How To Build A Coffee Table | Pro2Pro Premiere | This Old House

Hello everyone, welcome back to another pro 2 pro. Today I have a great project for you and a surprise and a great guest, say hello to Mr. John Maliki, yeah, how are you? Kevin, yeah, so everyone knows

this

guy. I'm sure if you don't look at him, he's everywhere. This is the raw material. What are they going to teach me to do? Yeah, so we're going to do a waterfall live edge

coffee

table

, the basic design is

this

lab is going to do the top and one of the sides, yeah, right, that's the waterfall, so what we're going to do is to start by preparing our slab, which was actually previously flattened. you can buy slabs like this at the lumber supplier that come resurfaced so this one is already flat on the top and bottom we're just going to remove the bark okay that's great how do you want to remove this?

So let's start with a chisel and hammer and when the wood is dry, the bark usually comes off quite easily. Yeah, I nailed it, so we have a knife that's a cool tool. What you're going to do is take it. We're going to pull it down and we're going to get rid of just a little bit of the bark that's left here on the slab, so you just tilt it down and you can see with a very light tap, you peel it off and Make them with a curved blade as well. , so once I start peeling and I see the SAP wood on this side starting to come out here, you know you're pretty good and I can finish it with the sander, but let's hit it. with a pretty aggressive grit on a sander, I like to use the smaller head, this is the 90, it gives you a little more control on something like this, how cool you have it there, we have 40 grit on this one, right?

Benny Hill music so it's all about the color as soon as the darkness disappears and you expose the lighter wood you're there yeah I really like to see that SAP living the edge live so this is an aggressive grain yeah , very aggressive, we'll hit with a lighter grain, it'll really start to polish that live edge, it'll give us a little more shine and I'm really starting to look like a good fine piece hitter, okay, so this will be our top right, yes, beautiful, yes. We have some nice cathedrals in the center here, so what we're going to try to do is drop our waterfall down to where the Cathedral is on either side, but to do that we have to find some kind of reference line. because there's no square edge on a slab, so you have to create your own, so what we're going to do is take the center of the slab at a couple of points and I'll see which one I like. way it looks best, then I'm going to run a reference line through the middle, so now we're going to connect the dots and what we're doing here is giving us something on the slab to reference.

You like, yeah, yeah, this looks good, so we have a center line, let's take a reference line off of it. I mean, this is the widest part of the slab, so we're going to get as much as possible. I'll align it to the center and then transfer it and then we'll reference everything else outside of this line which is the end of our

coffee

table

, yeah, and then a typical coffee table that I like to have around 40 inches. stadium mm-hmm gives you a nice solid top and we're right here in this area so all of this is a reference and because this is a rough piece of furniture in this live edge, you can choose, you know how big and how wide We want it, so we're going to continue here, we put a little mark on it and the same thing, this is going to be our reference mark for the top, which is awesome, so now we know we're going to be square on both sides of that table.

Yes, and this will help you a lot if you want to work with Live Edge because you're basically giving yourself a reference because what's going to happen is if you cut this square and you measure it because there's no square edge that you can still. make a straight line but you can cut it crooked and then you make a big mistake and you won't do it, you can't fix it after the fact, okay, that's the length of our top right, it's going to be a waterfall, so this is It's going to be part of our leg right here, part of this is going to be our leg, yeah, so we're going for a mid-century modern style, like you know, in the height range, so we'll be in the ballpark of 18 inches. and we're not going to cut this one yet, we'll wait until we cut this cut here that way, everything references, you don't have to worry about the blade cut and that you know could ruin things. up because the blade has a thickness that matters when you're cutting this the way we're going to do it right is the top leg has it all right so we're ready to cut so we're going to use a chain saw to this, that way we can use our exact reference lines, the chain speed on the chain saw line comes with a little depth gauge on the side, so we'll set it up and make several passes that way. we're not putting stress on the blade, a lot of people just make that cut like they fly through it, the blades get tall super fast, you know, less, uh, unless you put the blade on longer, it's not good , not good, starts like half an inch.

Cut the grapes just before, so we'll cut them at 90 degrees first. Many people think you would cut the miter now, but by doing the 91, you will relieve a lot of the tension that might be on the blade. that could make it come out a perfect 45, so we're going to cut it straight first and then we're going to cut our 45 degree bevel, it just relieves a lot of the cut or a lot of the stress that's going to be there and decreases the chance. to screw it up, which I've done several times, go all the way down, okay, yeah, and the nice thing about doing it this way is I don't have to move the track, we're just going to loosen the gauge here on the saw.

There's another one here in the back, tilt it out for 45, tighten it again as you can see, there's a pretty decent cup here, so when I referenced it, what happened was you got nice and tight, nice and tight, yes, but as you come. towards the outside edges it's starting to fall off so I'm going to flatten it a little by hand and then cut it back, it shouldn't be too hard to fix so we've got a number five hand plane here this will help me flatten both quickly . sides, so you're going to work the high sides first, check it out, we're looking much, much better, let's go ahead and just trim this 45 real quick on both parts and it should have fixed the cup problem, just fine-tuning it. just adjust it, we're going to do a full depth cut here because we're barely taking anything to bring a blended square here to give it a nice, crisp look, no light coming in through a perfect 45 and now you can see the miter much better, right?

Hey? perfect and get that beautiful waterfall coming in right, so we're just going to put a little mark here, give us a reference of where we're going to place our Domino. Now this is not very important, we will use the sloppy configuration. On the Domino that way we have a little bit of play from left to right so we can line up our edges here, which is the most important part once it's on the clamps, so just find a mark here, use whatever type of ruler you have. want. I'm going to give you something like what I said to reference from now on, you can keep it nice and even if you want to keep in mind that the live edge taper on the underside comes from the edge comes from the edge you.

You're going to want to avoid it, you don't want to go all the way here, you're going to dive right on the outside of that live edge, so we're going to make it so you pick it a three inch number, yeah. pick a number from left to right, so now we just flip it over, we'll transfer that mark to the other side, we have the XL domino here, we're going to place our fence, it has a positive stop at 45 degrees for us. and we have our plunge depth set and we're going to use the loose tenon setting that way we can move this thing around and get the grate on top lined up perfectly, so we use our reference mark here, a little window.

We'll give you that back and forth game, yeah, and that's how we'll be able to look at the front of the table and then line up our grain pattern on the top, so look at the grain on this side, we're pretty. Okay, but what you can see here is that since this is wider than this part, as I was saying, we have a little bit of an overhang here, so what we're going to do is reshape the raw edge and blend it in. Okay, so let's take this out with some slow strokes. You can do the same with a flat disc on an angle grinder with a heavy, aggressive grit on your sander.

Okay, so we have the blue pad here. right now that's the hard flattening pad using it on the flat surfaces, we're going to switch to this softer gray pad here and you can see the difference in thickness. This softer pad will allow us to perfect the live edge so it's time for some dominoes now essentially what we have here is end to end so we want to have a 10 or something like that integral on this miter to keep it nice and strong, so use a lot of glue inside the domino and spread it around. It's going to be very difficult to clean up the tight space that would come in the fold, so we're going to try to keep the glue about a centimeter away from that edge when we roll it out.

Set up the dominoes, so now we have our waterfall. glued leg here we want to refer to the fact that to make our second leg and the legs here you are thinking if the legs will be made of wood. You can make wood and metal, use pretty much any material you want and lots of options. there I'm going to try to keep it around, you know, three inches from the edge here and let's say we're going to make a total of about 14 inches, so we're going to cut a square edge on one side and then we're going to reference it from from that, cut our two vertical posts first and then the two horizontal pieces, so we have our pieces here now, we're just going to place them, let's see.

I'm super simple keeping this little box frame and We're going to use a domino to put them together, so one cool feature of the Domino XL is that it has these reference pins, so we're going to use them, they're going to be hidden inside, we're going to use these two pins and you. I can use the lines as a reference as well, but what we can do here now is because I've marked my face and the outside. I could take the pin, it's going to push this side in reference here and it's going to dip right in and then I can do that. same thing on the face where it's going to be a mortise now I'm here, dip it in, slide that pin all the way to the edge and it's going to be the exact same reference, the exact same distance, I don't have to worry about finding that window on a little line that I did, so we're going to lower the fence to 90 degrees, we're very lucky, this is the smallest glue, okay, come up here, how's the matching book?

Alright, it looks pretty good, we have a good grain. coming down really tight so I'm going to refine it a little bit and mix it up and it's going to look like it was born that way so we don't need to use the aggressive Rotex settings on this so I've got it set to random orbit and I've got a nice soft pad on there and we're just going to mix this up. I love it. It is perfect. How wonderful? Did you use 120 grit? Yes, you don't have to be too thick. all right all that's left is buddy but he said we're gonna clean it up with the tack o'clock and then we're gonna hit it with some danish oil look lifting that dist so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna cut our holes for our threaded insert.

The reason we use a threaded insert is because I can make it nice and sloppy, it makes the leg removable and allows for expansion and contraction like I said before, okay, so you can see. We have a nice big drill bit here. Yes, I would say a third larger than our screw, that will allow the hole to slide and that is what will allow both pieces of wood to move, expand and contract around where we are fastening it. First we're going to countersink our hole that way we can make sure that our beagle style screw is nice and flush, so I made a little center mark here and I got another reference mark here, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to line them up so that we have our little reference points.

Let me start the hole with the Brad point drill bit just because you don't have a big enough drill bit and then what we're going to do is move on to the full size drill bit for the insert so I'm going to make sure not to go too deep and put a piece of tape on adhesive right there. Awesome, leaves a polite little flag, eh, actually, oh, it's one more cleaning with the anti-static cloth, removes any environmental dust that may have settled and then we'll apply our Danish oil to flood the surface and then let it sit for about 15 minutes until it penetrates completely, then we'll wipe off any excess with a paper towel and then reapply a second coat, beautiful, so let the finish soak in, we're wiping off the excess here and it will be ready to use in 48 hours.

Beautiful, very good, thank you all for tuning in, thanks to Festool for sponsoring the pro to prote. More and especially thanks to John for showing uswhat to do and hang out with us. I appreciate it. It's a pleasure. It was fun. Come back and join us again. Thank you. I would love to do beautiful work, man, really beautiful.