[Music Playing]
Alright so, that is pretty good. That is probably as far as I am going to take it right now. Like I say we are going to work on this area later but it is looking like a much more round form instead of the sort of blocky edge that we had before. So that is good enough for now. Take it out of the vise and start all over again.
So now the shape of our leg is established, we did the all the work we needed to with our rasp and we are left with a semi rough surface. I mean this this rasp does a really good job producing a relatively smooth surface for a file, for a rasp but not smooth enough, we need to go a step further. And I did not want to take a minute to talk about this particular step. In a lot of cases, I talked to wood workers constantly who hate finishing. It is just something that they enjoy doing, they would rather just finish the project, pass it of to somebody, let them finish it and call it a day.
But unfortunately, the reality of it is the fact that the finish is almost as important—sometimes more important than the workmanship that got you there in the first place. Because you put a crappy finish on a piece like this people will notice. The wood itself has to be prepped properly you have to have it nice and smoothly sanded, consistently sanded. You should be spending a decent amount of time getting all of those little scratches out, getting this surface as perfect as possible so that when someone comes up to this piece and they grab it and feel and touch it. Because that is what they are going to do especially on something like this that is not typical.
It is not something you would normally see in most average furniture stores. So the average person goes “Wow! That is neat.” They do not really they have never really seen anything like that made out of wood. So you have to be prepared for that and having a really nice smooth finish is the way to get there and it all starts right here with the sanding process. So the process that I use is a little bit more systematic than what you know, maybe some people would use, it is going to start with rough sanding, using the random orbit sander, usually about 80 grit. Then I am going to move on to some other things to smooth it out from there and I will show you the processes as we go along.
Now the first step is going to use my random orbit sander, I have 80 grit on here, and I am going to go over the entire surface. Now it is not exactly what you think, I am not doing this to really smooth everything out at this point. I do not want to use my sander for that. I do not feel I like I have as much control, I feel like I could create more problems than I am solving if I go too heavily with the sander right now especially with 80 grit.
So I will quickly go over the whole surface as a preparation step for the next step which is using my card scrapers to smooth it out. And the card scraper on the other hand, I have a lot of control with and I could really pull off a lot of material where I need to keep things nice and smooth. So what this is going to do, believe it or not, is sort of just going to give me a frame of reference. As I sand the whole surface it is going to create a nice fine powder that is going to put a white haze over the entire piece. Now when I come back with my scraper, every stroke of the scraper all of the sudden becomes very visible when there is an issue, it sort of magnifies any problems that are in the wood and you will know within two or three strokes of the scraper whether or not you have gotten the surface nice and smooth from that point. So let us hit it with the sander.
[Demo]
Alright, now that the surface is kind of powdery, it is time to go to the scrapers and do the real smoothing. So I have got an assortment of scrapers here ready to go. In case one gets dull; it is not working on it. And let us take a nice close look and hopefully I can get the camera angle just right so you could see exactly what I am talking about here.
[Demo Scrapping]
I could really start to see where there are flaws and rework those areas a little bit too smooth them more.
This area actually looks pretty good. And what is really cool about this method is, you are sort off getting two things out of this. You are getting a visual reference for areas that you have worked versus areas that you have not worked. A leg like this can get pretty confusing; it is hard to know where you have what areas you have worked in and what areas you have not. But as I go through, like I said I am exposing real problems and the reason is this powder from the sanding will sit down deeper into areas where there are flaws.
So as you scrape, you smooth it out, you will see the darker color, the more vivid color of the wood come through and anything that still has that hazy look to it is filled with saw dust which means it is sitting lower in their for it has to be worked a little bit more.
There is a spot there that I have got to do.
[Demo Scrapping]
That is really it.
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