About : standard furniture table
Title : standard furniture table
standard furniture table
(lively acoustic music) marc: for those of you who don't know what we're doing today is akind of a last minute thing because that's how we do things. the gadget station projectthat we're working on now requires a certain joint at the top here. let me just show youthe picture real quick. you could see that. okay.
nicole: i got it really good. now at the corners here you have a lot of choices for joinery. where two pieces of wood meet you could do dovetails,you could do box joints. you could just a butt joint and peg it with some screws or maybe cap off with dowels or maybe even use a squarecap to cap off the screws.
there's a lot of ways that you could do it and my first instinct was dovetails and then i started thinking about it. i'm like you know, i'mkind of sick of dovetails. it's sort of treated asthe end all be all joint and it's really not. there's a lot of great ways to join wood that don't involve a dovetail jig or cutting it by hand.
i decided to try something different. since this piece has a verygreene and greene element to it i figured why not do something that's very greene and greene-esque? now to be honest i've never made a greene and greene piece of furniture. i've never studied greene and greene other than seeing pictures. i may do things that are not
the way you're supposed to do them but i just am trying to reproduce what i've seen in photographs. the joint for the top of the cabinet if this were the top piece and this were the side piece is gonna look like this. where you're looking at is basically i guess you can call it a box joint
but it's only got threeteeth to it, three fingers. like that and the key here is that they stand proud of the surface. on both the side and the top. nicole: yeah. marc: the other thing is they're rounded over on the corners. it gives it a very just, i don't know, it's kind of a very neat interlocking look
and i've seen this in somegreene and greene pieces. a lot of times the base of a structure will be designed like this. drawers will have thissort of joinery on it. the good thing is it'sincredibly easy to make. that's really goal today is we're gonna take two more pieces. this is just alder. it's not ideal becauseit's very, very soft
and you'll see why it'snot ideal in a minute. in fact i'll show you whyit's not ideal right now. there's the joint and you see inside there? my chisel although it's sharp tore the crap out of that because it's very soft so the fibers tend tocompress instead of slicing. even though the jointcomes together real nice
and it's completely hidden. i'd rather not have thatif i could avoid it. very simple joint butit's gonna be integral in keeping this thing together. the other thing whichwe may or may not cover because obviously i haven't done it here is i will be pegging this. i'll be putting a screw in here like that and then two more here and here,
and i'll cap them offwith a square ebony plug. not that big. that would look funny. we'll cap it off with a square ebony plug and that really is sort of the essence of the greene and greene look. this joint just works so much better for what i was trying to do and it made more sense for the piece
thematically i guess. here are two of our pieces of alder and i'm gonna start by laying out what would be the male. nicole: will the plug be flush or proud? marc: the plug will be proud. the great thing about thegreene and greene stuff is everything is about, it seems to be about textures
and different planes. the whole piece is not flat. nothing is really flush. it's all about stuffthat's in different planes. when you look at somegreene and greene furniture you'll notice that all theprofiles and everything it's just very ... you can't even figureout a good word for it but it's a lot of stepjoints and things like that
that just give it more texture and life. nicole: someone asked, "why are you using "screws and not just dowels?" marc: you could use dowels. you could just use screws. one of the reasons is i want to cap it off with a square cap and i don't necessarilywant to use a square dowel and i could always drill the hole,
drive in a wooden dowel and then cap it off with an ebony plug but i could also use because it's gonna completely hidden i'd rather just use a screw that i feel is gonna bea little bit stronger and the piece is gonnahave some weight on it and it's gonna have to supportits own weight as it hangs. there's nothing wrongwith using either way
whatever your preference is. in fact i'm not 100% decided that that's what i'm gonna do but mostly likely i will use screws. we're gonna make the male, all right? essentially we have to first of all decide how big the middle piece is gonna be and how big the two outside pieces are. now this is five inches across
and i like the middle one to have a little bit more substancethan the outer two just to be slightly larger. i just kind of like theway that look comes out when it's like that. the middle piece is two inches and the outer ones are 1 1/2 inches. i'm gonna set myadjustable square to 1 1/2. on the end of my workpiece here
i'm just gonna scribe my line. it's easier if i'm down on here. marc: okay. there's 1 1/2 here. flip it over, do the 11/2 on the other side. here's the thing. i'm gonna use the table saw for all these. if you were using a handsaw you might approach thisa little bit differently.
for instance when i establish the back end you might want to use amarking gauge or something so that you could split the grain. i'm not really gonna haveto worry about that too much but maybe we'll use it anyway. this actually is if you'regonna cut it by hand, this is a pretty goodjoint to do that with. a great joint to learn on. here's the other thing.
normally if you're making dovetails and you want these two boards to be perfectly flushedwhen they're joined together you could put your board like this and then you just traceor you get your knife and you trace across but we want them to stand proud remember. we want them about a quarter inch proud. i need to add a quarterinch to that distance.
just for fun, i put my board up nice and even with the other board like so. this does not have to be perfect and that's why i'm being sosort of relaxed about it. now i take my adjustable square and i'm gonna add a quarter inch. then i'm gonna trace thatquarter inch all the way down. you could have obviously just measured
so you don't have two lines to worry about but that line is notinteresting to us anymore. what i really strongly urge you do is mark the parts that are gonna be cut and what's not gonna be cut. on this particular piecethose go and those go. now on the other piece the only thing we know or that we want to worry about at thispoint is this back line.
i want to use this pieceitself once this is cut to trace just like youwould with dovetails when you take your tails,put it on the other piece and mark the location of the tails. i want to use the piece itself to make the markings for the female end one thing i do have is the depth which i'm gonna transfer here since my adjustablesquares are already set.
nicole: someone asked whatkind of square that is. marc: i believe this isone that lee valley sells. nicole: is it starrett? marc: no it's not a starrett. it's very close to a starrett though but it's made by lee valley and it's just a little four incher which is actually my favoritesize for just everyday use. for now let's leave the female untouched.
that sounds funny. let's head over to the table saw and we could start cutting this, and again, you could usea handsaw to do this, it would be relatively simple but i'm gonna try and do ita little bit faster today. do i make a full-scale model, prototype for all my projects? of certain things yesbut not of everything.
for instance, the legs on this piece were something that i reallyneeded to see in 3d space before making a determination on whether it was somethingthat would look right. this picture is good. this picture gives me my proportions, i'm happy with it but it's not the sameas seeing it in person and plus i couldn't draw in sketchup
what i wanted to see in person. i took some blanks again i've got a bunchof alder sitting around so it's great for making test pieces, and i actually cut a sampleleg out of the alder. this in 3d space now i cansort of evaluate the shape, i can hold it up to sample pieces and see what the look is gonna be like and if it's something that i really like.
if i want to go withit or make any changes. i'm able to add all these little extra angles and adornments to it. the little cut at the top was something i decided to add in. it's pretty cool, i like it but i wouldn't have beenable to get that far with a pencil and paper. this is a full-scale mock up of the leg
but i'm not gonna do a full-scale mock up of the entire piece. yesterday i came into the shop to work out the joinery on this piece. i wasn't sure what i was gonna do and i came up with this idea. i haven't really had muchtime to refine the process but there are certainlya lot of smoother ways you could probably pull this joint off
and if you have any ideasfeel free to yell them out but that's probably ... if it seems a littledisorganize that would be why. okay so what i'm gonna do for this is just use a standard miter gauge. any standard miter gauge would work. in fact where is the onethat came with the saw has a much bigger face on it and that's gonna be advantageous here
because we need to run thepieces over the table saw upright and the bigger the face is the more support it's gonna give you. mine is actually relatively short so we'll work with it. the thing is this line, this line is a guide. it's not absolute. we don't have toabsolutely hit it perfectly
because whatever this is we're gonna transferit to the other piece. it's the relative relationship of these two pieces that's important not the absolute spotthat this line's located. i'm not really all that nervous about hitting that perfectly. i don't really worry about it that much. okay so all i want todo is make a single cut
to establish the side of what's going to essentially be the tenon, but here's another thing to save us time. that tenon is gonna be dead center, right? it should be dead center and the best way to do that is to utilize our fence as a guide. i'm gonna bring the fenceright up to the workpiece and in fact i just realized
that i wasn't thinking properly what i should have beendoing the whole time. i just get so nervous. i should have had the fence here and made my adjustment this way. you adjust your fence untilyou are right on that line which makes life a whole lot easier. excuse that blunder. now i just bring the piece
while keeping it up against the fence, bring the piece to my miter gauge. i'm sitting here wondering why this is so much moredifficult than it was yesterday? it's because i didn't do it right. nicole: pressure of the camera.marc: it is. it's so nerve-wracking. all right so now the fence is the guide. we will cover in the next one,
i know someone's gonna say we probably shouldn't have this piece wedged between the fence and the blade. in this case that piece of material isn't coming off yet. we're just cutting a curve and the piece is gonna be stable so we don't have to worry about that but i'll show you a trick-
nicole: someone's yellingkick back, kick back! marc: no kick back, no kick back. okay, so it's clamped in place. the great thing about clampingit is nothing's gonna move so you're really eliminating the possibilities of kick back here. the clamp absolutely critical. (buzzing) now i'm letting it go.
i have no desire to pull that back through while that blade's running. what i've essentially done here is made the first cut and i let the table sawdefine my line for me on the side of that, forlack of a better word i'm calling it a tenon. capish? nicole: you just cut some blank.
marc: finally! okay so i'm gonna turnit around this way now to get the other cut and again, that was why i was kind oflaughing at myself before because this is how youget a perfectly centered finger there by using the fence this way. again, same routine. push against the fence. clamp it in place
and make the cut. now we have those two blinds established. now this piece before i transfer the marks to the female piece i want to make these two cuts. sorry. okay, we have to nowremove this material here. the good thing about this is the table saw isestablishing our cut lines.
they're gonna be nice andsmooth, nice and straight. i'm gonna adjust the height of the blade and again, i don't wantto go right onto it because at this point i canmangle the tenon a little bit and i don't want to do that. i just want to remove enough material that this little piece pops off. there we go. that's probably good enough.
you see that? now we also have to align the fence. same thing as before. again, this is where thiscut will determine how much the material sits above the surface. we were going for that quarter inch but if we're slightly moreor less than a quarter inch it's not the end of the world. i feel pretty good aboutthe location there.
now people were talkingabout trapping the workpiece. that's exactly whatwe're gonna do right now. if i clamp this in place, make this cut and that little chunk isgonna stop right here. what's gonna happen to that we're gonna have a bulletthat's gonna shoot back, okay? had i made that cut wewould be in trouble. that's why i made this little very simple plywood little fixture here.
it's three pieces ofplywood, screw it together and just filled the holes. this side has ... these are from rockler. they're those little t-bolt jig dillies. i use that, it fits right over the fence and i could tell you and in fact you don't necessarily even need one. as long as it's a good slip fit
you might not even need this. simplest thing you cando is use a piece of wood that's clamped to the fence. the idea here is we'regonna set the distance before the blade so thatwhen we make our cut we'll go through and by the time we get to the blade that little cut off piece will sit in between the fence and the blade
with a little bit of room to move around and that's gonna reduce our chances of it flying back in our face. i'm gonna tighten this down, i'm about an inch and ahalf ahead of the blade. now we're gonna reset the fence. i'm just gonna quicklymake this adjustment here and we should be ready to rock and roll. okay so i've got theworkpiece nice and tight.
(sneezes)i've got the blade lined up. bless you. now we're comfortable that as soon as we movepast the guard here that that little cut offpiece is gonna hang out there. remember, it could still fly. you could still have a little bit of a projectile here. in this case you'll see
that i really make an effortto stand out of the way. eye protection. put on a face shield if youfeel really nervous about it. in most cases it just kind of hangs out and sits between the blade and the fence. here we go, next cut. there is the little cut off. for anyone who didn't see the cut off kind of just hungout here for a little bit
and then moved out tothis side of the stop. now that cut you cansee is nice and smooth, just as smooth as the other one and we've only got alittle bit of material here to remove at the corner. that's gonna be no problemto remove with a chisel. all right? let's do the other one. nicole: someone says there'sno projectile with a sled.
why would you [need] a sled? marc: because i, (chuckles)i disassembled my sled. nicole: disassembled? marc: no disassembled. yeah, i took my sled apart because i just wasn't using it anymore. i can make the same cut as before, same exact thing. this is good for barbeque.
okay, so that's the male. we'll worry about cleaningup the details on that later. this process now is not exactly as critical as when you'redoing dovetails let's say and you have to get those lines perfectly because you really haveone shot to nail it. this one if things are slightly off i could just nudge it over a little bit and take another a little bit off.
maybe i could just usea chisel to pair it down if it's not perfect. i'm gonna take this piece here and transfer my lines over. in fact, we're gonna dothe same type of thing where we're gonna have anautomatically centered cut. normally you would want toput them in the position, in the position that they're going to actually be assembled.
in this case sinceeverything is dead center i don't have to do that. i can just stack them like this. nicole: can i do something? marc: what are you gonna do? nicole: hi vic! marc: vic's there? what other famous people do we have nicole: andy, [obama].
marc: andy hobbes. nicole: dan and-marc: how's norm? nicole: norm! marc: okay, andy has a dog named norm and he's adorable. he has giant ears that can help him fly. okay so i'm gonna take these pieces. i'm making sure of my fingers that they're nice and evenon the front and the sides.
nice sharp pencil and i'm just gonna strike my line across. again, these are just guidelines. the center piece is whatwe're getting rid of so when we mark this, we actually want to remove the material right up to this pencil line. see how easy it is to getconfused on this crap. this crap.
our kerf we want to runinside here like so. makes sense? good. in a lot of times in this i will actually do a sort of sneak fit. i will make adjustments untili get it to fit perfectly. the other thing that you can do this is where there's a lot of variability and preference on how you handle this.
a lot of times i'lljust make one kerf cut, make the second kerf cut and i'll come back with a coping saw, remove the excess and then use a chiselto clean up the inside. once you make these two kerf cuts there's other things that you can do. you can go to the bandsaw. you can actually justcontinue to use the table saw
i think you guys have probably seen norm do this a hundred times where you just make sevenor eight different kerf cuts and remove the bulk of thematerial that way as well. whatever you want to do. maybe you have a dado blade and you want to go that route although a dado with agrain in this direction you need a lot of supporton the back of the board
to avoid some major tear out. i'm adjusting the height again just down to the line. we're gonna use ... no matter what we dowe're gonna use chisels to clean everything up. won't worry too much about nailing that line perfectly. now once again, i'mnot removing any pieces
i'm just doing a kerf cut so i'm gonna go right with the fence. here's another reason i try to avoid using this thing sometimes. i need a new one. this one, the face is notas even as it used to be so when i reference off of it sometimes the top piece sticksout a little bit further and the major flaw here with this one was
putting the bottom piece this way and the top piece on top of it. ideally the outsideface of a jig like this should just be one solid piece. if anything i should putanother auxiliary piece on the outside. right up to the line. that's pretty darn close. this is alder too.
this is another example ofwhat i was talking about with the dovetails. because it's softer, you can sometimes make something fit that you would not beable to do with hard wood, with a more dense wood. you can kind of get an unrealistic idea for how much forgivenessthere is in a joint. that's my patented chin pressure move.
okay, right up against the fence. tighten down the clamp. let's make our cut. that one hit a very annoyingloud tone, didn't it? let's flip it over and hit the other side. nicole: someone says, "wouldn't this be easier with a handsaw?" marc: maybe. yeah, i mean it depends
on how good you are with a handsaw. the real thing is theway to think about it, i mean yeah, you certainlycould have used the handsaw. it just depends on how consistent you are with your handsawing technique. remember, we're gonnahave to do this four times on the case. if you're not that comfortable with it, i mean it's a great ...
like i said it is a greatexercise to do with hand tools because it's relatively simple. it's not as complicated as dovetails and it's a good place to get practice. i'm doing it with a tablesaw because i want to. yeah, because honestly when i'm doing this i really am gonna wanna bang out four of them quicklyand get them finished. nicole: someone asked,"what do you plan to do
with the real pieces sincethey will be much longer than the sample boards thatyou're doing right now?" marc: they won't be that much longer. they're about 20 inchesso they might be double and in that case it's reallynot that much of an issue. what i probably will do though is with this particular gauge as i clamp, the pieces are not sitting as flat to the table as i want them to.
they're kind of pulling back a little bit and i don't want that. what i'm probably gonna do is either get ... i don't know where it is. i've got a couple miter gauges but get a miter gauge withan auxiliary fence on it that's dead on 90 degrees to the surface of the table,
and that's gonna keepme a lot more supported and also by having a higher fence when i have a taller workpiece it's gonna be more stable that way. this is just like i saidfor the practice cuts to establish the joinery itself. yeah, you can definitely make improvements on what i'm doing right here. this is awfully short.
there's not that much difference here between dovetails and what we're doing in terms of the options that you have. when you do dovetails andyou need to remove the space between the tails and pins, there's tons of ways you could do that. the bottom line is you just need to get rid of the material so you can come back with your chisel
and chop it so it's niceand clean and straight. this is really no different. there's just as many ways to accomplish it doing it with this. it's just personal preference. i've seen david marks do an entire set of dovetails on his show using the bandsaw for the whole thing. some people think that that's crazy
but it worked for him and it seemed to be a decent idea. did anyone decide what they want me to do to remove the waste? anyone care? with my teeth maybe? (chewing) all i'm really doing on the bandsaw is making cuts like this
and getting myself more and more access so that eventually i couldjust make a straight cut across the back, and i'm staying away from the line still. okay, that's all. super easy. i didn't really talk about it before but i did mention that whenyou make that first cut if you need to make an adjustment
and just take a little bit more off you have to decide howmuch is close enough before you want to come back and just use a chisel to pair it away and make the fit absolutely perfect. usually you can get pretty darn close without removing all that material. it's really easy. if you have a good lightsource to hold it up
to a light source and you're not really gonna get, be able to see this with a camera but if you hold it up you can really see even though i didn't have allthese material removed yet i could just kind ofeyeball it with one eye, and by looking at how much light peeks through on both sides i'm able to tell whetherthat thing was gonna fit.
i didn't even mention itand i probably should have but you could see the fit of the tenon or in this case the male and the female hereis pretty darn good, okay? that's kind of what we're looking for. honestly i'd like it to be alittle bit tighter than that but it's good enough for now. the first thing i want todo let's take the male. this one's gonna be easy.
put them in the work bench and this is where you'll see the fact that soft woods can be a pain in thebutt to work with here. i'm just gonna grab ... not that one. that one needs to be ... that one needs some surgery. yeah, nicole did locks of love.
marc: where she donated her hair which was really cool. okay, the material here, this is just real simple. there's just a littlechunk right in the corner so with a grain running vertically if we start chopping this way first you have a chance that youcould just split that board right down which is not the goal.
what i like to do iscome in across the grain and then start severing the fibers so that by the time i do my vertical cut the material's all out of the way. i use the surface here as a reference. you may not even need touse any weight on this. you could probably juststart to chip it away if you want to go like that but you want to referencethe flat side of your chisel
right against the surfacethat's already dead flat. just make sure you keepyour fingers behind your cutting surface. just a few light tapsis really all it takes. (tapping) once it's loosened you could usually justpry it out of place. with this one we now justhave to chisel to a line. i'm gonna rush this.
i would probably be alittle bit more picky if i had the time. this is where a lot of times if you have, sorry i'm moving around here. like i said i'm rushingthrough a lot of this so things that i normally would do i may have forgotten to do. this is where if you're usingyour little [dilly] wacker which is the official name for this.
you can put the line hereand cut across the grain. what that does is not only stops you from getting any tear up, but the most important thing that it does is it gives you a little channel in which you could put your chisel into and rest the chisel in there, and you could straighten thatline out with no problem. this line needs to be on both sides.
the reason because if youstart chopping on one side and you go all the way down. if we start cleaning thatup and go all the way down chances are we are notgonna be dead straight. i've never been able to geta cut like that dead straight so i'm not even gonna bother trying. i want my border line here. i want them on both sides. now we have a mark on both ends.
last time i did this wheni made the other joint i did cut across. this time i avoided itand i'll show you why. when you do that you'll notice people who cut hand cut dovetails a lot of times some peoplewant to get rid of this other people are proud of it. you see the extra lines. this side, yeah.
you see the cut lines that go across? a lot of times those lines are the mark of hand cut hand crafted work so people leave them there. i wasn't sure whetheri wanted them or not. this time i'm trying one without and i'm kind of regretting it because it is a really good guide for telling you where to place the chisel.
absolutely. if you are uncertain about your ability to hold. hold it straight getyourself and i was ... i'm glad someone brought this up because i was going to and i forgot. get yourself a nice big block of a quarter that's been milled perfectly square at least on one corner.
the face and this end here and then lay that on top of the board. it's even helpful sometimes if you put a little dab of hot melt glue or maybe double wrap sandpaper. something to stop it from sliding. give it a little friction. place that right along your line and clamp the heck outof it so it doesn't move.
then all you need to dois reference your chisel on the back of thatsurface and then tap away. it's awesome technique. in the interest of timei'm just gonna kind of blow through this real quick. all right, this is just amatter of putting the chisel right on the line and going for it. a lot of times when i don'thave a line as a guide i will put it on the line
and i'm gonna slowlyas i bring it vertical i'm putting downward pressure. because i want to givemyself a little bit of divot, a little divot there that will help me keep this in position, otherwise it's gonna be really hard. there is a very light trace line. the other option would have been to take my adjustablesquare as i went across
and i could have gotten a knife and use the knife to cut the line. of course the other option beyond that would have been to use this guy before the whole thing got to this point. now that that light line is established i'm actually gonna take the hammer and just make sure weestablish that line even more. when you're cutting this
it's okay not to be dead straight. perfectly vertical. if you are ... do you have a good viewof the whole chisel? nicole: yes.marc: okay. if you're out this way you're not gonna get enough material out but if you are perfectlystraight that's great but i always find that if youaim for perfectly straight
you're gonna end up one side or the other. you're gonna be either thisway or that way slightly. i like to have my error and purposely put myerror in the direction that's gonna be useful to me. i always tilt a littlebit in toward the material because it's okay if that material is slightly hollowed out. it's the end that we'remost concerned with
because that's where the fit is gonna either be obviouslyon or obviously off. you'll see that i do justa little bit tilt inward. what i like to do is go about halfway. not all the way down, just about half. you could see i didn't go all the way. it's just about halfway here. we stopped right about there. you could see where thefibers compress and pullout.
we'll flip it over. i'll get it clamped in place and then we will take a break. i like it to face me. make no mistake about it. there are definitely moreaccurate ways to do this. making sure that thatscribe line is perfect and that's this veritaswheel marker gauge thing is great for that purpose.
right now i'm just relyingon some manual dexterity and a little bit of luck. in fact, you know what? i'm gonna finish this upwhile we're doing a break and then we'll go from there. i'm gonna just basically repeat the same exact thing idid on the other side. okay, okay, okay. i think we could probably just ...
everybody's got the idea here. a little bit more. where is my other piece? that is pretty decent fit. got a little burning on that one that we would have to sand out here. now the key is and this is the fun part, to round over all these edges so that we get this type of appearance.
any way you're comfortable doing this that's the way you want to do it. for me i like using acabinet maker's rasp. i'm gonna do all four sides. i usually start by givingmyself a 45 degree chamfer. i hold the tool 45 degrees to the edge. (scraping) i'll do the same thing on this side. it's a little awkward doing it backwards.
the great part about this stuff is when you do this by hand it's a lot more forgivingthan you might think. there's a kind of skew on an angle here so you don't harm this other piece. we'll do the same thing on this side. when i'm carving like this as much as it might be betterto have my eye protection on it's very hard to see
especially when you'resweating through that and it really distorts my vision. that would be why i'm not wearing in case anyone's wondering. once you establish a chamfer and in fact that's not that bad looking. if you really wanted to keep that look that looks kind of cool. it just depends on what kindof look you want to establish
but that's not bad. what we're going for is a rounded look. at this point you have a45-degree chamfer or roughly. we went from one corner toessentially two corners. we've got a corner up here and a corner down here. i want to break both of those corners now. let's start by breaking the one on top. let's break the one below.
by doing this it's kind of systematic and although carvingand things like that is free form carving is really ... you get the impressionthat it might be a lot more self-control and a little bit more artistic ability is required to do it. the truth is it's just a series of more mechanicalmovements than anything. at least the way i break it down.
same thing on this side. break the top. you could see how if youcontinue in this pattern breaking each line down, you'd eventually endup with a semi-circle. do the corner. do the bottom now. we have what looks likea rough semi-circle. i just take a sanding block.
in this case it's one ofmy flexible sanding strips. i'm gonna round it over like this. it's gonna be ... that one's kind of messed up. long strokes that aregonna blend all of those little corners that weessentially created. now you're gonna have tofine sand this at some point so that you don't see all the scratches but i'm just gonna kind ofrush through it really quickly.
i suppose if you're really clever i don't know that you'dbe able to get the sides but you could potentiallyuse a round over bit and route it so that it islike a perfect semi-circle but i don't know. that's not fun. see? i'm jacking it up. i guess someone could say it's also
not fun to not use a handsawto do the original cuts. to each his own. nicole: someone asked,"wouldn't a block plane "give a finer surface than a file?" marc: it would but it wouldn't do this in the way that i want to do it. i really like using thecabinet makers files for rounding over and things like that. if you were using a block plane
you would have to do a series of cuts across the grain that could very easily leadto chip out in the corners. if you're real good and you have control over that corner and chew a little bit of material away from the corner first before doing your strokes across the grain you certainly could use it
but i really like the sort of ... doing this by hand givesit a certain hand carved. i mean it's even and it's consistent but there's still a handcarved essence to it and it may just belittle tiny imperfections that create that and i really like that look. all right, there is the design. okay?
nicole: pretty.marc: now the one thing i did on this one i didn't give myself, of course rushing. things like this are gonna happen. there's a little ... it's acceptable, i guess that's okay. i won't mind to be more proud than that. i want to see more of the side like if you look at the other one it's a little bit more substantial.
i like that better. to me that makes more ofa punchy sort of point. that's it in a nutshell and i think if we had time we would be able to go in to the next part but as you could seewith my practice boards i haven't hammered out that process. i'm probably just going to use the hollow chisel mortising chisels
since they're four sided and (buzzing) basically punch through. that's gonna establish the plug area for the ebony plugs. okay, just like any other chisel and in fact i don't want touse that hammer to do that because it will mess up the face. nicole: you don't wantto use that one either? marc: not that one either
because that will mess up the chisel. all right, i'm just gonnause this little wooden guy. you just try and keep it straight. really all you need to do take it in far enough toestablish the borders. this is a tiny one. i don't even know that i have a chisel small enough to handle that. yeah, i do.
at this point with that perfectly square surface established you can just go in andremove the extra material so that you can then puta square plug in there. the other thing we're gonna do is because i'm gonna screw through there i'm gonna pre drill a hole and then drive a screw through and then cap the end with a plug.
really the hardest part of that operation is getting a perfectly square, four cornered square in that location and this is just onereally quick way to do it. that's really all there is to it.