Making furniture boards with your own hands

Making furniture with your own hands is becoming more and more popular due to the high price of finished products, and due to the large amount of source material that has appeared in the public domain. At home, with a certain set of appropriate tools, it is really possible to make high-quality furniture yourself that will reliably serve you for many years. In the article we will consider the nuances of making furniture boards with our own hands.

This process is not overly complicated, however, in order to avoid possible mistakes, it is recommended that you first familiarize yourself with the basic manufacturing rules.

To make a high-quality shield, you must adhere to a certain order of actions.

1. Cut the planks into squares at a 90 degree angle... Pay attention to the fact that there is an even cut. This part of the work is especially difficult in technical terms, and if you are not confident in your abilities, purchase ready-made bars.
2. By means of a planing (jointing) machine remove all roughness and damage on the workpieces.
3. Align on a flat surface cooked barsto get the right mix of texture and color.
4. Outline the sequence of blanks... Otherwise, later they can be confused.
5. Process the workpieces coarse and fine sandpaper.
6. Pay close attention to the alignment of the edges on the details.... If the bars are flawlessly even, the finished furniture board will be no worse in quality than the factory one.

To properly prepare the parts and assemble the furniture board, it is necessary to acquire specialized equipment and raw materials:

• circular saw;
• milling machine;
• with an electric drill;
• hammer;
• electric plane;
• belt and vibration grinders (you can process wood with sandpaper by winding it on a block, only it will take more time);
• thicknessing machine;
• a clamp or do-it-yourself auxiliary equipment for screed boards;
• a long iron ruler, pencil, tape measure;
• wood materials;
• plywood and thin rails for rallying (connecting) the shield;
• adhesive composition.

The manufacturing technology is not very complicated, but it involves preparatory work necessary for the finished product to be of good quality. Since the furniture board consists of a mass of bars, sometimes a slight flaw in one of the components leads to a violation of the configuration of the entire structure.

The process of preparing elements includes several operations.

1. Drying of edged timber. Removal of residual stresses in wood and bringing lumber to the required level of moisture content.
2. Calibration, identification of areas with shortcomings. Detection of damage to workpieces and provision of reference surfaces for further processing.
3. Cutting material... The lumber is sawn into thin planks (lamellas) for a solid panel of a certain width on a 2-side thicknesser using a circular saw unit.
4. Facing to size and cutting out flawed areas.The lamella is trimmed into elements of a certain length and the unsuitable sections are cut out. The short, undamaged elements are subsequently used for splicing.
5. Longitudinal (lengthwise) splicing of parts. Cutting on the end face of toothed spike blanks, applying an adhesive composition to the spikes and longitudinal splicing of flawless blanks into lamellas with facing to size.
6. Calibration of lamellas. Calibrated to remove adhesive fragments and obtain accurate geometries and a clean surface prior to bonding.

The gluing procedure of the shield can be carried out in different ways.

If you glue a shield from boards processed with a planer machine, then problems will appear:

• the elements clamped by a clamp are able to "creep away", and a step will come out;
• the step can be removed exclusively with a thicknessing machine or long-term grinding.

Such disadvantages are absent when mating shield elements on an inserted rail. The work is carried out in a specific order.

• Prepare 40 mm boards. They must be of the same thickness and smooth.
• A shield is laid out of the boards, and the base is marked with a pencil. The base marking is necessary in order to make the cuts on the required side, as well as for the error-free assembly of the elements into the shield.
• On each part, using an electric circular saw, 9 mm deep cuts are made from 2 sides. For elements placed on the edges of the shield, one cut is made.
• From scraps of lumber, slats are cut 1 mm thick thinner than the width of the slot and 1 mm wider than the depth of the slots in 2 boards - in other words, 17 millimeters. The rail installed in the recess should move freely in it.
• For gluing, a PVA glue composition is used. It is applied with a brush so that it fills the grooves.
• The assembled shield is pulled together by means of clamps and left to dry.
• Excess adhesive released outside remove with a sharp tool, and then polish the shield.

In order for the boards of the shield to stick together efficiently, they need to be squeezed. But if there are no devices for these purposes, you can use ordinary wedges.

In such a situation, the boards are tied with dowels (thorns). This fastener is usually in the form of a cylindrical bar with chamfered or rounded ends. These connectors can be purchased from a building materials store or you can make your own.

For the shield, smooth fitted boards are prepared. They are laid out on a leveled plane, with a pencil they indicate the order of priority of the calculation.

• Specialized fixture mark areas for spikes on the boards... They are applied at various levels.
• Areas for thorns transferred to the end surface of the elements.
• To drill a hole for a tenon, use a jig... It is a device that is rigidly fixed to the board and equipped with a drill guide.
• The hole is made with an M8 drill. The drilling depth is fixed on it with an insulating tape.
• Glue the shield on 2 supportsmade according to the dimensions of the board.
• The end surface of each part is lubricated with PVA glue... In this case, it is necessary to fill the holes for the thorns with adhesive.
• Spikes are driven into the holes, and after the part hammered into a shield.
• The assembled product is placed on the supports. To prevent the shield from deflecting, a load is placed on top, and so that it does not stick to the support, an insulating layer of newspapers is arranged.
• On the support, the shield is compressed with 4 wedges. They are driven by a hammer until an adhesive composition appears on the joints of the plots.
• After drying with a sharp tool, remove excess adhesive, and then the surface is processed with a grinder.

Wood waste accumulates in any carpentry workshop. If it's a pity to throw them out, then you can build furniture boards of various sizes from them.

It is easy to prepare the parts for gluing.

• Square elements are cut from waste 22 mm thick with a side of 150 mm, and then they are subjected to processing on a machine in order to obtain a flat plane.
• Spikes on parts cut out with a groove-tenon cutter for wood.
• The dowels should go along and across the fibers... When on one part the spikes pass along the fibers, then on the second part - across the fibers.
• After milling, the elements are docked in a checkerboard pattern., and then glued with PVA glue.
• Elements lubricated with adhesive squeezed by means of clamps.
• After drying, the gluing is aligned on a circular, and then the sides are milled and ground.
• A similar shield can also be made from rectangular elements., although it must be said that from the plots in the shape of a square, the shield comes out more rigid. The rigidity of the structure is formed due to the fact that the butt joints of the squares do not coincide.

Glued and carefully dried wooden furniture board to bring it to a presentation must be carefully processed twice with grinding equipment. Pre-sanding is done with coarse sandpaper using a belt sander. After that, the surface must be sanded with a flat (vibration) sander.

To remove the hairiness of the wood surface from the furniture board, a very simple method is practiced: the surface of the part is covered with liquid. When dry, the villi rise and can be removed without much effort with the grinding equipment. When the procedure is over, the smooth and even board is ready for use.

Properly crafted shields have the following characteristics:

• do not lose the natural pattern of the cut of the wood and the structure of the tree;
• do not shrink, do not deform and do not crack;
• refer to environmentally friendly materials;
• regardless of the size of the parts, shields can be created in any required dimensions.

You can watch a video instruction on the manufacture of a furniture board below.