How to Make an Ugly Object Look Awesome

0:00 there are over 15 billion videos on YouTube and somehow you found this one and that tells me that you care about Aesthetics you want to live and spend time in a place where you can look around and feel happy with what you see I'm the same and for the most part as an adult with free will I can do that I get to choose the objects in my house and sometimes I even get to build them when I stop and think about it there's really only one thing that gets in my Way kids I have two of them and if you have any then you know that their stuff gets everywhere their body weight to junk ratio is unparalleled now in the past I've had a

0:47 very specific way of dealing with this I hide it if you come over to my house you'd walk into our living room and notice some built-ins with a few curated objects nicely displayed but open up the doors below pencils games toys wire okay this one's my fault but you get my point and if you head into our family room it's the same story a large wall-to-wall cabinet to safely hide stuff well today we're going to do something different this year one of the family Christmas gifts is going to be this keyboard it's a little bit over 3 ft long which basically means too big to shove behind a door so so instead of hiding it we're going to highlight it so

1:33 that rather than having an eyesore it'll be a focal point sounds good in theory now let's see if I can actually pull it [Music] off so the absolute most important thing is this piece has to look awesome so I spent way more time and came up with way more ideas than any normal person would deem reasonable for what is essentially a stand for a kid's toy but when all the dust settled these two were my favorites and my personal feeling was that this is probably the one that I should build but I just kind of like this one better so I asked Dolores and

2:18 she said she thought that I should build this one but she kind of liked this one better so then I did a poll and you guys vote said that I should build this one but I got a bunch of messages that basically said the top one feels safer but the bottom one is cooler so I just kind of sat on it for a while then one night when my six-year-old and I were drawing before bedtime I had a different idea these and honestly even from this quick little sketch I could just tell that this was the way to go and I think that there's something to that both of the other ideas were fine but I wasn't super excited about either either of them and I think I should put more stock into that feeling that feeling is the little

3:05 voice that tells you you're not there yet but with this new idea as soon as I had it I could just feel that I was on the right track now I don't want to overstate its importance it's not like this was a life or death decision but I'd say it's somewhere between deciding what to eat for lunch and who to marry and that's not to say that lunch isn't an important decision it is but but even if you pick wrong you get another shot tomorrow no okay let's make some templates so templates can be a little confusing to some people and that's because they think of them like a cheat code that

3:50 makes things easier but that's only partially true the more accurate way to think about templates is as a step in the workflow that is sometimes necessary and other times completely unnecessary for example you know that we're building this and I will use templates to shape all of these parts but if I were going to build a version that didn't use templates it might look more like this which is kind of like the cybertruck version of the same idea hang on okay now it's the cybertruck version anyway for the kirvy version templates are almost 100% necessary and for the cybertruck version 100% unnecessary and that's because it's

4:37 pretty easy to identically reproduce these straight Parts 2 10 or even a thousand times using something like a table saw meanwhile making two identical Parts with the curves would be nearly impossible without a template in other words templates aren't an optional way to make the job easier they are the way to get the job done period not a luxury but a necessary step and once you understand that it becomes really easy to look at a piece and know if it does or doesn't require templates for example this piece does this piece doesn't

5:22 does doesn't by the way those were all pieces that we sell plans for and no V to self from now on whenever somebody asks if they can buy templates for one of our plans where templates would be completely useless send them a timestamped link to the 3 minute 30 second Mark of this [Music] video all right so in addition to making these three templates I made these two and these are going to be for a pair of assemblies that will hold the panel that the keyboard will sit on and a back panel then to to create the shape I just trace it out in marker trim it slightly oversized on the band saw and then use a router to duplicate the

6:10 [Music] shape now the reason that I put these grooves into my template is so that it can cut a shallow slot on the inside face of each piece and then eventually the panels will actually fit into these [Music] slots then I can just repeat this exact process three more times to shape all four side [Music] pieces so normally I like to wait until I'm a little bit later into a project to really start messing stuff up but you I figured I'd get an early start this time so this is kind of a weird one but what I just realized is that my grain orientation is wrong on the side pieces that I made and it might be okay but it

6:56 also could lead to a catastrophic failure so I remade them here's the bad one see bad and I don't know 95% of the time that I would make a shape like this the grain is going to be going this way but I actually need it to be going this way thankfully I still have a bunch of small offcut pieces that I could use for this so I was able to glue up a couple more panels so that the orientation of the grain is the way that I need it to be and then just go through that whole process of marking it out with the template bandsawing routering all that stuff all the stuff that you already saw me do on the piece that ended up being wrong so it's all done and here's the correct piece next to the bad piece I don't even know can you tell you

7:43 um okay yeah so whatever not too big of a setback it's fixed now and I'd rather have figured it out now than after I had everything glued up so that's a win so to quickly explain why that was a problem would move mainly this way across the width of the grain so if I join my panels to those side pieces like this then I'm not allowing for wood movement which could cause something to crack but if I do it like this then it'll move all together throughout the year no problems so hopefully that all makes sense now and we're all on the same page which means we can officially move on to making the

8:28 [Music] so you might have noticed that I'm trying to not use up too much good wood for this project back when we started this was the only new board that I used and everything else was just offcuts from other projects except for this piece this was actually the top from a haul table that I built about 7 years ago that I replaced with a new piece that's why I had these dominoes in it already the desktop is going to be shaped like this and I'm going to use the CNC to shape this one I always like to show the non CNC way to do something because most people don't have a CNC but we've already covered it with the whole template thing so why not then I can cut my desktop panel and my back panel to 40 in

9:18 [Music] wide that way when I assemble everything I'll end up with about a half of an inch of extra space on either side hang on I got to cut the music this part's going to get a little technical so remember when we cut those slots on our side pieces well now I'm going to cut a round over on my panels and the plan is that they'll fit inside of those slots this wasn't part of the plan I'll fix that later anyway after I finish that then I'm going to cut this little Notch onto all the corners so

10:04 that the panel will fit inside of the slot despite the fact that it's slightly longer than the slot basically I want it to fully cover the slot now what's interesting about this is remember a couple minutes ago when I remade my side pieces to allow for wood movement well because the panel doesn't fully sit within the slot I probably could have gotten away with leaving them the bad way but I figured it's best practice to do it the proper way and people might be watching this and learning from it so yeah okay that's the technical part so we can put the music back on oh I guess the song's

10:52 over here's a question I got three weeks ago and another from two weeks ago and another from 12 days ago there all some variation of why don't you just cut everything on your CNC and I should clarify this wasn't a flood of this question that I suddenly got the last 3 weeks I have a constant non-stop stream of this question piped in 247365 so I'm going to quickly explain why I didn't on this project specifically and then I'm going to answer the question that I think these people are actually asking in general a common misconception is that you can just cut out Parts on a CNC and then glue them back together and that you'll end up with a perfect piece of furniture and yeah you could

11:38 technically do that but your joints are going to suffer I'll show you what I'm talking about in a minute but long story short a table saw is going to give you a way cleaner cut than a router will also on some pieces I get really really picky with what wood makes up what part of a piece but you can kind of think of the template as like a spotlight for the wood and it's much easier to get super specific I probably have a margin of air of like an eighth of an inch doing it this way now on this project specifically the reason that I didn't was because there wouldn't be any Real Time Savings this leg assembly for example I'm only making two of them and all the shaping will take me about 2 or 3 hours

12:23 which is about how long it would take me to create a file and do everything on the CNC now if I were making six legs or 60 legs oh hell yeah CNC all day and I think that that's the real question that people are asking isn't the CNC way faster and more repeatable and easier and the answer to that is yes and no so if this were a product that I'd potentially build thousands of here is the workflow that I would use first I'd cut out three blocks like this these two both have joint faces cut parallel to their opposite edges so that's just an easy rip cut on the table saw like you already saw me

13:10 do then this piece has a 90° Edge and another Edge that has a 15° cut on it again really easy cuts and I'd basically just make a sled exactly like you see me using here that I could pull out every time that I needed to make another set of legs by the way quick little Pro tip when I want the cleanest cut possible I'll usually cut once then insert a small shim here I'm using this ruler which is about 38 1,000 of an inch thick and then take a really light cleanup cut anyway back to the workflow next I would set up a file on the CNC that carves out the entire shape so now all of the joint faces were done on a saw

13:56 but the shaping is done on the CNC Best of Both Worlds and I would be willing to spend days or weeks or however long it took me to dial this into an efficient workflow but if I'm only building one I'll probably just keep doing it this [Music] way by the way I have to give a shout out to one person who commented about the CNC and kind of summed it up perfectly they said I think part of the crowd who asks why you don't do something on the CNC are also the ones who would complain that you're not a real woodworker for using the CNC so much damned if you do damned if you don't all around it seems and I think that that's kind of

14:43 the case with anything you do where you're going to put yourself out there I mean with woodworking specifically pretty much anything that you can think of any cut any joint there's going to be a half dozen ways to get a job done but you pick one and you do it and then you'll get a mix of feedback some people will think oh wow that's a great way of doing that other people will genuinely want to know why and others will think that their different way of doing it is the right way and that you're an idiot and that's fine no actually that's more than fine it's great because if there was only one way these videos would become a whole lot more predictable and

15:29 I'd probably have stopped making them by now I'd run out of stuff to say so if you're genuinely curious keep asking and I'll keep [Music] answering wait whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa slow down [Music] okay so like three months ago I'm watching YouTube and I see this video for this really sketchy looking thing that plays like every video game from the beginning of time up until PlayStation 2 I think and it looked

16:15 really sketchy so I ordered it assuming it's not a scam I think that this will make a really cool gift for the family but the problem is it's just a loose hard drive in a box I don't want that sitting in the uh family room first let's go make sure that this thing works and then I'll okay so good news is it worked bad news is I have about three days to figure something out so that I can get it done for this video and in time for Christmas hopefully I'll come up with something that's good and fast we'll check back in in a little [Music] bit all right now given everything that we've done so far the stretcher looks like a pretty simple shape and it is but

17:01 there is one little thing that makes it tricky so design-wise I want these arcs to look like they all converge at close to the same point so you would think that to do that you just want to make a shape like this and then use dominoes or Dows or whatever to attach it and you could but because it gets so thin right here these tips are going to want to curl away here's a clip from a couple years ago when I found this out the hard way [Music] so my solution is rather than making the stretcher like this I'll make it like this where it'll interlock with the legs also I can't make it out of one piece

17:47 because it would get really wide and wasteful and really weak in these areas so I need to make it out of three pieces like [Music] this by the way I know we we've covered a lot of complicated stuff in this video so far and that everybody watching it is at a different point in their woodworking journey and I'm always trying to find that right balance with the way that I present things so that hopefully it makes sense to everybody and if you feel like I have and you enjoy the drawings the animations and all that extra stuff then hopefully you'll feel that I've earned your subscription and I thank you for it and also a lot of you already know that a big part of my business is selling woodworking plans and the projects we make plans for range from

18:33 intermediate to Advanced in terms of the skill level required and I pride myself on how good they are I seriously think our plans are the best out there but I've always wanted to do something that was more for the beginner crowd or even people who haven't started yet so for the past year I've been working with sha and John to create the best beginner woodworking course period that's actually the name of the course and it's everything that I wish that I had when I was starting all in one place and it would take me like 10 minutes to list it all but to keep this short it's got four project plans with step-by-step video chapters and drawings in both metric and Imperial over 20 other videos that deep dive into all of the foundational tools and techniques access to a private Discord and more so I'm going to have a

19:19 link down in the description that you can check out if you're interested but I really do think it is the best beginning woodworking course out there period so check it out one other thing the course hasn't launched yet so until it does anybody who wants to enroll is going to get 25% off of the normal price and an invitation to attend three live virtual hangout sessions hammering so if this is something that you're interested in honestly this is the best time to do it get a nice discount and start woodworking okay N64 Nintendo Super Nintendo you remember Virtual Boy where everything was red yeah the tennis game don't look at that

20:06 one me again so I've been thinking about this in drawing for a few hours and here's kind of where I landed I don't want to build a box because I don't want to have to worry about like heat venting and that kind of stuff so I basically want to make it a shell that just sits over the pieces and that way if there is some kind of heat issue I can just remove it when I'm playing put it back on when I'm not easy so initially with the design I was going for kind of like a minimalist game console type look I don't know how to describe it so then I asked myself what are just the coolest looking electronic components and I've always really loved stereo equipment from the 1960s and70s they're usually like an aluminum plate with a bunch of switches and dials that's kind of

20:52 wrapped in a thin piece of wood so I think I'm going to use that for my inspiration I think I got some ideas I just need to figure out how to build it okay I'm going to go build it so I mentioned how I saw that YouTube review for this game console like 3 months ago well after I saw it and I ordered it I made the foolish mistake of telling my 11-year-old and now every 5 days or so he'll ask about it and then I have to keep coming up with lies about it being backordered and stuff so that's been fun I don't know maybe it'll add to the excitement of the reveal and I also said how this thing looked a little scammy but I'm starting to feel better about it now at first I ordered it and it showed up at my door so that's always

21:38 a good start second when I tested it it seemed to work now in full transparency I've only tested two of the I don't know 18 billion games or whatever you could fit on a 4 terab hard drive but still two for two that's good and three I trust the channel where I saw the review the Channel's called Tech D and review doing stuff like this is pretty much all that they do so I feel like I'm in good hands and I'll put a link to their review rather than putting a direct link to the product I feel like if anybody's entitled to the affiliate money it's them so there you go all right so we are officially out of my comfort zone I've got a panel of wood drying that's going to become the box then I got this aluminum plate with a pill

22:25 shape cut into it and this is going to be the front of the console and then the plan for that is I got this aluminum mesh stuff I don't know I'll try to get a focus on it but it's got a bunch of little tiny holes in it so the plan is that that'll go behind here venting not functional but it'll look cool hopefully then I want to try to find a way to mount these little knobs that I found that are really cool looking on the front so you should have already seen me making that wooden panel and you probably know no it was like a really thick chunk that I started with and I kind of split it down the middle to make thin pieces so right now those are about a half of an inch thick and I'm going to try to make it where the grain of the wood continuously wraps around the

23:12 entire thing not necessary but it'll look nice also if you've ever seen those stereos from the 60s and 7s the wood is always like super thin looking like it looks like it's just a little tiny veneer wrapping around it so I want to make it look extra thin and how I'm going to do that is I'm going to cut a rabbit into the front so that there's only like a quarter of an inch that you can see on the front that's surrounding the aluminum plate so that's the first step I'm going to try to handle that right now hopefully I'll get a nice grain wrap with the wood um and then I've got a plan for all this aluminum stuff but like I said that's totally out of my wheelhouse I don't deal with this kind of stuff very often so I'm going to kind of brainstorm while

23:57 I do that and hopefully I'll be able to get it to look nice but we shall see I got to see if they have gr well the Bible game you don't play The Bible Game No yourself Gran Turismo 3 oh baby let's see this I'll tell you what this much fun should be illegal and it probably is sometimes the stupidest ideas are the best ideas let me set the stage so here I'm putting the final touches on the pieces before we assemble and I wasn't sure how high the keys on a keyboard are supposed to be but from what I found it's about 29 and 3/4 of an inch from the floor to the Keys and it seems like it's actually not super

24:44 crucial as long as your seat is adjustable so that's good to assemble I wanted to keep things really simple just the little glue and some screws that'll go through the legs and into the top assembly and those will get plugged so I get it all set up I drill my holes and then I go to install my first screw and I find out my bit can't reach so I thought I must have a skinnier bit somewhere around here and I do but only for Phillips head screws but I really like these Spa screws not a sponsorship by the way but spaxs if you're watching screw you I can't be

25:29 bought just kidding so spur the moment with glue drying the only solution that I could think of was to pack the bit receptacle full of sawdust to hopefully get the extra reach that I needed and it worked proof that sometimes the stupidest ideas are the best ideas [Music] [Applause] okay I might live to regret what I'm about to say but for the first time in a while I'm actually feeling pretty optimistic that I might get this done in

26:14 time so keyboard stands basically done sanded it's finished just needs to dry for a day or so before I put the keyboard on it and good to go there it is currently the 16th of December so I made a little list for myself of what I need to finish today the box is finished it's got a good grain wrap it all looks great I just need to throw a little bit of finish on it and let that dry for a day I need to cut my front plate to size that's made out of aluminum and I'm going to do that on the table saw but since I have a saw stop if I just try to cut it it's going to trigger the break that'll be a big setback so I need to make sure that I'm always deactivating the brake every time I go to use it so

26:59 that I don't accidentally do that mental note make sure you do that okay then after that I need to mark up and drill holes for my knobs so I think what I'm going to do is after I drill those holes I'm actually going to take the bit that I used to drill the holes and cut it into a couple little pieces that'll stick through the holes that they drilled and then I'll Mount the knobs to those since they'll be perfectly sized then I need to cut the aluminum mesh so that it's just slightly bigger than the pill-shaped opening in the front and mount that to the backside now I've never mounted aluminum to aluminum I don't have any welding or soldering equipment but from what I've read you

27:45 can actually use epoxy to do it so hopefully that's true because that's kind of my only option other than like gum and on that exact same note once that's cured then tomorrow morning I can attach the plate to the box with more epoxy and if all of that stuff works that should be it it should be done in time for Christmas and time for the kids to come see it and time for me to put this video out all right I'm going to go try to finish it all thank you all right I got it all done in time and for the record I just want to say I am not not expecting my kids to be blown away or even care about these

28:33 [Music] things and that's fine if anything they'll appreciate it in like 20 or 30 years from [Music] now it doesn't work as for my opinion on the pieces with the keyboard stand I really like the way it came out but I do wish that I had stuck so strictly to the whole using off Cuts as much as I could thing particularly here I think sapwood can look good when you use it correctly but this ain't correctly it's this thing but what do you think it is video gam and the game cover I would say came out just all

29:20 right definitely looks better than the alternative though so happy I did [Music] it all of that said if the original goal was to create something that's more of a focal point and less of an eyesore I'd say we definitely succeeded and I don't think I'll be hiding these anytime soon thanks for watching