Building a Massive Laser Bench

The Art of Woodworking: Measuring and Cutting with Precision

As any woodworker knows, measuring and cutting are essential steps in creating precise and accurate projects. In this article, we will explore the importance of measuring and cutting techniques, as well as provide tips and tricks for achieving optimal results.

One of the most critical aspects of measuring is accuracy. When working with materials like wood, it's easy to make mistakes that can affect the entire project. To ensure accuracy, it's essential to use precise measurements and calibrate your tools accordingly. In this particular project, the creator had measured the space where the shelf would be installed, but was unsure about the exact dimensions due to the presence of a gap. To overcome this challenge, they decided to turn their work around and make adjustments as needed.

The Miter Saw: A Powerful Tool for Precise Cutting

To take precise cuts, the creator turned to their miter saw, which allowed them to make minute adjustments to achieve the desired dimensions. However, they soon realized that dust collection was a significant issue in the shop, particularly when working with power tools like the miter saw. To address this problem, they employed a simple yet effective solution: using small, frequent cuts to gradually remove material.

The Power of Small Cuts

By pushing their blade down about halfway and then lifting it up, the creator was able to take precise cuts that left minimal amounts of material behind. This technique allowed them to make minute adjustments to achieve the desired dimensions without wasting valuable resources. As they worked, the creator could see the blades shifting slightly, a testament to the precision of their cutting technique.

Notching and Trimming: The Final Touches

Once the basic structure of the shelf was complete, the creator turned their attention to notching and trimming. Using a circular saw with a tail, they attached the trim pieces to the shelf using small screws that pinched into the wood. This clever solution eliminated the need for countersinking, making the process faster and more efficient.

The Puzzle Piece: Assembling a Double-Stacked Shelf

In this project, the creator had encountered a unique challenge: two stacked shelves with limited space between them. To overcome this hurdle, they employed an unconventional approach: cutting the top shelf in half to accommodate the narrower gap. This clever solution allowed them to create a seamless joint that would hold up under pressure.

Challenges and Triumphs

As any woodworker knows, projects rarely go without a hitch. In this case, the creator encountered a few challenges, including warping shelves due to improper drying. However, with patience and perseverance, they were able to overcome these issues and create a stunning piece of furniture that would be the envy of any woodworking enthusiast.

The Importance of Support: Joining My Patreon Page

For those who have enjoyed this article and are eager to support the channel, I invite you to join my Patreon page. As a patron, you will not only be contributing to the creation of high-quality content but also receiving exclusive benefits, including early access to new projects and behind-the-scenes insights into my woodworking process.

Conclusion

Measuring and cutting with precision is an art that requires patience, skill, and attention to detail. By employing techniques like small cuts and adjusting for warping shelves, woodworkers can create stunning pieces of furniture that showcase their craftsmanship. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, I hope this article has provided valuable insights into the world of woodworking. Happy building!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys i'm nick and this is build that build a place where our motto is life's a bench i'm running out of space fast you guys know recently i got the arturo laser master 2 pro which is just taking a bench space right now what you guys may not know is i have another laser that's similar to this one another diode that's in a box in there the only reason i haven't assembled it is because i don't know where to put it so this week's project is a bench and i'm gonna make a monster of a bench it's gonna be eight foot long it's gonna be about 30 inches deep i've recently decided that i am just going to treat this garage door like a wall so i'm going to build a bench that sits right in front of it and i wanted to have enough space for both lasers to sit on top of it have the laptop in between them and this bench is also going to have a shelf like right underneath that top portion where i can just pick up my lasers and slide them under there the idea with that is i want to get my workflow down first and then we'll talk about a more permanent solution for the lasers i'm thinking of either building enclosures that would slide out or maybe just the laser itself slides out on like some under mount drawer pulls but i want to see how much i'm picking it up and putting it down and doing stuff like that before i make any further modification and the process i'm going to use to make this bench is what i use for most of my benches and it's it's what we call additive joinery instead of notching out a 4x4 to run a 2 by inside of it take one full two by four and then anywhere we're gonna make a notch we're gonna cut a second two by four uh the length up to that so also these plans will be available on my website hopefully eventually and the colors are so you know all those boards are the same height the same cut so see how you've got red here and then you've got orange behind it so that orange board is a six inch board and then this blue board right there is going to sit on top of it and so we're going to create our joints like that you'll see as we go along it's just a lot easier than trying to notch stuff out and i want to get this bench done pretty quickly because i have a lot of stuff to do luckily the price of lumber has gone down quite a bit uh because i'm using 12 2x4s and one sheet of three quarter inch ply and two sheets of half inch ply you could probably do the top with half inch ply but i just wanted to be a little beefier a little a little beefy you can use mdf if you want your bench to be heavy as okay so i'm just gonna start pulling some cuts uh as you guys know and if you don't you should you have to make repeated cuts over and over use a stop block or something like that in order to make sure that all of your cuts the exact same length and if you can't cut them all at the same time so we're gonna assemble our legs first so we're gonna start off with a 40 inch cut and a six inch cut assemble those and then we will start doing our additive joinery now this bench can be configured any way you want i want an open area right here because i want to be able to put my fan and my stool under there but you could very easily run these across the second row right there is going to be our shelf for our lasers our lasers there's a storm rolling into texas sorry it's so bright um and the power just totally went out so i got no no no lighting hopefully luckily a lot of my tools are uh cordless but i'm just gonna go ahead and just sorry about like if you can hear outside head open the garage door and i'm sorry if the lighting isn't isn't spot on okay let's get back to work so and this is where your additive joinery comes in because see we've created this pocket for this to go in and then we'll attach this here and then instead of having to have notched this out we'll continue with another two by four up here that's a big ass bench in retrospect i probably didn't need to cut i i could have notched this out but what i'm going to do is i'm going to notch a piece out here and then come up here to meet with the other ones i think these are all 14 and a half inches so that'll be like what 18 to make up for it and then it'll it'll bypass there because this is this part right here is going to be open okay let's do a little gorilla camera work here you guys may have heard of sneaking up on the cut i'm going to show you what we're doing here now this like i have a measurement for this like this should be 18 inches but there may be a little gap here there may be something over here you never know so what i want to do let me turn it around so what i did is i cut this a little brown i cut it cut a little long okay what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back over to the miter saw and i'm just going to take little cuts until i'm right on top of this one and holy the power just came on i have i have dust collection that's the biggest problem with this with the power being off in the shop is well aside from the air conditioning you don't have any dust collection because my dust collection plugs into the wall so there's sawdust all over the place like this and what i'm going to show you right now is the easiest way to take the smallest amount of material off you're going to push your blade down about halfway push into the blade and lift up now when i run this did you see that little amount of material that it took off now i just take this over to check it still too long so you come in here like this you push into the blade you can actually see the blades shift a little bit if you're real close check that out like a glove baby i notched most of this out with my saw obviously you can't get all the way through uh with a rounded saw so just gonna come in here i just take that off so it's not the prettiest cut in the world but it's gonna be behind us you're not gonna see it so yeah real quick i'm just using one center for four for each one of the shelves if i feel like that's not enough later i'm gonna go in and add some more but i don't think anything really heavy is gonna be on here so i think we should be all right especially with the three-quarter inch piece of plywood on the very top the blade in that circular saw it's still a tail so to attach the thing i'm just using these little trim screws because i don't want to go through and countersink all these things and these things will just pinch right into the wood so well i brought the puzzle master out here and apparently since these are double stacked and this is just a little too narrow right here let's cut it in half i've been so good at putting tape on everything so it's slightly huge so all right guys what do you think this thing is enormous and heavy and i love it uh however i did have a couple of hiccups along the way including i went to i went to bed and this thing was square and i got up the next morning and it was no longer square so if you look under the top the top is actually or the the frame is actually shifted a little bit from the top you'll never see it uh it's really hard to pick up on unless you're looking for it the only thing i can think of is that when i was buying two by fours at home depot they were definitely not dry so i i think they're just literally twisting as this thing is drying so hopefully now that everything's together it'll hold it and won't do anything too crazy now i can't wait to get up in this bench so guys thanks for sticking around to the end of the video if you like this project hit that like button if you haven't subscribed please consider subscribing it helps me out more than you know and it costs you this much but if you want to spend more than this much consider joining my patreon page i'll link that down below i want to give a special thanks to all of my patrons but especially my top tier patrons or my boilermaker patrons stephen mann eric weiss derek coates chuck faulkner puffy muffins jim carter zack z and andy the viking a little buffalo trace clinkies now that i have the bench i need to assemble another laser and then you guys need to tell me what i need to laser next leave it in the comments down below until next time thanks for playing and now i gotta get to work that's money and don't even act like it's enough money it's money all right shoot this all right let's shoot the who's shooting what's up guys i'm nick i don't like where this is pointed i'm gonna stand on this really rickety stool that turns there's a ladder like literally right there but lazy i mean come on is it really a workbench if you don't use a whole box of screws the old reverse screw perfect perfect like nipples on a man but if you want to spend more than this much and help support the channel and you need to tell me what i need to start lasering down below leave it in the commentswhat's up guys i'm nick and this is build that build a place where our motto is life's a bench i'm running out of space fast you guys know recently i got the arturo laser master 2 pro which is just taking a bench space right now what you guys may not know is i have another laser that's similar to this one another diode that's in a box in there the only reason i haven't assembled it is because i don't know where to put it so this week's project is a bench and i'm gonna make a monster of a bench it's gonna be eight foot long it's gonna be about 30 inches deep i've recently decided that i am just going to treat this garage door like a wall so i'm going to build a bench that sits right in front of it and i wanted to have enough space for both lasers to sit on top of it have the laptop in between them and this bench is also going to have a shelf like right underneath that top portion where i can just pick up my lasers and slide them under there the idea with that is i want to get my workflow down first and then we'll talk about a more permanent solution for the lasers i'm thinking of either building enclosures that would slide out or maybe just the laser itself slides out on like some under mount drawer pulls but i want to see how much i'm picking it up and putting it down and doing stuff like that before i make any further modification and the process i'm going to use to make this bench is what i use for most of my benches and it's it's what we call additive joinery instead of notching out a 4x4 to run a 2 by inside of it take one full two by four and then anywhere we're gonna make a notch we're gonna cut a second two by four uh the length up to that so also these plans will be available on my website hopefully eventually and the colors are so you know all those boards are the same height the same cut so see how you've got red here and then you've got orange behind it so that orange board is a six inch board and then this blue board right there is going to sit on top of it and so we're going to create our joints like that you'll see as we go along it's just a lot easier than trying to notch stuff out and i want to get this bench done pretty quickly because i have a lot of stuff to do luckily the price of lumber has gone down quite a bit uh because i'm using 12 2x4s and one sheet of three quarter inch ply and two sheets of half inch ply you could probably do the top with half inch ply but i just wanted to be a little beefier a little a little beefy you can use mdf if you want your bench to be heavy as okay so i'm just gonna start pulling some cuts uh as you guys know and if you don't you should you have to make repeated cuts over and over use a stop block or something like that in order to make sure that all of your cuts the exact same length and if you can't cut them all at the same time so we're gonna assemble our legs first so we're gonna start off with a 40 inch cut and a six inch cut assemble those and then we will start doing our additive joinery now this bench can be configured any way you want i want an open area right here because i want to be able to put my fan and my stool under there but you could very easily run these across the second row right there is going to be our shelf for our lasers our lasers there's a storm rolling into texas sorry it's so bright um and the power just totally went out so i got no no no lighting hopefully luckily a lot of my tools are uh cordless but i'm just gonna go ahead and just sorry about like if you can hear outside head open the garage door and i'm sorry if the lighting isn't isn't spot on okay let's get back to work so and this is where your additive joinery comes in because see we've created this pocket for this to go in and then we'll attach this here and then instead of having to have notched this out we'll continue with another two by four up here that's a big ass bench in retrospect i probably didn't need to cut i i could have notched this out but what i'm going to do is i'm going to notch a piece out here and then come up here to meet with the other ones i think these are all 14 and a half inches so that'll be like what 18 to make up for it and then it'll it'll bypass there because this is this part right here is going to be open okay let's do a little gorilla camera work here you guys may have heard of sneaking up on the cut i'm going to show you what we're doing here now this like i have a measurement for this like this should be 18 inches but there may be a little gap here there may be something over here you never know so what i want to do let me turn it around so what i did is i cut this a little brown i cut it cut a little long okay what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back over to the miter saw and i'm just going to take little cuts until i'm right on top of this one and holy the power just came on i have i have dust collection that's the biggest problem with this with the power being off in the shop is well aside from the air conditioning you don't have any dust collection because my dust collection plugs into the wall so there's sawdust all over the place like this and what i'm going to show you right now is the easiest way to take the smallest amount of material off you're going to push your blade down about halfway push into the blade and lift up now when i run this did you see that little amount of material that it took off now i just take this over to check it still too long so you come in here like this you push into the blade you can actually see the blades shift a little bit if you're real close check that out like a glove baby i notched most of this out with my saw obviously you can't get all the way through uh with a rounded saw so just gonna come in here i just take that off so it's not the prettiest cut in the world but it's gonna be behind us you're not gonna see it so yeah real quick i'm just using one center for four for each one of the shelves if i feel like that's not enough later i'm gonna go in and add some more but i don't think anything really heavy is gonna be on here so i think we should be all right especially with the three-quarter inch piece of plywood on the very top the blade in that circular saw it's still a tail so to attach the thing i'm just using these little trim screws because i don't want to go through and countersink all these things and these things will just pinch right into the wood so well i brought the puzzle master out here and apparently since these are double stacked and this is just a little too narrow right here let's cut it in half i've been so good at putting tape on everything so it's slightly huge so all right guys what do you think this thing is enormous and heavy and i love it uh however i did have a couple of hiccups along the way including i went to i went to bed and this thing was square and i got up the next morning and it was no longer square so if you look under the top the top is actually or the the frame is actually shifted a little bit from the top you'll never see it uh it's really hard to pick up on unless you're looking for it the only thing i can think of is that when i was buying two by fours at home depot they were definitely not dry so i i think they're just literally twisting as this thing is drying so hopefully now that everything's together it'll hold it and won't do anything too crazy now i can't wait to get up in this bench so guys thanks for sticking around to the end of the video if you like this project hit that like button if you haven't subscribed please consider subscribing it helps me out more than you know and it costs you this much but if you want to spend more than this much consider joining my patreon page i'll link that down below i want to give a special thanks to all of my patrons but especially my top tier patrons or my boilermaker patrons stephen mann eric weiss derek coates chuck faulkner puffy muffins jim carter zack z and andy the viking a little buffalo trace clinkies now that i have the bench i need to assemble another laser and then you guys need to tell me what i need to laser next leave it in the comments down below until next time thanks for playing and now i gotta get to work that's money and don't even act like it's enough money it's money all right shoot this all right let's shoot the who's shooting what's up guys i'm nick i don't like where this is pointed i'm gonna stand on this really rickety stool that turns there's a ladder like literally right there but lazy i mean come on is it really a workbench if you don't use a whole box of screws the old reverse screw perfect perfect like nipples on a man but if you want to spend more than this much and help support the channel and you need to tell me what i need to start lasering down below leave it in the comments\n"