Making Rustic Furniture: Tips

One of the things I really like about making rustic furniture is the ability to just go out and harvest my own materials. There's a real free wheeling artistic side to rustic furniture that I don't often get to do in my cabinet and furniture making. So what I wanna do here is give you some tips to make rustic furniture a little bit easier for you to do, first off, let's talk about material. I've got a coat rack here that I did just over the last couple of days. This is made out of popple and I'm lucky enough to live in a place where we've got some trees I can harvest for this. So I literally went to the back of my property, cut this stuff down, and a day later I had a coat rack. You can also get your material by ordering it. There are places that provide material like this. This is peeled pine, not uncommon that you can also get peeled Cedar and you can use this kind of material for projects like this as well in order to get that same rustic look. So I use that stuff a lot. Now, once we've got our material picked, what we wanna do is create more to some tenon joints in order to make the furniture. So the modest part of this is nothing more than drilling a hole. If you're using a handheld drill, like I'm about to do here, the best way to drill that hole is with what's called a self-feeding bit. If you're already doing woodworking, you might have a bit like this in your shop already. This is a Forstner bit, now this would make a hole but this is gonna work better especially like I said, in the handheld application. So I've got a piece here in the vice. Let's just see how this looks. You can use a piece of masking tape, like I've done here in order to get your whole depth indicated. I'm gonna shallow that up just a little bit for this piece. And the beauty of the self-feeding bit is that I have very little down pressure on this. And because it's self-feeding, it's actually pulling its way right into that material. It makes drilling very easy. Now, let's say I've got a project that calls for a number of these positions being drilled into this piece. Now there was a lot of holes. A lot of projects are gonna call for that. If it's a table, I might have a rail up here and a rail down here. If it's a back of a chair, I might have a whole series of vertical slats I'm gonna put in. What I want to make sure is that the orientation of this piece and other words, its perpendicularity is the same here as it is down here. Here's a real easy way to do that. I'm gonna take a piece, I've already got a 10 and nine. Push that into the hole, now I've got an alignment system here. So when I come to my next position, I'm eyeballing my drill with that first piece in order to make the hole. This is a great way to make sure that when we put this whole thing together the orientation of all these pieces is the same. Now pop this guy out, you can see what a great fit that is. Now sometimes what happens is I've got a piece of a certain size that I wanna use. I'm gonna put a tenon on the end of it in order to do that and understand where I'm going. Let's talk about what the tenon cutters for these projects look like, got one here. It's kinda like a bell shape. And what happens is that this part of the bell is gonna engage on the end of a material. The cutters take material off. One of the things that you'll need to do when you first get started is find tool that fit. So what I always do is I drill a hole cause you can't change that size. That's determined by your bit. I can change the size of the tenon by loosening these cutters. And you can see that if I slide this cutter in it's gonna reduce the diameter of the resulting tenon. If I slide it out, it's gonna make it bigger. Once you're set up, then we're ready to go. Now let's say that I want on this piece to do an inch and a half 10, and that's the cutter I've got right here. So first off, when I line this up, I can see that the end of this size log is sort of barely engaged in my bell here. And I wanna make my life a little bit easier. I wanna make it easier to get this started. So I need to reduce this diameter just a little bit. Couple of ways you can do this real easy way is with what's called a draw knife. That's this tool right here and what just a couple of strokes. It's kinda like peeling potatoes. I can knock material off the end of this, reducing its diameter. And I would do that all the way around then eyeball it against my cutter. I wanna get this to a point where this is reduced and fits better inside here making it easier for this to get started. Now, once you're ready to cut. Let me grab another piece, I'm gonna cut my, gonna cut a 10 and 40 on this one right here. There's quite a bit of rotational torque on this as we cut the tenon, a good woodworking vice works great for it, here's an alternative. You know, if you poke around, you're gonna find these used at garage sales, a variety of other places. These are actually plumbing vices that are designed to hold pipe. So they're perfect for round stuff like we're about to do here. So the way I'm gonna use this is I'm gonna put a pad in here so that those steel components don't mess up my material. Throw the vice over the top and clamp that down. Now, I need to change from the drill bit to the tenon cutter. And then I can show you how to put a tenon on the end of this. Once you're ready to go, couple of things that you need to do as the operator, one is that you want the cutter to be on the material before you turn this on, you don't wanna start out here in space and then walk up to it. So I'm gonna have that started on there. If like I was referring to earlier we had reduced that diameter. You'd have a little chamfer right there to nest the cutter up against. Next thing is, I'm gonna start running this and it doesn't take a lot of forward pressure. It does sell feed itself to some extent as I'm cutting, I'm gonna watch inside the window here. What these are telling me is how long a tenon I'm making. So that helps me make sure I get this just right. The other thing you have to do is make sure that you're feeding on an axis parallel to the axis of your material. It's possible for me to do this or me to do this and end up with a crooked tenon. So we were real careful about drilling those holes, getting those lined up. You need to be equally careful about cutting your tenon. Make sure that's nice and straight. Now this is really cool, again, it's kinda like peeling potatoes. So watch how fun this one is to do. Really, really simple way to put a tenon on the end of these. So now here's what we got. We got a mortise, we got a tenon. We do have to talk about material for a minute. From the perspective of derive versus screen let's have a look at this coat rack so I can explain what I'm talking about. What we want in the perfect world is for the parts that are gonna get the mortise, the holes for that to be wet and for the parts that are gonna have the tenons for those to be dry. Now think about the dynamic of wood. If this is already dry it shrunk and it's at its final size. If this is still wet, it's gonna shrink. So what's kind of cool about doing it that way. Wet here, dry here is that when I put these together, over time this is gonna continue to dry and it's gonna shrink around that piece, further tightening the joint. So it's gonna make it even tighter than it was when we put it together. If you mess this up and you do the opposite, you're gonna be in trouble. If this is wet and this is already dry as this piece shrinks, as the tenon piece shrinks, it's gonna shrink away from the hole and this is gonna get sloppy over time. The other alternative is just let both pieces dry completely then everything is stabilized and you're gonna be good to go. I've had great luck with this popple and also with Willow, I've got a piece of that here. This is a piece of Willow, I've had great luck with these just working with them green. And again, I want the main component, the whole line the part I'm putting the hole into to be green, the other part to be dry, but starting with the material green, just like this, leaving the bark on and the bark staying stuck for me over a long period. So a bunch of little tips, tricks and techniques here to make rustic furniture easier for you to do in your shop. This is a great hobby to try and I think you're gonna enjoy it just as much as I do.