- [Marc] The Wood Whisperer is sponsored by
Powermatic and Clear Vue Cyclones.
Okay so today, we're going to talk about fixing mistakes.
Not that I ever make them.
♫ Hit it ♫
(lively music)
For other people who make mistakes
you may want to know how to fix them
so you could advice them on how to make their errors
not as visible.
Here's the thing about mistakes,
honestly, we all make them
and you've probably heard the saying that a good woodworker,
the sign of a good woodworker is his ability
or her ability to fix mistakes.
It's not that you don't make them,
you just know how to fix them so that people don't see them.
There are times where you have to have a do over
so there are some mulligans in woodworking.
But I would say about 99% of the mistakes that happen
are fixable and repairable to a level that your client
or whoever you're giving it to,
they will never even see it.
If you're going to repair mistakes,
there are a couple of things that you're going to need,
your best friends.
Number one, CA glue, cyanoacrylate glue, super glue,
whatever you want to call it
and then also this is essential.
Super glue does dry quickly
but not as fast as I want it to
and I use a quick set activator.
Most of this come with,
if you buy one brand of the glue,
you usually have the same brand that they sell
aerosol activator
and that allows the glue to cure up immediately.
If you're holding a small piece in place
little dab will do you, spray the activator on there
and then it's just immediately dry.
CA glue is essential.
A good quality filler,
Timbermate is my favorite brand of filler
very effective, doesn't shrink,
comes in a lot of good colors,
and those colors are a fantastic match for the woods
that they're supposed to match.
You'll also want an iron.
- [Nicole] Where did you get that?
- The store.
(lively music)
Let's say you're routing a workpiece
and you get a little bit of tearout
in the middle of the workpiece.
As you're going along you just hear that sort of
sound that no woodworker likes to hear
is that "crank" as you're routing.
That means you lost a big chunk.
If you can save the chunk, great
because you're going to use it,
we'll do that in a little bit.
If you can't save the chunk,
sometimes the only thing that makes sense
is to use a filler and that's the example
that I've got here.
Take a look at this piece,
so we actually have two and I know this is maple
so it's going to be a little bit difficult for you to see
but where my finger is here, that's one that's got
the filler placed in it already.
So we'll use that in a second to fast forward
but right here you may not be able to see that too well
but there's a gouge, pretty good size gouge.
What I'm going to do is use Timbermate maple beach
and pine flavor, pop that lid off.
This is water based by the way
and as it dries up,
how many times have you bought a thing a filler
and you're going to open it up
and it's completely cured, right?
What a pain in the butt.
This stuff is water based so if you do that
and it's cured because the water evaporated,
spray some water in there, put the lid on,
come back in an hour and it's usable again.
All I'm going to do is grab a little bit of this
good stuff here.
Okay there's my gouge,
put that right in there.
Now later we're going to look at a similar gouge like this
and do a wood repair
but right now I just want to focus on filler.
Now I don't use filler all that often
but there are just times where it really is
the most sensible solution.
So you want to overfill of course like that,
make sure there's enough in there and then let it dry.
It's water based, it does dry fast
but not fast enough for a demo.
Let's look at the one that's already filled.
I'm just going to sand it back.
If you look at the color match here,
this is what I love about Timbermate and we're zoomed in.
Obviously that's going to be a lot more noticeable
when you're zoomed like this but once it's finished
this stuff does take stain and you pull back
and you look at this whole leg
as a whole you're not really going to see that.
I wish I had the right colored pencil for this
but I've done this in the past.
One of the things that makes filler not look so good
is the fact that it matches the background wood
which it does pretty well here.
What it doesn't do is it doesn't gives us those fine
grain lines that run through it
so if it's a really big flaw
like this probably isn't that big of a deal
but if it was a larger surface area,
if you get a colored pencil that's closely matched
to the color of the grain lines,
you can actually trace those grain lines in.
Now I'll tell you what,
this is a colored pencil I stole from my son's playroom.
It's not the right color but if you go to the craft store
you could pick up some really, try to get one
that's as soft as possible
and get them in a range of browns, all right.
Then basically look at where the grain starts and stops
and you can actually try to carry that grain line through
however looks natural.
Believe it or not, again not the right color
so it stands out a little more than I would want it to
but if you pull back and look at that,
that actually will help disguise this
and make it look like real wood.
The key though is you got to quickly put
a fast drying finish on that or the pencil
will just kind of wipe off.
Just a little bit of shellac or lacquer
probably isn't a bad idea for something to seal
that color in.
(lively music)
How about a misplaced mortise?
Has that ever happened?
It's never happened to me but I've heard
it happens to people so the key with something like this
is to simply fill it, right.
You've got a hole, you need to fill it.
The problem is a lot of people make the mistake
of thinking "Well, all right let me cut a little piece,"
because you would have a tenon going in there
so let me cut the tenon and put the grain
running this way.
The problem is if you do that,
you're going to have end grain showing here
so it's going to be a lot more noticeable
than if you do a long grain joint.
I just basically cut some scrap, sized it down
so that it would fit nice and snug
and then I also taper the ends.
A lot of people may have trouble getting this piece
cut perfectly so there's no gaps.
Don't worry about cutting it perfectly,
cut it about a 16th of an inch oversized,
grab a piece of sandpaper
and just give yourself a little angle
on both sides.
Little bit of a taper
and that's going to allow me to coat this sucker with glue.
I'm doing this very quickly, bit of rush.
Like this,
of course you'd want glue in the mortise as well.
Put it in and because you have those ends tapered
as I hammer this down it's going to take up the slack
on the outside edges.
It's really is just a superficial repair, all right
it's not a structural thing so as long as I don't see gaps,
I'll be happy.
All right, so you would let the glue dry on that
and then you will just plane it flush with the surface.
There's one that I've already done, it's in place,
probably wasn't as careful with it as I should have been
so I'm just going to grab a block plane
just clean that up a little bit.
Okay,
and that is a pretty acceptable repair in my opinion.
In fact if you didn't know that I did that
and you just looked at that piece,
you probably wouldn't know that it even happened.
Now if my mortise is in the wrong spot,
I could relocate my mortise.
Even if part of the new mortise,
a lot of times that is what happens,
you're just a little bit offset
so your new mortise will go into part of this repair,
that's fine.
It's solid wood, it's going in the same direction
as the rest of our leg.
If we route into it,
there won't be any associated problems with it, right?
So that's a great way to fix your misplaced mortises.
(lively music)
Let's say you got a little bit of chipout.
Maybe you're doing some edge routing
and I got a piece of tape here
just because I didn't want to lose the piece.
Here's the thing, whenever you have chipout,
if you can recover the piece
and a lot of times you'll be on your knees
with a magnifying glass looking for it
because finding the chipped out piece saves you a ton
of time and effort because that piece
is already perfectly cut to fill the void of the chipout.
Right now just so you know this I created
with a chisel so I gouged in here and then flaked it out.
So it's not exactly the same thing you would see
but you get the idea.
This is a good use for CA glue
but if you look real close here,
that is a dead on match for the fit right
and that's why you want to find this piece if you can.
Let's put a little bit of CA glue on there,
by the way CA glue comes in a couple different viscosities,
different thicknesses.
I like medium and gel for error repairs.
Occasionally I do have a calling to use the thin stuff
but man is that stuff watery.
Not great for repairs in my opinion.
Okay, so I could just put this guy in place
if I want to, like this.
Now a lot of people will put the activator on the other end,
I don't want to do that because I want to make sure
this gets a lot of pressure.
The glue gets distributed
and then I could use my activator.
Okay, so I'll use something like
little putty knife like this
put some diagonal pressure down
and just hit it with a little bit of the activator.
Now you'll definitely have a little bit of squeeze out
to contend with but that could easily be sanded
or chiseled away.
Normally I'd give it a couple more minutes to cure out
but you would sand it nice and smooth and look at that.
It's a repair on top of a repair,
let's pretend that didn't happen, can we do that?
Give it a little sanding.
All right so there will be no visible line
when it's all set and done because it's lock and key,
it fits in perfectly.
(lively music)
There are times where you're not
going to recover this piece, you can't find it.
That is what this example represents here.
Right at the corner,
just nothing really you could do about it.
All right, popped right out,
now you're cursing, you're very upset.
Sometimes in order to fix a mistake
you actually have to make the problem worse
so what I'm going to try to do
is actually turn this into a surface that I can work with.
Right now it's useless to me
but I want to take a piece of scrap and glue it in place
and I need a nice flat area to do that
so you can do it with a chisel or you can use a plane.
I'm not left handed so this may not go so well.
Once you have a nice flat surface we now have something
we can work with by taking another piece like this.
Now you may use yellow glue
if you have a way to clamp this securely
but once again CA glue is my hero.
For this one, I'm going to put the glue on the work piece.
Okay, a little bit of glue on the work piece,
quick set activator,
spread it around a little bit,
you only have a couple of seconds.
That's good, now this is just a big old chunk of scrap
I had laying around.
You probably would want to size this down
to be a little bit more appropriately sized for this
because now I've got a lot of material to remove
and that becomes a lot of work
but I typically with a smaller piece
could then come back to this.
I may very well knock this off
and that's why you don't have as much material here.
If it's a smaller piece you don't have as much to work
and you could just kind of pare away with a chisel
or take light passes with a plane
but I don't know, let's see what happens.
If it comes off, it comes off,
just to understand why.
Notice how well that's holding just with that CA glue,
all right and that's why you could be
a little bit more confident in a repair like this
that it's going to be fine.
- [Nicole] Go on.
- Really, you want me to go?
- [Nicole] Yeah, go on, I want to see it.
- Nicole wants to see it, I better go then.
Let's keep going.
I was just trying to stop while I was ahead here.
- [Nicole] I want to see this.
- Not the best match in terms of the grain
but for a quick job it's not too bad
and of course we use a saw to trim off the edge here.
All together though we made the problem worse
to allow us to put a nice patch in
and the results aren't too bad.
(lively music)
A lot of times you drop a workpiece right?
That can happen or you drop something on it
like "Oh my gosh, I dented my workpiece."
Here's the great thing about a dent,
a dent is nothing more than compressed fibers.
Unless the dent is so severe like that
where you've actually separated fibers,
you can actually get most of this to spring back
because you've effectively just crashed fibers
so we need to do something that brings some life back,
helps those fibers spread apart a little bit.
All right so I've got a light dent here,
two side by side dents here
and a really severe dent that I don't think
is going to repair very well,
this will be probably more visible with water.
Here's the other one.
I can barely see it myself right there.
So I'm letting a little bit of water sit on there
while I prep a blue shop towel or some kind of a wash cloth,
whatever you have is fine, just something absorbent
that you can soak with water.
What we're going to do is steam the dents.
Now we know that wood expands with moisture right?
And that it can expand quickly if it's hot moisture
also known as steam.
If we can very carefully steam these dented areas,
we may be able to get the wood fibers to spread out
and fill up that gap and the dent goes away.
Let's do just that, I'm going to focus on
some of these bigger ones here,
I'm trying to remember where they all are.
Sometimes by the way the water …
It's like straight from treating right there,
the water will in of itself cause expansion
even without the heat so you may have trouble finding them
because they've already expanded
but there's a good one right there
let's steam that bad boy.
Now, if your board is really thin, you have to be careful,
too much moisture, too much heat
you can actually cause a little bit of warping to occur
but usually on a big solid piece you're okay.
You can also be a little bit more careful than I am,
I'm being very messy with this by using the pinpoint
tip of the iron and just kind of focusing
in your flawed area.
It's not a bad idea but for the sake of a demo
I'm just kind of being sloppy.
What are you doing honey?
Ironing my wood.
You can see we still have that really severe dent
right here.
It's a little bit better but like I said
crashed fibers are one thing,
fibers that actually get sever
because it was such a deep impact
that's going to be a problem
and that's going to be hard if not impossible
to use the steaming method to get out
but you can certainly make it less of a big deal.
Here I've got a little bit left on this guy,
I don't know if you can really make that out.
This is also a pretty rough board
so there's a little bit of material left right there
that I didn't get it to reform.
Maybe a hair here just a little bit barely detectable
and I had a spot that was over here fairly light dent
that I can't even find anymore.
All of these with a little bit of sanding,
so three light duty dents gone.
This one on the other hand,
if you could see is the wood fibers
or the sanded dust fills that up,
it's a little bit too deep,
but we can make it look a little bit better.
This is a technique that I would use for light duty dents,
not really heavy stuff.
You can also use the steaming technique on plywood
if you need to.
Plywood a lot of times even if it's a nice looking surface,
just dragging it around the tools and the shop
where your workbench
and the shop can put these little hairline scratches
on there and sometimes before I sand
if it's noticeable enough before I give it my final sanding
because you don't want to sand plywood
very aggressively right?
A lot of times what you can do
is do a little bit of the steam treatment
on any noticeable scratches.
Let the fibers in that top layer veneer
puff up a little bit,
they'll get very rough and then you could do
your final sanding and a lot of times that final sanding
is a lot quicker and easier and those mistakes
or those little flaws just go away.
Don't be too aggressive about it on plywood
because you don't want to like reactivate the glue
in the veneer layer, you don't want to warp the plywood,
you got to be careful with it.
For very noticeable surface flaws,
you can spot treat them and actually get a decent result.
(lively music)
Now one thing I'll address, a lot of people
when they talk about repairs, fixing repairs,
they'll talk about glue and wood dust.
Take the dust of whatever wood you're working with,
get a little bit of CA glue or epoxy, mix it together
and that can be a sufficient repair.
That can work in some instances
but I don’t really like it as a finish.
The reason is because this type of material ...
(compressor turns on)
I need to turn off my compressor.
It's a real shot people.
- [Nicole] We're alive.
- Yeah, doing real woodworking here.
- [Nicole] You're talking about the CA glue.
- Yeah, okay.
The problem that I have with that is CA glue, epoxy
even type on, these things don't accept stains
so even when you put on a clear finish,
clear finish still imparts a color change to the wood.
If you've repaired a certain area
then you hit it with finish or worse yet
an actual stain, a lot of times it becomes an eye sore.
Even if you have the wood fibers mixed with it,
they're not absorbed, they're just wood fibers
in a liquid suspension.
Now, and even with epoxy,
a lot of times you look really close at epoxy
that's been mixed with saw dust,
look really close at it, it just looks like saw dust
suspended in a resin.
So you have to be careful about how and when you use that.
Not sort of a different story
because you could put a little dye in an epoxy mix
and you could fill a knot and a lot of times
knots are so darkly colored
that if you use a clear material to fill a little flaw,
it actually will be hard to see,
because it's just showing the dark color beneath it
but hopefully that prepares you for any mistakes,
common mistakes you might confront.
Maybe in the future like I said
we'll do an updated version based on feedback.
How do you repair this, how do you repair that,
but this should get you going for some really basic repairs.