Mistakes happen…they’ll never know

Alright, I'll start from the beginning and say that this piece was difficult to make. Curves in furniture or perhaps even woodworking in general tend to give a sense of exceptional skill or something like that we are used to seeing furniture with. Square edges and straight legs, that's how wood is cut most of the time in straight lines, so it makes sense, and when we can manipulate the wood to bend and curve it, it gives the idea that an incredible amount of thought went into it. work and skill. to do it and it feels almost incredible and I will tell you that at least one of those things was true for this piece, no doubt that's why some of my previous designs incorporated large curves and bends that I was able to achieve by stacking curved band saw cuts. plywood, was the simplest, albeit extremely time consuming, way I found to achieve the amazing look without the incredible amount of skill and fun enough.

This exact piece ended up being the most successful YouTube video I have on my channel and the only video I have on my channel with over a million views, so I thought it was about time I made a remake and paid homage to a piece that helped me launch my career on YouTube and what better time than now, when I'm starting my career on YouTube. old YouTube channel again, the only difference is that this time I have a little more skill and I'm going to make a better version. I want this one to really feel amazing and look like it's made of solid wood, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

For ourselves, the first thing we need to do to make a curved piece of furniture is to make a curve and to do this we need a couple of things. I used flex plywood, sometimes called flex lumber or crimp lumber, or I've seen it called crazy lumber. Also, let's be honest,

they

're perfectly accurate and unnecessarily funny names, but whatever you want to call it, I layered it to match three-quarter-inch Baltic birch plywood, the nasty kind that would be used for flat sections, and made a folded shape. For MDF we have a large vacuum bag that I have used for some veneered tables in the past, but this was actually my first time doing a folded lamination with it and I wasn't exactly sure how everything was going to turn out. wow, so I made sure nothing moved while I put everything in and sure enough, I was able to get everything into the bag with no problem and every time I use this I am amazed at the amount of pressure this little vacuum exerts.

The pump can be pretty weird if you ask me to make sure I give everything enough time to harden. I left it in the bag overnight, which meant I had to come back the next morning like it was Christmas, except it was a sad, weird Christmas where instead of buying a Super Nintendo or something and being surrounded by family, I was alone in a cold wood shop pulling a folded laminate out of a vacuum cleaner bag, but it came out as a curved piece of plywood, which is exactly what I asked Santa for. Christmas for me, thank you sad and strange wood shop Santa foreigner needed to make from there was to make some, don't try this at home, table saw cuts to trim the curve edges and get it nice and square, getting the nice, square curve that doesn't make any sense, but I guess at the same time it makes a lot of sense.

You may notice that, seemingly out of nowhere, I'm now wearing shorts and a t-shirt as I cut this sheet of plywood to start making the flat sections. of the cabinet or maybe you didn't notice it, but the reason for this is because I have been making this furniture for almost four months, this was literally the first thing I made for this project and it was hotter back then, but The main reason why I mention it so I can use it as an excuse for any

mistakes

I might make along the way and I'm just joking to be fair, repeatedly stopping my progress and then trying to pick it up weeks later.

It was really hard to keep track of what I was doing and what I had already done or what I was going to do next, like these dice I'm cutting here. I made these panels and then

they

sat in a corner of the workshop for over a month before I did anything else to them and really, after that amount of time,

mistakes

are bound to

happen

. Paste UPS, they can be complicated, daunting, intimidating, maybe all of the above and this one really was no different, but maybe not for the reason you might think. for the most part it was pretty easy, the only thing that wasn't easy and if you've ever used a domino you'll

know

what I'm about to say, but getting a domino out of a mortise is sometimes one of the hardest parts. of an assembly, I usually like to assemble a dry assembly without glue to make sure everything fits, then I take it all apart to glue it together and this includes fighting to get the dominoes out because they fit together so well.

Which I guess is a testament to how good the Domino machine is, but also the Festival, if you're watching this, make a domino pulling tool or if someone, if you're a tool maker, makes this tool, you have to less one sale within the first one. minute of selling me this and then if you extrapolate it over time, there's a sale every minute in perpetuity. I mean, you're a millionaire and you don't even

know

it yet. Here's something I debated for a while before finally landing on how I wanted to do it and it has to do with the order of operations when it comes to Edge Banning the cabinet because the cabinet is made of plywood I would obviously be veneering all the faces in addition to need to edge band the plywood edges, so the question was basically, should I veneer the cabinet first and then edge band?

Thinking about it, I realized there were arguments for both ways when using store-bought veneered plywood. Obviously edge banding after the veneer is applied because the veneer is applied before you buy it, it's a very easy choice and I like to use solid wood edge banding. which I do myself and I can usually get a pretty perfect application but in this case I decided to put the Edge band on first and then apply the veneer and that was for a couple of reasons, I wanted to bevel the front edge of the cabinet first so I I needed a thicker solid wood front edge so I could cut that chamfer without exposing the plywood core and this meant the front edge would be much more noticeable on the top of the cabinet if it were glued to the already veneered panel, especially if the board maple What I was using for the edge banding didn't match perfectly with the veneer I had purchased, which probably wouldn't be the case with Edge Banning first.

I could hide that seam under the veneer, I'd basically trade a seam here for a potential seam here either way, I was getting a seam no matter how hard I tried to get everything to match, so it really depends on where I think it will be least noticeable, that was my reasoning. , at least I'm not sure. Yes there is a universally accepted correct way but let me know if you have any thoughts on this foreign speak of veneer, it was time to try it and this was my first time using store bought veneer so I thought I would get the feel for it.

For this, with a smaller section in the piece and the angled end panel, it seemed like a perfect place to practice a little. In the past, I have always made my own coating and applied it using various techniques, but because of the curves of this piece, I wanted to try something different and decided to use PSA veneer, which means pressure sensitive adhesive, which I got from veneer GL. You can see from the name that they like badges, so check their inventory, they have all kinds of good things they made. I don't get paid to say that and I actually bought this veneer with my own money, but they have a lot of good stuff so I thought I'd let you know anyway.

PSA is a real wood veneer backed with a 3M adhesive that creates a permanent bond when applied with pressure, if you don't stick to this plywood you are going to disappoint everyone, sorry, not that kind of pressure, more like a downward physical pressure than emotional, but after using it on this little test piece it was actually part of the real piece, so I guess it wasn't really a test. I was happy with the results and was confident in using it on the rest of the cabinet. What is something that clearly indicates that a piece of furniture is veneered if you say it doesn't exist? end grain, then you were thinking the same thing as me and that makes you a winner when applying edge banding to a veneered panel, the problem is that the end of a panel will need edge banding but the direction of the grain will be seen a little weird. a solid wood board would show the end grain and look like this, while a veneered panel with edge banding would look like this.

Some people don't love how the end grain looks on a solid wood panel, but I think we can all agree that the more natural something looks the more we like it, which is why the cabinet ends have bevel cuts. angled just to give a little extra detail but I wanted to do what I could to make the cut ends look as natural as possible so I decided to do some end grain edge banding it was a little extra work honestly not that much and maybe something most people will barely notice, but this kind of attention to detail is what I think sets some things apart and it's not a type of woodworking either.

Strangely, we do all these things with a natural material and make it look as unnatural as possible. Then we do all this to make the natural material that looks really unnatural look natural again, like, what are we doing? Remember at the beginning. when I said I made a lot of mistakes and tried to fix a lot of mistakes during this build, this is the point where they start unfortunately and the first one was that I also cut the slot for the bottom of the end panel. When I cut these dice, I remember it was almost two months before this.

I was still wearing shorts and a t-shirt and now it's cold and rainy. I'm wearing pants and a jacket and here's a shot of Chris filming the rain to prove it. all that and a photo of me filming Chris filming the rain to show that I don't know if this rain clip appeared in Chris' most recent video on YouTube, but go watch it when you're done here, it will show it on YouTube today. and for the foreseeable future rain or shine anyway since I still have to coat everything I knew I could just do a simple patch and not worry too much about how it looked because it was going to be covered in the future and beyond.

I mean now because it was the big day and it was finally time to veneer the entire curved cabinet. How exciting I was able to get 24 by 96 inch sheets of veneer and my curved cabinet was about 16 inches wide so it worked but almost 120 inches long so obviously I had to strategize how I was going to cover everything and make it look better knowing it would have a couple of seams. After careful strategy, I decided to cover both the interior and exterior. the cabinet with two sections of veneer, a long section and a short section, the inside face would have the long section at the bottom so that it would wrap around the curve and end at the bottom of the top, meaning the seam here It would

never

really be seen unless you decided to stick your head in the cabinet and take a look.

I can see the scene and the outside face of the cabinet would be the opposite where the long section of veneer would run along the top and around the curve to the bottom where the seam would end under the entire piece, which you couldn't see unless you were an ant with a flashlight and the nice thing about PSA coating is that it's pretty easy to cut and apply. I was able to do everything. of the cutout with a ruler and a knife and just used a piece of MDF with a blunt edge to apply the pressure needed to get everything to stick.

The whole process to veneer both sides of the cabinet probably took me a couple of hours with filming. and I didn't have to mess around with things like glue or contact cement, which was nice and remembering the whole Edge band, then the veneer or veneer, and then the Edge band debate. Well, here's the argument for Edge Banding after plating because PSA plating has a paper backing. for the adhesive there is a thin darker line under the veneer, honestly it's not that bad and if I was using a darker wood it probably wouldn't even be noticeable, but for light things like maple I don't know if it would. this again, I might try thin, veneered edge bands if I were a more excitable person.

I might hurry up at this point and glue the entire cabinet assembly together; after all, I have a veneered, edge-banded curved cabinet box and vertical panels ready. and wait to get hit, but rushing is a bad thing and luckily I'm not an overly excitable person and we also have a couple more things to do before we can make this a solid cabinet, one of which is cutting into the front . edge detail that, likeI mentioned a few minutes ago, it's a pretty easy chamfer. The other thing that needed to

happen

was to install the top and bottom runners for the sliding door and there are a surprising number of different ideas and thoughts I had when doing this.

Here's a quick thought, what do you think of my Oscar Meyer pants and shirt combo? I know it's not completely Plum, but I mean, come on, that's cool if you ask me anyway, like I'm saying one of the hard parts of making these videos is I'm trying to include all the ideas and thoughts I have while I make this furniture, so just for the sake of experimentation, let's try a little quick here and see what I can achieve. My first thought was that I chose to use the brass C channel because if I cut a slot for the sliding door in the cabinet, it would expose the plywood core and expose the lie that none of this is actually solid wood.

A fortunate byproduct of this decision is that the brass C channel looks great, so everyone wins with that thought, since the C channel did not fit perfectly in the slot cut by my half inch diameter router bit, so here is a Tip: Use a layer of blue tape to slightly offset the router to widen the slot and the C channel then fits like a glove, another winning idea. Making slots for a sliding door can be complicated because you have to consider the depth of the top and bottom slot and the lengths. of the tenons on your sliding door to make sure the door can go in and out, which is why you see me having to trim the height of the c channel here and that brings me to my final thought because a lot of what I do in these videos They include all these different ideas and techniques and cramming them all into one video is almost impossible.

Visit my Patreon page. I'm making a second commentary type video for every video I post on YouTube, where I really dive into the nitty-gritty. concrete details of what I'm doing, everything we just covered, but hopefully at a more reasonable pace and maybe in more detail, so if you like that kind of thing, definitely go check it out or if you just want to help out. channel and help me make sure I can keep making these videos, that's a great way to do it too and thank you to everyone on my patreon so far. I really can't even tell you how much the support means.

I guess the best I can do is just say it one more time, thank you, I sincerely appreciate it, I've said it before and I'll say it again, but Milling is boring, it's boring when you do it and it's even more boring watching someone do it, but if you edit it's perfect, it can be one of those strangely satisfying moments, so here's my formula for watching a strangely satisfying and interesting milling section in a YouTube video. Start with raw wood, the rougher the better. Quick shot, just enough to see how rough it is. a little slow motion, you know, for the dramatic cut of the planer showing a pass that goes from rough to clean, now a quick shot looking at a crooked edge to apply what I'm going to do next, which is on the jointer joining a wide edge.

Taken in close up, it now jumps to the table saw for a final cut, preferably the crookedest edge that is trimmed nice and straight, and in that final shot, two clean boards come together and the seam practically disappears, okay , be honest after watching, is that you? I feel quite satisfied and that feeling of satisfaction may be a little strange for you. Totally fine, if it's honest, it's preferable. I glued the panel of the drawer fronts and the sliding door. The shot we are looking at here on October 6, 2022 and now this shot. where I'm getting ready to cut the panel in half was done on January 8, 2023 so over three months between the two, the shorts and t-shirt have now become pants and jacket and I even did my assembly biannual on the table. flip and during this period of time for the life of me I had forgotten whether or not I used dominoes in the glue on the panel I made a minute ago and when I started cutting the panel to start shaping the sliding door I progressively got more and more Nervous because I was going to make a cut and expose a domino, the sliding door took up the entire height of the cabinet and the joint where the dominoes may or may not have been centered on the panel, so there was really a pretty low risk. of cutting one out while making this door, which maybe gave me confidence that may or may not have been false confidence, of course I could have gone back and looked at the old footage I had filmed because I filmed that glue, but at this point , what is it?

Done, done, and really ignorance is bliss, so I went on without checking and I purposely won't show you the pictures of that Globe right now because I'm building suspense, so keep watching, will it cut into a domino? piece ruined by a mistake that you will discover tomorrow or in a couple of minutes the same wood Time the same wood Channel and so on to the drawer fronts where the first thing I did was cut a miter on one end to create the wrapped type of front from the corner drawer Look what I was looking for and sure enough, I cut the bevels for the miter and once again no dominoes were exposed.

I was starting to think that Sean did Future Sean a favor by leaving The Dominoes without glue, even though he had one crucial last cut. What to do before I was absolutely sure I was out of the woods and that was to cut the drawer front panel right in half to split it into two drawer fronts, which would certainly expose some dominoes if they were in fact there, so after cutting an angle to match the vertical panel on the cabinet, I was able to make that Final Cut which actually consisted of two cuts, the first long cut and then a last small cut to free them from each other and sure enough, there They're, you can't see my face in this. shot, but I imagine it was something like this, but there's no use dwelling on the problem, there's just time to fix it and I could almost get away with doing nothing since I was going to embed some brass in the edge of the drawer fronts, but even with that, it looked like The Dominoes was still going to show through a bit, so I made some small patches to cover them up as best I could, knowing that the metals would end up making this pretty hard to notice once that everything was in its place.

The mistakes I made during this project, I'm at a point where they seem like no big deal, like now, as I say this, after they happened, I fixed them and moved on, but in the moment they can stop you in your tracks and take away the wind from your sails, this final panel was one of those moments for me, maybe worse than exposing The Dominoes and the reason this felt so bad was because it started to change the design of the piece and its appearance. which is the most important thing, how it looks like what happened was that I first built this end panel so that the drawer fronts could have something to slide and the drawer slides had something to connect to on the front of the cabinet and My initial design was to have the drawer fronts just set in from the outside face of the end panel, but when I cut the final miter on the drawer fronts I cut it too far due to the thickness of the material, which meant the drawer fronts my drawers were now going to be moved three quarters of an inch from where I initially wanted them and honestly, that discouraged me.

I considered many different options and alternatives, most of which included redoing the door and drawer fronts, which was definitely not something I wanted. I wanted to do at this point, so I stared at it long enough to convince myself that it looked good or maybe even that it looked better and that way I could move on. Sometimes you just have to look at things from a different perspective or maybe. just trick yourself into doing it, although you'll see in the end, it's really not something anyone would notice if I hadn't said anything, wait a minute, am I you?

I'm making drawers here, oh man, the only thing more boring than watching someone Mill wood is watching someone make drawers. Come on, Sean, it's okay, it's okay. I know maybe there are some of you who want to learn the ins and outs of making a drawer box and I have good news for you because if you like drawer boxes and if you are interested in carpentry and learning how to work with wood, check out our project courses at video from recent years. We've put together what we think are some of the best online woodworking courses out there.

Each course guides you through the entire process of building a piece of furniture and will hopefully leave you with many new skills and techniques that you can apply to your own designs - and if a piece has drawers, you can rest assured that we've looked at every detail. What you need to know to get it. They look and fit perfectly, so visit our website, see if any of the designs catch your eye, and give them a try if you want to improve your woodworking. Very simple, we have some drawer boxes ready to go Come on, I'm no stranger to messing things up when using a CNC machine.

I trust almost any tool in a woodworking shop, but when I press the start or go button on a CNC I'm rarely completely sure it's going to work. to work properly, so to no one's surprise I screwed it up this time too, but to my surprise I didn't screw up the actual CNC work. It was another stinky Domino that decided to show up out of nowhere and ruin my day once again this time. It may be one of the most visible spots on the piece right in the middle of the sliding door handle because I knew there were dominoes in this glue, at this point I thought I had figured out where they were and knew I wouldn't cut into one, but sure enough, here we are, so once again I racked my brain thinking of different ways to fix this problem and finally decided to double down on my new CNC skills and use them to cut another pocket that I could then. fill it with Walnut and then re-cut the handle hole if you were to leave the piece as it is now.

I think it would look great. A curved maple cabinet with matching walnut drawers and doors. It's pretty nice but I would say adding maybe 10 more in small details near the end of a build could potentially change the look of a piece many times over and that can go either way unfortunately it could make a piece look a lot better but it could also make a piece look much worse. Being complicated like that, so adding the last few details to this piece was definitely one of those situations. I had a nice piece of furniture but I knew I needed that last 10 percent to get it to where I really wanted it to be and I had two details.

What I thought would get me that 10 percent, the first was a slot cut into the top edge of the bottom drawer and the bottom edge of the top drawer so I could embed some brass that ran the length of the drawer fronts. and turn the corner. around the miter and I'd say that was good for maybe seven percent, then a bevel cut on the top edge of the top drawer and the bottom edge of the bottom drawer that I sanded to create an almost large rounded look on the fronts of the drawers and I would say this is the remaining three percent, so I wanted the brass detail to continue along the sliding door and along the handle recess.

I just cut it off for maybe a little extra five percent and plus I was hoping the brass would help cover up the repair work I had just done for the exposed domino in the handle recess, so one last groove to cut and oh , what's that? You messed it up again, awesome, good for you, the panel barely slipped on the router table and I got a good one, cut, there's no better way to say it, so another solution was to make a light cut to widen the slot on that bad spot and then I could glue the brass with a thin spacer to fill that wider section and add that to the List of things in this article that no one will ever notice, but I know they are there and until I slowly forget about them all them over time, I will think about every mistake every time I look at this article that

never

really helped me.

You have to look at this piece again and buy it from me. Selling furniture is actually one of the hardest parts of making furniture for YouTube videos. Besides being a horrible salesperson, that's the recipe for having a room full of furniture in your store, so if you or anyone you know is interested in the bugs in this piece and go visit my website and let me know if you're interested, as I said. I'm a bad seller, so I've probably focused on all the mistakes, but I promise it really is a very attractive piece, stay until the end and see how it all turns out.

You know, if I hadn't made a single mistake in this piece, I still would have learned a lot. I was doing the things I had. Never done with PSA coating before. I was experimenting with a new version of an old design with the bent lamination curve and I didn't even get into this part, but I tried new drawer slides that open no less,but maybe the best thing I did. What I learned was always Soldering and as the piece comes together and all those little details now become part of the bigger picture, the memory of all those mistakes is already starting to fade, the brass shines and the domino patches start to disappear. , add a little finish and I forget about the bad cut on the door, I add a touch of color and that's all everyone will notice and besides that I look at this piece right now, even remembering all the mistakes and I think it's a one of the best things I've ever done.

I've done it and it also has a lot more value to me because of everything I learned while doing it and I hope it can bring value and happiness to someone else in the future, so I guess the bottom line is it doesn't matter what you're going to do. make mistakes, that's exactly what happens when you do things like this, but mistakes can be fixed and as long as you look at the finished piece you forget about the mistakes, even if it's for a split second, you made it so make things , correct the mistakes. Those mistakes dress up as Plum and come out the other side proud of all those mistakes you have overcome.