wood branding iron drill press

- [marc] the woodwhisperer is sponsored by powermatic and clear vue cyclones. okay so today, we're going totalk about fixing mistakes. not that i ever make them. ♫ hit it ♫

wood branding iron drill press, (lively music) for other people who make mistakes you may want to know how to fix them so you could advice themon how to make their errors

not as visible. here's the thing about mistakes, honestly, we all make them and you've probably heard thesaying that a good woodworker, the sign of a goodwoodworker is his ability or her ability to fix mistakes. it's not that you don't make them, you just know how to fix themso that people don't see them. there are times where youhave to have a do over

so there are somemulligans in woodworking. but i would say about 99%of the mistakes that happen are fixable and repairableto a level that your client or whoever you're giving it to, they will never even see it. if you're going to repair mistakes, there are a couple of thingsthat you're going to need, your best friends. number one, ca glue,cyanoacrylate glue, super glue,

whatever you want to call it and then also this is essential. super glue does dry quickly but not as fast as i want it to and i use a quick set activator. most of this come with, if you buy one brand of the glue, you usually have thesame brand that they sell aerosol activator

and that allows the glueto cure up immediately. if you're holding a small piece in place little dab will do you,spray the activator on there and then it's just immediately dry. ca glue is essential. a good quality filler, timbermate is my favorite brand of filler very effective, doesn't shrink, comes in a lot of good colors,

and those colors are afantastic match for the woods that they're supposed to match. you'll also want an iron. - [nicole] where did you get that? - the store. let's say you're routing a workpiece and you get a little bit of tearout in the middle of the workpiece. as you're going along youjust hear that sort of

sound that no woodworker likes to hear is that "crank" as you're routing. that means you lost a big chunk. if you can save the chunk, great because you're going to use it, we'll do that in a little bit. if you can't save the chunk, sometimes the only thing that makes sense is to use a filler and that's the example

that i've got here. take a look at this piece, so we actually have twoand i know this is maple so it's going to be a littlebit difficult for you to see but where my finger ishere, that's one that's got the filler placed in it already. so we'll use that in asecond to fast forward but right here you may notbe able to see that too well but there's a gouge,pretty good size gouge.

what i'm going to do isuse timbermate maple beach and pine flavor, pop that lid off. this is water based by the way and as it dries up, how many times have youbought a thing a filler and you're going to open it up and it's completely cured, right? what a pain in the butt. this stuff is waterbased so if you do that

and it's cured becausethe water evaporated, spray some water in there, put the lid on, come back in an hourand it's usable again. all i'm going to do isgrab a little bit of this good stuff here. okay there's my gouge, put that right in there. now later we're going to lookat a similar gouge like this and do a wood repair

but right now i justwant to focus on filler. now i don't use filler all that often but there are justtimes where it really is the most sensible solution. so you want to overfillof course like that, make sure there's enough inthere and then let it dry. it's water based, it does dry fast but not fast enough for a demo. let's look at the onethat's already filled.

i'm just going to sand it back. if you look at the color match here, this is what i love abouttimbermate and we're zoomed in. obviously that's going tobe a lot more noticeable when you're zoomed likethis but once it's finished this stuff does takestain and you pull back and you look at this whole leg as a whole you're notreally going to see that. i wish i had the rightcolored pencil for this

but i've done this in the past. one of the things that makesfiller not look so good is the fact that itmatches the background wood which it does pretty well here. what it doesn't do is itdoesn't gives us those fine grain lines that run through it so if it's a really big flaw like this probablyisn't that big of a deal but if it was a larger surface area,

if you get a colored pencilthat's closely matched to the color of the grain lines, you can actually tracethose grain lines in. now i'll tell you what, this is a colored pencil istole from my son's playroom. it's not the right color butif you go to the craft store you could pick up somereally, try to get one that's as soft as possible and get them in a rangeof browns, all right.

then basically look at wherethe grain starts and stops and you can actually try tocarry that grain line through however looks natural. believe it or not, againnot the right color so it stands out a littlemore than i would want it to but if you pull back and look at that, that actually will help disguise this and make it look like real wood. the key though is you got to quickly put

a fast drying finish on that or the pencil will just kind of wipe off. just a little bit of shellac or lacquer probably isn't a bad ideafor something to seal that color in. how about a misplaced mortise? has that ever happened? it's never happened to me but i've heard it happens to people so thekey with something like this

is to simply fill it, right. you've got a hole, you need to fill it. the problem is a lot ofpeople make the mistake of thinking "well, all rightlet me cut a little piece," because you would havea tenon going in there so let me cut the tenon and put the grain running this way. the problem is if you do that, you're going to haveend grain showing here

so it's going to be a lot more noticeable than if you do a long grain joint. i just basically cutsome scrap, sized it down so that it would fit nice and snug and then i also taper the ends. a lot of people may havetrouble getting this piece cut perfectly so there's no gaps. don't worry about cutting it perfectly, cut it about a 16th of an inch oversized,

grab a piece of sandpaper and just give yourself a little angle on both sides. little bit of a taper and that's going to allow meto coat this sucker with glue. i'm doing this very quickly, bit of rush. like this, of course you'd want gluein the mortise as well. put it in and because youhave those ends tapered

as i hammer this down it'sgoing to take up the slack on the outside edges. it's really is just asuperficial repair, all right it's not a structural thing soas long as i don't see gaps, i'll be happy. all right, so you wouldlet the glue dry on that and then you will just planeit flush with the surface. there's one that i'vealready done, it's in place, probably wasn't as carefulwith it as i should have been

so i'm just going to grab a block plane just clean that up a little bit. okay, and that is a pretty acceptablerepair in my opinion. in fact if you didn't know that i did that and you just looked at that piece, you probably wouldn't knowthat it even happened. now if my mortise is in the wrong spot, i could relocate my mortise.

even if part of the new mortise, a lot of times that is what happens, you're just a little bit offset so your new mortise will gointo part of this repair, that's fine. it's solid wood, it'sgoing in the same direction as the rest of our leg. if we route into it, there won't be any associatedproblems with it, right?

so that's a great way tofix your misplaced mortises. let's say you got a little bit of chipout. maybe you're doing some edge routing and i got a piece of tape here just because i didn'twant to lose the piece. here's the thing,whenever you have chipout, if you can recover the piece and a lot of times you'll be on your knees with a magnifying glass looking for it

because finding the chippedout piece saves you a ton of time and effort because that piece is already perfectly cut tofill the void of the chipout. right now just so you know this i created with a chisel so i gouged inhere and then flaked it out. so it's not exactly thesame thing you would see but you get the idea. this is a good use for ca glue but if you look real close here,

that is a dead on match for the fit right and that's why you want tofind this piece if you can. let's put a little bitof ca glue on there, by the way ca glue comes in acouple different viscosities, different thicknesses. i like medium and gel for error repairs. occasionally i do have acalling to use the thin stuff but man is that stuff watery. not great for repairs in my opinion.

okay, so i could justput this guy in place if i want to, like this. now a lot of people will putthe activator on the other end, i don't want to do thatbecause i want to make sure this gets a lot of pressure. the glue gets distributed and then i could use my activator. okay, so i'll use something like little putty knife like this

put some diagonal pressure down and just hit it with alittle bit of the activator. now you'll definitely havea little bit of squeeze out to contend with but thatcould easily be sanded or chiseled away. normally i'd give it a couplemore minutes to cure out but you would sand it niceand smooth and look at that. it's a repair on top of a repair, let's pretend that didn'thappen, can we do that?

give it a little sanding. all right so there will be no visible line when it's all set and donebecause it's lock and key, it fits in perfectly. there are times where you're not going to recover thispiece, you can't find it. that is what this example represents here. right at the corner, just nothing really you could do about it.

all right, popped right out, now you're cursing, you're very upset. sometimes in order to fix a mistake you actually have tomake the problem worse so what i'm going to try to do is actually turn this into asurface that i can work with. right now it's useless to me but i want to take a pieceof scrap and glue it in place and i need a nice flat area to do that

so you can do it with achisel or you can use a plane. i'm not left handed sothis may not go so well. once you have a nice flatsurface we now have something we can work with by takinganother piece like this. now you may use yellow glue if you have a way to clamp this securely but once again ca glue is my hero. for this one, i'm going to putthe glue on the work piece. okay, a little bit ofglue on the work piece,

quick set activator, spread it around a little bit, you only have a couple of seconds. that's good, now this isjust a big old chunk of scrap i had laying around. you probably would want to size this down to be a little bit moreappropriately sized for this because now i've got alot of material to remove and that becomes a lot of work

but i typically with a smaller piece could then come back to this. i may very well knock this off and that's why you don'thave as much material here. if it's a smaller piece youdon't have as much to work and you could just kindof pare away with a chisel or take light passes with a plane but i don't know, let's see what happens. if it comes off, it comes off,

just to understand why. notice how well that's holdingjust with that ca glue, all right and that's why you could be a little bit more confidentin a repair like this that it's going to be fine. - [nicole] go on. - really, you want me to go? - [nicole] yeah, go on, i want to see it. - nicole wants to seeit, i better go then.

let's keep going. i was just trying to stopwhile i was ahead here. - [nicole] i want to see this. - not the best match in terms of the grain but for a quick job it's not too bad and of course we use a sawto trim off the edge here. all together though wemade the problem worse to allow us to put a nice patch in and the results aren't too bad.

a lot of times you drop a workpiece right? that can happen or youdrop something on it like "oh my gosh, i dented my workpiece." here's the great thing about a dent, a dent is nothing morethan compressed fibers. unless the dent is so severe like that where you've actually separated fibers, you can actually get mostof this to spring back because you've effectivelyjust crashed fibers

so we need to do somethingthat brings some life back, helps those fibers spreadapart a little bit. all right so i've got a light dent here, two side by side dents here and a really severedent that i don't think is going to repair very well, this will be probablymore visible with water. here's the other one. i can barely see it myself right there.

so i'm letting a littlebit of water sit on there while i prep a blue shop towelor some kind of a wash cloth, whatever you have is fine,just something absorbent that you can soak with water. what we're going to do is steam the dents. now we know that woodexpands with moisture right? and that it can expandquickly if it's hot moisture also known as steam. if we can very carefullysteam these dented areas,

we may be able to get thewood fibers to spread out and fill up that gapand the dent goes away. let's do just that, i'm going to focus on some of these bigger ones here, i'm trying to remember where they all are. sometimes by the way the water … it's like straight fromtreating right there, the water will in ofitself cause expansion even without the heat so youmay have trouble finding them

because they've already expanded but there's a good one right there let's steam that bad boy. now, if your board is reallythin, you have to be careful, too much moisture, too much heat you can actually cause alittle bit of warping to occur but usually on a bigsolid piece you're okay. you can also be a littlebit more careful than i am, i'm being very messy withthis by using the pinpoint

tip of the iron and just kind of focusing in your flawed area. it's not a bad idea butfor the sake of a demo i'm just kind of being sloppy. what are you doing honey? ironing my wood. you can see we still havethat really severe dent right here. it's a little bit better but like i said

crashed fibers are one thing, fibers that actually get sever because it was such a deep impact that's going to be a problem and that's going to behard if not impossible to use the steaming method to get out but you can certainly makeit less of a big deal. here i've got a littlebit left on this guy, i don't know if you canreally make that out.

this is also a pretty rough board so there's a little bit ofmaterial left right there that i didn't get it to reform. maybe a hair here just alittle bit barely detectable and i had a spot that wasover here fairly light dent that i can't even find anymore. all of these with a little bit of sanding, so three light duty dents gone. this one on the other hand,

if you could see is the wood fibers or the sanded dust fills that up, it's a little bit too deep, but we can make it looka little bit better. this is a technique that iwould use for light duty dents, not really heavy stuff. you can also use thesteaming technique on plywood if you need to. plywood a lot of times even ifit's a nice looking surface,

just dragging it aroundthe tools and the shop where your workbench and the shop can put theselittle hairline scratches on there and sometimes before i sand if it's noticeable enough beforei give it my final sanding because you don't want to sand plywood very aggressively right? a lot of times what you can do is do a little bit of the steam treatment

on any noticeable scratches. let the fibers in that top layer veneer puff up a little bit, they'll get very roughand then you could do your final sanding and a lotof times that final sanding is a lot quicker andeasier and those mistakes or those little flaws just go away. don't be too aggressiveabout it on plywood because you don't want tolike reactivate the glue

in the veneer layer, you don'twant to warp the plywood, you got to be careful with it. for very noticeable surface flaws, you can spot treat them andactually get a decent result. now one thing i'lladdress, a lot of people when they talk aboutrepairs, fixing repairs, they'll talk about glue and wood dust. take the dust of whateverwood you're working with, get a little bit of ca glueor epoxy, mix it together

and that can be a sufficient repair. that can work in some instances but i don’t really like it as a finish. the reason is becausethis type of material ... (compressor turns on) i need to turn off my compressor. it's a real shot people. - [nicole] we're alive. - yeah, doing real woodworking here.

- [nicole] you're talkingabout the ca glue. - yeah, okay. the problem that i havewith that is ca glue, epoxy even type on, thesethings don't accept stains so even when you put on a clear finish, clear finish still impartsa color change to the wood. if you've repaired a certain area then you hit it with finish or worse yet an actual stain, a lot oftimes it becomes an eye sore.

even if you have the woodfibers mixed with it, they're not absorbed,they're just wood fibers in a liquid suspension. now, and even with epoxy, a lot of times you lookreally close at epoxy that's been mixed with saw dust, look really close at it,it just looks like saw dust suspended in a resin. so you have to be careful abouthow and when you use that.

not sort of a different story because you could put alittle dye in an epoxy mix and you could fill aknot and a lot of times knots are so darkly colored that if you use a clearmaterial to fill a little flaw, it actually will be hard to see, because it's just showingthe dark color beneath it but hopefully that preparesyou for any mistakes, common mistakes you might confront.

maybe in the future like i said we'll do an updatedversion based on feedback. how do you repair this,how do you repair that, but this should get you goingfor some really basic repairs.