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(upbeat music)
Marc:Well, right now, I'm in the middle
of a project for a client and it's a pretty fun one.
Part of the reason is the client himself.
It's someone who really appreciates
good quality hard woods and good craftsmanship
and one of the most important features
of any of my projects that I've ever made for him
in his words is me signing it,
which makes me feel kind of good.
That's really the kind of customer you want.
So this project is really cool and I wish
I could show you guys everything from start to finish,
but I'm under the gun, got a little bit of a time crunch here.
But there is one aspect to this project
that I thought would be really cool to share with you
and that involves the doors.
The doors are basically going to
to be made from 6 panels.
Each door has 3 panels and the panels themselves
will have a birdseye maple background,
the actual - as it starts to raise up will be birdseye maple
and right in front of it, like sort of at
the very tippety top of the raised panel,
is going to be walnut.
So I had to think about how I would approach this
and I've never really made a raised panel
made out of 2 different woods like this,
but it was compelling, I thought it was interesting,
so this is one approach that I think is going to work.
So I have a strip of walnut up here,
which is oversized.
The maple itself is exactly the size
of the panel that I want
so what I'm hoping is with this
little thin strip of walnut at the top
my goal is to hit it with a raised panel bit
and sort of expose the birdseye maple that's under here
so that eventually we'll have a nice ring
of birdseye maple with the
raised portion being from the walnut.
I just used regular tight bond glue
to attach these and press them.
In fact, I glued 2 at a time, put the glue on both sides,
sandwiched them together with
a layer of paper towels in between
just in case there's a little glue squeeze out
and then just clamped
the heck outta this thing overnight.
And when it's all said and done,
you've got a pretty good bond there.
So the real unknown is how this thing
is going to handle at the router table.
I've got a brand new bit,
it's a big fat Eagle America bit,
they make good stuff, so I'm hoping
it's going to be sharp enough
to last me through all of these
and I'm going to be taking these cuts -
I'm not gonna be really jamming this thing in there.
I'm gonna take it a little bit at a time
and work my way up to the point that the
full raised panel is shaped and looks good.
This walnut that's on here was
very specially selected for this.
I had to stabilize it with some epoxy and CA glue.
Absolutely gorgeous when there's finish on it.
It's gonna look amazing.
I just have to be careful that
I don't destroy it with the router.
So let me show you the setup over here.
So what I've got here is a full raised panel bit
and all I did was remove the back cutter.
I don't really need the back cutter
because my panels are gonna be thin
and once the raised panel cut is made
I should be left with a 1/4 inch lip here
which is the perfect size for
the groove in my door frame.
So if I had the back cutter on there,
that's really for thicker material
that would also cut a little groove into the back,
still giving me a 1/4 inch lip,
but it would be just more material than
I really need for this particular setup.
So I just removed everything.
This bottom portion is just part of the shaft
so there's no need to have any sort of
bearing or nut on there.
And I'm going to use my fence here as the guide.
And before I start her up,
I just want to show you what
the setup is going to consist of.
I've got a miter gauge here so that
when I make the cross grain cuts
I'm nice and safe.
The long grain cuts I could make
just using my push paddles.
A couple other things I want to mention here.
When you make the cut cross grain,
there's a real good chance you're
gonna get tear out some place over here.
If you are going to get tear out,
the likelihood is it's going
to be during the cross cuts
so it's nice if you could run cross grain first,
turn it left 90 degrees, then run it this way,
then do this cross grain.
Now, see, each time I turn it
after doing the cross grain cut,
the next cut removes any of that tear out.
So just as a general strategy you always
want to hit that end grain first
and turn it each way and this way
I'm going counter clockwise with each turn.
Also, this bit is huge.
Look at the size of that.
The more meat on this bit
the slower that bit needs to run
otherwise, you know, you could very
well have a disaster on your hands.
So what I'm going to do is
set my router for the lowest speed.
(upbeat music)
(bouncy music)
Now I've done all 6 of panels
and just to show you the strategy,
I already have my 1/4 inch lip here
so the bit is as high as it's going to go.
So all I need to do now is,
in slow increments, just keep moving
the fence back, exposing more and more of the bit
until I'm at pretty much where I need to be.
I don't want to go too much, you know,
past where this cutter head ends
so as soon as the profile starts
cutting into that walnut, we're pretty much there.
(bouncy music)
So I think I lucked out.
I mean, despite having some materials here
that are notorious for being problems
when you're routing, things like birdseye maple,
those little eyes, they tend to pop out sometimes,
this is a relatively weak area
on a piece like this, for instance,
also would be notorious for just blowing out
and you've gotta be real careful with it,
but we lucked out.
All 6 panels came out really nice
and let me show you how it's
gonna look on the final piece here.
All right, so check it out.
Now these panels are going to
make a major statement for this piece
and that was actually something that
the client wanted so I was able to find
this piece of walnut here that had
this really just gnarly-looking bark
and once this gets finish on it
you'll see it's actually very splotchy
and it's kind of something that
normally this would be firewood.
But I thought if I could somehow stabilize this
and get it mounted to the birdseye panel,
I would actually have a really
cool-looking product out of it.
So, in fact, this particular area here,
this just real soft, punky sort of wood that was here,
I stabilized it and I was able to cut
that board in half and do a book match.
So these were actually all cut from the same piece
and they're sequential and I just basically
cut them into 6 pieces this way.
And you can see, the pattern is close to a mirror image.
You've gotta consider through the thickness
of a piece of wood, something like this
is not gonna stay consistent
all the way through its thickness
so what looks nice and wide here actually
thinned out quite a bit by the time I got to this piece.
But the pattern is pretty outspoken.
It's going to be really just eyecatching
and that's exactly what the client wanted
so I think this is a pretty good success here.
I'm happy with this.
So that's all I have for you today.
Hopefully you see at this point that
even a piece of wood that at first glance
just looks like it's junky and is really
good for nothing but fire or smoking meat in my case,
you know, there could be a beauty
locked behind the surface there,
something that really can make
your next piece stand out.
I mean, really if you think of
woodworking as an art form
and you think of what our palette is
and what our materials are, you know,
if we were painters the wood would be our paint.
It's our way of expressing
and doing something interesting.
So it doesn't have to just be walnut,
maple, cherry, you know, straightforward and simple woods.
It can be really wacky-looking things.
Let the wood itself bring an element
of something interesting to your projects.
And even if it's just as simple as grain direction,
we talk about that all the time.
It's very important to "paint" with grain direction
and paint with the color of the wood.
And when you find something like this,
that's a gem, that is not something to throw away.
So hopefully you'll be able to incorporate
stuff like this into your projects.
Thanks for watching.
(bouncy music)
Marc:You know, it occurred to me recently
that since so many people don't
actually watch our show on the website,
they might not know about
The Wood Whisperer Store.
And we have a lot of things with our logo.
We slapped my face on everything.
I mean, really, who doesn't want
my face on their chest?
So we have t-shirts, we've got hats,
we've got mugs, we've got travel mugs.
I've even got these little push sticks
that I had custom made recently.
I designed the handle myself so that
it's something that's really, really super comfortable,
it's got our logo laser engraved
right on the front there, very cool.
The other thing we have there is
our most popular seller, is my DVD.
It's A Simple Varnish Finish.
So anybody who's struggling with finishing
and you just want a, you know,
basically the silver bullet kind of finish,
this is what I recommend and I go through
the entire process in this DVD.
Now I tell ya, my parents are very cool about all this.
They do all the shipping, the packing,
and everything pertaining to orders at
The Wood Whisperer Store so I have them
to thank for it, but frankly they're getting bored.
So I would like to keep them busy.
So if you wouldn't mind helping me
keep my parents busy and giving them something to do,
go to Shop.TheWoodWhisperer.com
and check out some of the
cool stuff we have there.
Thanks.