to
expand and contract at very different rates.
There's a lot of times, and it may
change over the course of a year, depending on the season
but you should probably be able to feel that metal,
either an indentation or it will sit proud of the surface,
you'll just feel it with your finger.
And again, perfectly normal.
Looking at the top, here's another area
where you might expect to see something.
Where these legs punch all the way through, unlike some of
the furniture that I've seen at Bed, Bath & Beyond where it
looks like they stamp on the tenons, which is real classy,
here these actually protrude all the way through,
and since the grain is running vertical and the
rest of the grain of the seat is running horizontal,
you've got to expect those to expand at different rates,
so you should be able to feel those ridges,
maybe even just a few weeks don't the line you'll
start to feel them differentiating from each other.
But again, it's all normal, this is something
that happens with any piece of furniture.
Next up is my zebra wood contemplation bench.
This is a fun little design, kind of different.
The joinery itself was a little bit strange.
It's sort of giant, open mortise and tenon where the
mortise itself is formed by the top, which is made of,
well was originally made of three separate pieces that
we glued back together to create this open mortise.
The tenon, which is built in to the leg here,
is actually screwed into the body of the top piece,
and then capped off with some wenge caps.
It has really held up pretty well.
I drove some three inch screws in
there, so it's certainly strong enough.
The place where you might expect to feel some abnormalities,
of course, just like with the bar stool,
is this place where the end grain pushes up
through the face grain of the zebra wood.
Perfectly normal and I do feel a slight ridge there.
Fortunately this material hasn't really moved
very much over time, so it's in pretty good shape.
The other thing is we've got three pieces joined together,
so you might expect, if you run your finger across,
to feel those joints over the course of time.
Fortunately, because this zebra wood has kind of
an open pore structure, you don't even know what is
a joint line and what is just the way the grain runs.
That's actually really good, and it turns out
to be a great wood for this type of project.
Same thing goes with the legs.
These legs, although they may look like one
single piece of wood, it's actually made up of two,
because I didn't have boards that were wide enough.
I was just able to match the grain in such
a way that it looked like one piece of wood.
Really not a whole lot to say about this
piece because it's very basic joinery,
but what we do feel on here is perfectly normal.
What we have here is what I like to call a gadget station.
It's a prototype, so I bent some of the rules,
I did a few things the way I normally wouldn't do them,
and it turned out to be okay but it let me know what I want
to do when I do my second round of the real gadget station.
It's primarily made with jatoba, and in a case like
this with a cabinet that's going to have a lot of
gadgets inside of it, and chargers and things,
there's a good amount of heat build up in there.
If you make this out of solid wood you may have
a problem in the future as the heat builds up,
things expand and contract, it may cause issues.
I opted to make the entire thing out of plywood
and I just made own my veneer for the jatoba,
so it gives it a really nice solid wood look.
If you open it up I could show you where I did
wind up going wrong, and things I'm going to
fix in the future generations of this piece.
First of all, all this is ply, it's all very stable,
the shelves have held up really, really nicely.
The top is in really good shape.
This piece here, this was just a design concept.
I thought when this is hanging on the wall that
it might be cool if you put a laptop on there,
and you could stand there and type away, but who does that?
You have your laptop in your office or
it's sitting in your lap on the couch.
It really turned out to be an interesting concept
but not really, in reality, a great idea.
One of the main issues here are these chains.
Since this sheet here is actually a piece of plywood,
driving a screw in there and having all this weight
on there over the course of a couple years really
puts a lot of strain on those layers of ply.
If you look really closely you could see that it's pulling up,
and I really think some day those screws may just pop out.
That's definitely something to consider,
and thankfully this didn't go to a customer,
this is just in my house and I can monitor this,
and it teaches me a lot about what to,
well in this case what not to do in the future.
This piece is what I like to call an ottoman tray.
We had a big ottoman in the living room
and no coffee table, so you need something
for serving guests and things like that.
This worked really well.
It's just a very simple sheet of maple ply
surrounded by a carved padauk frame.
This is one of those cases where you have to realize that
any time you encase wood in a frame, it's going to expand,
and it's going to blow out the joints at the corners,
and that's why you need to use plywood, because it's stable.
Had I used solid wood it would have been a nightmare,
but since it was ply it's nice and stable.
The joints are all really tight, I actually used
splines inside the joint to keep them together.
These ridges, this is really good.
Even if you, in most cases, you do everything right,
you still will probably over the course of time
feel a ridge where these miter joints are,
and I don't, so we lucked out a little bit there,
but you stack the cards in your favor if you
do something like a spline or maybe even just
biscuits across that joint, really, really helps.
The inlay here, this little sun design.
Inlays are always interesting because they are dead flat.
They feel perfect when you first make them, but then
eventually you really start to feel some texture differences,
maybe even some low points and high points.
I've got a few of them here, the outside of this is in
really good shape, but there's one spot right there would
I could start to feel that the ply is a little bit higher
and this part of the sun must have sunk down a little bit.
But hey, that's life, what are you going to do.
I don't even know exactly what I may have done to
cause that, so can't help you there, but the bottom
line is a little bit of that is perfectly normal.
This is one of my favorite pieces that I've ever made.
It's my Asian-inspired inlaid hall table.
The inlay on the top, much like the inlay on
the serving tray, you can feel a little bit
of texture here and there, perfectly normal.
The top here is a piece of ply with
a veneer piece of figured maple.
It's got a wenge trim around the outside and
it sits in a rabbit, and this beautiful
jatoba frame encases the whole thing.
And again, you have to use ply if you're going to
encase it in a frame, otherwise you blow it out.
It actually sits a little bit proud of a frame too,
which is something that's a little bit unique.
The one thing I really want to point out here,
and it's something we talked about on the
serving tray as well, are these miters.
Over the years I've done a lot of frames and things,
and if you've done a lot yourself I'm sure
you've noticed that they almost always seem to
want to separate, to some degree or another.
A couple years down the line, run your finger there
and you feel that they've moved a little bit.
Judging even just from this one experiment,
if you call it that, from this one particular project alone,
the fact that I put this wenge spline in here has kept
all four of these joints dead one, I mean perfect.
I don't feel a joint at all on any of them.
That's enough evidence for me to say that
any time I do a miter joint it is absolutely
going to be supplemented by either a biscuit,
a spline or something to make sure that those are kept
perfectly level for the entire life of that piece.
It worked really well in this one.
Other things that we could take a look at ...
Well, here's a good lesson.
Again, this was a prototype.
In the future if I were to make another one of these
I would make sure that I have the right lumber to do it.
In this case these legs required a very thick,
I believe it was even a four-by-four
block to cut these compound curve legs,
and in order to do that I had to glue up multiple pieces.
And what happens when you do that
and you cut a leg with a curve?
You sometimes, I don't know if you can see this here,
but you sometimes get a wacky joint where
it goes from one piece to the next piece.
That doesn't look good, especially not in the front and
right on this really, really, visible front left leg.
In the future that's something you want to
make sure you avoid, kind of as an aside.
Again, prototype so it wasn't really that big of a deal.
Let's take a look at the drawer here.
The drawer was sort of an experiment in simplicity and design,
just trying to come up with something that wasn't dovetails,
I wanted to do something unique, that had a little bit of
a visual interest that you don't normally see in a drawer.
That's what we wound up with, with these stainless steel
dowel rods that are serving just like a normal dowel,
pushed straight in to the front of the piece, and there's
a little strip of wenge trimming out the front edge.
It gives it kind of a unique look,
and that's held up really well.
I don't feel any of the joint at all.
I do feel these metal pieces, just like in the stool.
Whenever you have that metal and wood combination
it may feel perfect on day one but it's
probably not going to feel perfect later.
But all that is perfectly normal.
The drawer itself just slides into this compartment.
There's no guides, the side of the
drawer compartment is the guide.
There's a little play in there, and that
was intentional, that was there on day one.
It still slides nice and easy and the internal compartment
here is made out of plywood so we don't really expect
that to swell or anything, so this drawer for the
duration of its life will probably slide perfectly.
This is usually how I spend my time in furniture stores.
Anyway, while we were under here, in the shop lighting,
which is much better than the lighting inside the house,
I noticed a little hairline fracture,
in fact it's small, it's hard to ...
Okay, it's right here on the front,
where it looks like there's a little bit of a split.
I don't know how that's going to affect
this thing over the course of time but it
definitely is something to keep my eye on.
Why something like this would happen, I don't know.
The bottom line is wood has internal stresses on it.
As seasons change, and we laminated two or three pieces
to get this leg to become as thick as it is anyway,
so it's hard to say what causes those things but the
bottom line is you have to know that they may happen,
it's just part of the game that we play.
It's not terrible, but I will keep my eye on it and if it
starts to spread I may have to do something about it.
Maybe take it back in the shop, sand it down a little bit
and put in some CA glue or something, that might seep
deep down and hold that together, maybe even epoxy.
But right now it's not significant enough to
even do anything to treat it at this point.
Many of you may notice this piece,
this is the crown jewel of my collection.
This was featured in the beginning,
I believe of our first intro to the show,
and it looked fantastic in that picture didn't it?
It's a good thing we got that picture when
we did because it doesn't look so good now.
Let me show you some great lessons,
and this was one of my first,
or maybe my third project that I did, or second project,
that was like a serious woodworking project.
I saw in a magazine, they had this great
plan for a chess board or a checker board,
in my case, because I don't know how to play chess.
Anyway, it was a chess board with storage.
Hinged top, it was a really great design.
You could make these cove mouldings on the table saw,
which was a new technique for me, and I thought it was great.
The one thing I didn't like was the fact that the
chessboard itself had a gap all the way around it,
and I guess maybe I didn't read the
instructions all the way through and I was like,
"Who would want a gap there? It's just going to be a place
"where dust and dirt and things are going to fall.
"Why would I want to do that?"
So I made the top out of all solid pieces,
and I framed it with this beautiful walnut frame,
and I didn't realize what they were doing was putting
a spline between the frame and the body of the chess board,
with some extra room to move so that as this piece expands,
in this case it's going to expand and contract this way,
as it does that it has the room to do it.
I didn't give it that room, so let's take some close up
shots and show you some of the magic of wood movement.
The way this is constructed, the sides were
created as one piece and then we cut it.
Last minute you cut the top off and
that creates the whole top portion.
Looking at the joint here on the side,
this is pretty good, this held up pretty well.
There's a biscuit holding it together, and I'd be
pretty happy with that if that was everywhere.
The problem is the top.
Since I ignored the rules, this has separated dramatically.
I don't know if you can see how, we've got about
a quarter inch separation where the wood has decided,
"I'm stronger than this frame, I'm pushing my way through it."
We've got a gap that starts about here,
and increases significantly over there.
The miter here, although it's still together it's sort
of just slid, very interesting the way it split apart.
And we've got one to match on the other side.
Right here, this one starts even further
back, and look at the size of that gap.
And again, just pushed this frame piece forward.
Didn't really separate it.
It's a very interesting lesson here that
that glue can still keep a grip, yet slide.
It's actually separated yet the pieces haven't
come apart completely, which is kind of amazing.
Now another interesting thing,
and I'm guessing that my joinery and gluing skills
weren't really that good at the time, because there's
a lot of separation on these actual squares themselves.
I can feel major ridges, and in fact I can separate
the pieces with my fingers just by pushing.
I have a feeling that if I push too hard
they would just fall all over the place.
So, really embarrassing, actually.
I've tried to sell this at a yard sale a few different times.
In fact I peeled a 10 dollar sticker off of it.
I'm glad that it didn't sell, and I'm glad it
looked like crap and no one wants it,
because it's a really good lesson and reminder
that I can pull out for occasions just like this,
to show you what happens when you break those rules.
We talk about it all the time, we talk about wood movement
and not violating those rules of wood movement,
and we try to follow the rules,
but how often do we see a really great example
of what happens when you ignore those rules?
And that's exactly what this is.
I think I'll keep it around, maybe it will be
just a little comic relief once in a while,
but it is certainly a good lesson in wood movement.
As a professional woodworker you might think
that I know a little bit more about the
final destination of the pieces that I create,
but the reality is a lot of times you make something
for someone and you never hear from them again,
so you really don't know how that piece has held up over time.
The only experimental pieces that I can monitor
over time are the ones that I made for family,
and I really do use them as experiments.
Every time I see them I touch it and feel it and examine it,
and see what may have gone wrong over the course of time,
and that's where I learn the most important lessons.
As a new woodworker you may be in even more of
a trouble situation, because you haven't made
enough projects to accumulate them in your house,
and use those as experimental pieces of furniture.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of what things you
can expect, what things are normal and not normal,
and really a lot of it is just the way wood is.
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go bury this in the back yard.
(burp) Huh? You have a lid that- Let's do that again.
(drumming)
Nicole:[unintelligible] (laughs)
Marc:Serious? Are you serious? (laughing)
Well it look- (stuttering) What the hell happened?
Nicole:Thanks for filling out the survey.
Marc:(unenthusiastically) Yeah, thanks.
Nicole:You're just doing this to get clips!