Nobody Uses Wood Like This, and I Don't Know Why

Hi, I'm Cam with Blacktail Studio and

this

week I carved a table base for a top I made out of

wood

that was actually meant for the oven and then I saw how disturbed you all are with my first Blacktail Rorschach test. Stay tuned, I

know

I do a bit of satire on

this

channel, but this week's episode is actually sponsored by Keep. That's not something I just slid in there to see if they were paying attention like I sometimes do, but we'll talk about that later anyway. The piece of

wood

I'm using is this piece of black walnut from Gobi walnut and it actually looks pretty good here, but it was pretty messy, it had tons of cracks, tons of shakes, tons of marks, basically all the different defects of the wood. wood that is there.

This piece of wood had them all and then Goby said they couldn't really sell it and their store is actually heated in the winter with a wood stove with all the offcuts so they were going to burn this piece and so would I? I'm going to try to repurpose this, give it a second life as some kind of cool bistro table. If you are a carpenter, it is very likely that you have a piece of wood similar to this in your store right now, it is one of those pieces that we tell you about. people have a lot of character and if you don't

know

character and woodworking it usually means things you don't want, it means rotten areas, it means the cracks, it means the checks, all the things that make this piece of wood generally unusable.

However, in traditional woodworking, if you're a little patient and can be a little creative, you can make something cool with a piece of wood like this and we'll do it by using my band saw if I haven't figured out what I'm doing yet. doing: I'm going to match the book to this piece of walnut, which means I'm going to cut it in half and what happens is when we open this. Like a book, it forms a sort of mirror image of itself and the traditional pieces of normal, straight grain wood that you would use in woodworking can look good if you combine them with books, even very good, however, if you get these pieces of characters with all the knots and swirls.

Grains, cracks, gaps and rot, all of these also form mirror images of each other, giving it a really cool effect. We had a little fun on Instagram and the YouTube community tab figuring out what everyone sees in this image because a lot of people saw it. So many different things and no one saw what I saw, which I thought was strange, although maybe it won't be so strange once you finally hear what I saw, but anyway that gave me an idea that some of you might know in the end of these videos that I like to have. a call to action, whereas I say, hey, if you made it to the end of the video, say this word at the beginning of your comment and I'll know that you made it to the end and this week we'll do it.

It has a little different meaning, the word at the end will be just what you saw in that picture there or in the finished picture on this board, but I also want to see if anyone can guess what I saw and I'll have some clues. Throughout this video, which will be part of the trailer for you to continue watching the full video, I'm going to give a number of clues throughout the video, but I want to see if anyone can guess and if they can guess, I'll send you something kind. cool, I have some kind of cool wall art piece that I did a while ago for no particular reason and I also offer these consultations on my website where I can help people with questions about woodworking or business or we can just hang out for 30 minutes, so if you want the wall art you can have it, if you want to hang out and chat over Google Meet for 30 minutes we can do that too, but that will be the call to action at the end of the video.

I lost it in my ramblings. All I've done so far is join these boards with wood glue and used dominoes to help line things up. If you don't have a domino, don't worry, wood glue would be enough. strong enough so I went and sealed it all with a clear epoxy and filled all the gaps with the jet black super clear epoxy and I know that sounds like an oxymoron, that's just the name of the brand and I'll include links to everything in the description next now we're going to let it set for a few days let it cure while I work on this base and if you want to skip forward anywhere in the video or want to go back I have timestamps where you can scroll down the bottom and see the progress of the entire project, so if you want to see how that top ended up, go ahead and skip ahead now, but I think this electrically carved table base turned out pretty cool. using one of my favorite jigs and this is just a really simple circular band saw jig and I didn't make it up.

There are many YouTube videos available if you search for circular band saw jigs. I just made a pretty basic one and found a However, there was a way to mess it up and this was new to me and I've used this jig a lot but it's always been with thinner material and this two and a half inch piece of walnut started to pinching the blade and it didn't I don't know what was going on, I had to figure this out for the next hour or two and it started smoking and jamming and almost stopped the blade completely so I aborted this project mid-cut and went back and it took me like I said a while to figure out what was going on, but what really happened was that there was so much friction that it was actually melting the tires on the band saw and I've never had that happen to me before and I've cut many circles smaller than this one. there before, so it took me a little trip to Woodcraft to get some new tires.

I ended up replacing the blade as well because it had been several years since I replaced this King blade for resawing, it was a pain but I was able to in the end. to complete the cut and I don't think at this point I figured out what the problem was because I shouldn't have done basically the same cut there, but this is how we're going to start our electrically carved table. base, okay, clue number one for the picture I saw in the book, matching boards, I saw an animal, but the animal wasn't Donnie Darko's rabbit, although I really liked that guess from quite a few people on the community page Youtube.

It's also worth noting if no one guesses what I guessed. I'll give the prize to the person who makes me laugh the most, so put it in your back pocket at the beginning of the video. When you saw that a hair loss prevention company was sponsoring this week's build, you probably thought. exactly what I did when I was first contacted, what a perfect ambassador for hair I come from a time where it was not only acceptable but encouraged to make fun of your friends and tell them everything that was happening to them and since I started I lost my hair when I was around 19, my friends reminded me basically every day how bold I was until I finally admitted it around 21 and finally shaved it all off.

It took a little longer than I would have expected, but luckily for me, two-thirds of guys experienced some form of hair loss by age 35 and I really feel like I'd be doing my friends a disservice if I didn't share with them the same courtesy now that they showed me when I started losing my hair, unlike in 2001 when I started losing my hair, today people have options and, Fortunately, for my college classmates, it's affordable enough for even most current college students and you get treated right from home, so if you're ready to take action and prevent hair loss, visit Keeps.com Blacktail or click Click the link in the description below to get 50 off your first order.

That's K-e-e-p-s dot com slash blacktail. The piece of wood I'm using here measures approximately four inches by six. piece of black walnut about one inch thick and I cut a three degree angle at the bottom and a three degree angle at the top and this will help it taper from the outside at the base and end in the center below the table and this is kind of by design, meaning if I tried to make a perfectly symmetrical table I'm just not good enough at carving to make it look natural, it's not made on a lace so there's no way I could carve one perfect tulip base by hand so the more intentionally asymmetrical I can make it the more natural I think it will look in the end and I just remove most of that material with the band saw to save myself some time carving later and this is my xl domino putting a large 12 millimeters. for a 140 millimeter domino right in the center and this will just help keep everything aligned for my glue, which I'm going to use epoxy for this glue and this part here, I'm pretty sure, that's not how the tiles were supposed to be used. of dominoes, but that's how I came up with it and it actually worked out pretty well in the end.

They held it down and then just pushed it right into the base and it went in perfectly straight, so what's the problem, but if you decide. To do this, just be careful because you would probably get hurt or worse, break the domino. You will notice that I did my best to align these grains so that they run parallel to each other in each section and this is because all wood will continue to expand and contract along the grain seasonally, so if I mounted them perpendicular to each other , there is a good chance that there will be some cracks and separations between these two pieces and I even did my best with that vertical axis. section although I don't know how necessary it was with a smaller section like that, I also mounted it upside down right there so luckily it wasn't too quick, I wasn't using super glue or anything to mount it in the right direction.

Get a little creative with my holding style here and there's probably a name for this. I've never done it like this before and I had to modify it a bit, but in the end I got it pretty good, some of you. You may know that I have a long time follower on my channel with chop saw carving tools, they make these amazing carving discs and this is not a chop saw, it's a turbo plane from Arbor Tech and since this video is not sponsored by Arbor Tech or Cutsall, I contacted my contact at cutsall, who happens to be the owner, and said "This will offend you if I try this new tool and he said not at all because I would love to get feedback on what you think of it, because here's the The difference is thinking of a cutting saw as a really very aggressive sandpaper and thinking of shaft technology as a really very weak planer, so port technology removes bits of wood and the chop saw basically removes thin pieces of wood and that's the best way I can describe them, I think they both have a purpose, they're just very, very different, so I liked the tree technology.

I thought it was a useful and useful tool. I plan to use it again, but I will finish this project with the quetzal carving discs. I think you would love to know that over the years I have received great support for my neighbors from a handful of people. There have been several people here in the YouTube comments who have said how much my neighbors must hate me. and if I was in their hoa they would kick me out or arrest me for making so much noise and so much dust and I think it's very nice that people care so much about my former neighbors and my current neighbors even though they have never met them. so I want to address that now, if I can, first of all, everywhere I've lived, my neighbors have jobs, it's fantastic, they leave in the morning, they come back at night, I work all day, they don't even know what I'm doing. the noise doesn't really matter because it's usually between five and seven in the evening and I have doors so I usually close those doors too, but as for dust, I usually clean everything, I have leaf blowers, I clean the neighbors' yards .

I will clean the sidewalks and my house now. I don't actually have any neighbors, we have a pretty big piece of land so there are no offended neighbors and I really appreciate the great support you guys have given me. Neighbors over the years, the tool I'm using here is called a spoke shave and I don't use it often enough. I'm going to start using it more because it was the perfect tool to soften those high spots and The look I was going for was kind of an ax handle where it wasn't, you know, round, it wasn't oval, but it was that kind of soft contour and nice and the spokes have worked very well for that.

I had a few other tools that I used, I liked these cut saw rasps, they work great, I also use some regular rest, but they don't dull, they don't clog very easily and they do a very good job of removing a lot of debris. material quickly. I recommend wearing gloves if you are going to use them because they are so sharp you can wear them on your hands pretty quickly okay clue number two for what I saw in the matching picture in the book, it was a mammal that weighs between 22 and 82 poundsaccording to wikipedia and that's for small females up to large males and I'm not going to be too strict about this but try to keep one guess per comment if you copy and paste 50 different guesses into the same comment I'm just going to say you don't win even if you accidentally hit the right guess, so let's show some ethics on YouTube and keep it right with one guess per comment.

This next part is something I probably could have done sooner. but I think it's better to wait until the end to do it and what I'm doing is just hollowing out the bottom of this, just concave the bottom of the base of this table because, as someone pointed out in a previous video That's exactly how I do it. They make Coke bottles or Coke cans or cereal bowls or plates, basically anything that sits on a flat surface has a smaller lip because it's much easier to make that smaller lip lie flat. Make it a whole flat, wide surface.

That's what I'm doing, the only thing that's going to touch the floor is this little ring about two inches on the edge of the table for the bottom. I didn't smooth or sand any more. in that concave section I left it with that kind of rough textured look and this was for a couple of reasons, the first being that I actually like the look of that textured look, but secondly, and much more importantly, I don't really I wanted to go nowhere. Beyond that, it would have been a lot of work to sand and smooth that as smooth as this part here for something you'll never see, so you can call me lazy, but I'd really prefer it if you said I went with the artistic touch on the bottom anyway. finished here I was using monaco blonde.

I ended up sanding at 400 which is higher than what I normally use and I thought it would actually be a lot more impactful than the 180 grit I normally go for and in the end I don't think I liked it as much so in the future I'll probably I stayed with that 180 or 240 that I normally use in my blo

uses

. He had another larger project to undertake to create a carpentry workshop in this industrial area. I'm going to Southeast Portland, which by the way I said northeast last time because it's north of me and someone who was local pointed out that it's actually southeast, so I was at Creative Woodworking in Southeast Portland and had a couple minutes free in my 30 minutes. minimum, so I upped this refill so they could process it a little faster and a little better than I could at home because I probably would have ended up having to use my drum sander and I hate my drum sander, it's my least tool favorite, it just takes forever and doesn't leave a very good finish, so I just gave it a few passes on their wide belt planer and this is what we got, starting to look kind of cool and a little creepy, there are actually a couple of disadvantages.

Using wood has so much character and one of them is that it takes a long time to make it look good. There are so many little gaps, holes, and cracks that needed filling because I ended up having to remove a good amount of wood here. and that just left so many of these little pockets that it was impossible for that epoxy to penetrate, so I probably spent as much time on this little surface as, you know, an eight-foot table of relatively light wood in terms of filling these little cracks. . and imperfections, so what you save money you lose over time and I think it's worth it in the end.

I like to have a mix of nice, clean wood and some of these pieces with more character. I went back to my bandsaw jig to cut this out. circular top and I made a couple of mistakes and the first mistake you probably saw was that I didn't cut a small enough circle, I just missed the edges so I had to move my pin, recut a slightly smaller circle and Then I realized that it really wasn't smooth enough and I probably should have expected that, but the band saw just isn't a precision machine when it comes to making a finished cut and there are all those kinds of vibration marks from the band saw, so I came up with this idea. in my head for a while and I apologize for not having a more detailed view of what I did, but I basically just drilled a hole in my outfeed table, put that same pin in and let this circular top spin on that pin against my router here and this. gives an essentially perfect finish, so I think it might be cool to set up a series of holes so I can cut huge circles with great precision using my router table and that perfectly flat feed table, so I could try to make a video in the future on the creating a nice repeatable jig using that exit table and a pin that can rotate on my router table.

This edge profile I'm making is something a little different. I never really see people do it and I'm not sure. Why am I making a larger round at the bottom and a smaller round at the top and it's three quarters of an inch at the bottom followed by a quarter inch at the top? I think it's great, there's nothing wrong if you want to just do a quarter inch and a quarter inch or a half inch and a half inch, but I think this makes it look a little more interesting and a little more unique and I would love to know What do you think in the comments if you like the edge profile. or if you think I should have gone for something a little more traditional, tip three, I see a primate anyway, if you like this compilation, if you want to see more videos like this, one of the things you can do is subscribe to my channel , which yeah, it's amazing to me, but it will also tell youtube, hey, show me more woodworking stuff, show me more construction, show me more things I can fall asleep to, whatever the reason, watch my videos if you subscribe , it will tell youtube to show them.

You have more stuff like mine and it's like a bonus for me, it really helps my page, so if you don't mind if you think I've earned it, I'd appreciate it if you hit the subscribe button right now when it arrives. To mount these caps to the bases I have to be a little creative and that's because I don't always know if this cap, for example, is going to stay with this base forever, so I don't want to recess it and leave it flush. mounted there so it can only fit on this base, so what I did was I got these pre-cut metal discs and I put them on, I think it was like eBay and they're an eighth of an inch thick.

Also be careful. when you use the drill without having it attached, I buy them on eBay an eighth of an inch thick and I drill some holes and this allows me the flexibility to move them from table to table, the disadvantage is that you have to use screws and I don't love using screws. I even made a whole video about not using screws when it comes to attaching large table tops. It's a little different for these small tabletops. Screws will be fine, but I prefer threaded inserts. and bolts wherever possible, so all I did was drill the holes in the appropriate pattern, added some countersink to make the table flush and then added some number eight wood screws and it's a real mounting system simple and quite safe.

I really enjoyed this project, I thought it was a lot of fun, but I don't want that to bias your answer to the next question and that's pretty simple: do you like projects like this? Do you enjoy these types of characters with the bases carved with power, things like this and it doesn't help me if you lie to me just to be nice and I promise you it's not a troll thing if you say it's not for you, it's just that You are the spectators that you are. the clients you are the clients and I want to continue creating content that you really want to see, so let me know in the comments if you love this project, if you hate it, if maybe you don't care one way or another and that will really help me adapt my future videos to what you guys really want to see and as some of you may know, I like to give people a little bit of credit to make it to the end of the video so this week.

Start your question or comment with what you see in the picture that matches that book, and like I said before, if it matches what I see, you'll want a prize. I will send you that artwork or we can have a video chat as usual, thanks. Thank you very much for watching, subscribe to see more videos like this.