Easy Face Grain Column Assembly

An attribute that really makes this coat tree work is the fact that it's face grain, four sides, and it's face grain four sides cause this is a column and the parts for that column all cut on the table saw 45 degree cuts on each piece. So now we're ready to glue these things together make it into one big post. A couple of things are critical here. One is that we want to make sure we use a good glue for this. And the glue I'm talking about is a glue that'll give me plenty of open time. Got a lot of stuff to work on here. I don't want the glue to get away from me before I'm ready for it. The other thing that's a nice attribute of this glue is that it dries very, very translucent. So out here on these pointy miters if anything doesn't come together just perfectly I'm not going to have a funky line from the glue because I've got a translucent glue I'm using for it. To get ready for this, what I've done is put some blocks on the bench. I've got masking tape on them so if I get squeeze-out from the column, I'm not going to glue these parts down to my blocks. What's gonna make everything come together for me here are inner tube strips and then a bunch of clamps. So the inner tube strips are a very handy thing to have in your shop and they work great for irregular clamping objects like I'm going to do here. Here on out it's just fairly standard fair. Good film of glue on each of the two miters on two of the pieces. Four edges glued it's go-time here. We'll get everything else brought into place. Got wiggle room on the end so I want them to be close but they don't have to be perfect because they're going to get cut anyway. Now this is where the first inner tube is going to come into play. Right here in the center I'm going to squeeze my miters closed and wrap the inner tube to keep it there. And then I'm going to do the same thing another inner tube on each end. And you got to kind of, if you squeeze this with your hands you'll feel it slide to a point where the outside corners line up with each other. That's what you want to do. You got to manipulate it just a little bit to get the miters closed and where you want them. And then the inner tube will take over from there. Very cool that really works great. Now, inner tubes alone might not quite finish it. And you can just kind of tell by looking down the corners if they closed all the way or not. These actually look pretty good. And I'm going to buy some insurance by putting a clamp this way, very very gently and a clamp this way very gently because if I over squeeze either one of these, I'm going to distort it. I'll get those miters to climb against each other. So I'm going to tighten the horizontal clamp, tighten the vertical clamp, tighten horizontal, tighten vertical until everything looks okie and dokie right about there. And I'm just going to keep doing that any place down the column here. If you go right to the clamps and you don't do the inner tube then this has a tendency to just kind of run away from ya. And it's really, really hard to get everything to come together. So starting with the inner tubes makes it a whole lot easier. Very nice. When this is done with these mitered corners like this nobody's ever going to know that you've got four pieces here because the miters came together so nice. Got a good glue job going on this one. At this point the glue on the column needs to be allowed to dry. The glue on my bench, I'm going to hurry up and clean that up, it's a water cleanup. So I'll get a damp rag, get that all wiped up, and then we just need to wait for the glue to dry so we can move on to the next step.