Gluing Up a Hollow Column

If you're making something like a plant stand a great way to make a column for a piece of furniture like that is not from one solid piece, but by gluing up a hallow column. In this case, this is a hexagon made out of cedar. We're gonna make one out of oak. And what I want to talk about here is some tricks to making this go a little bit easier. There are a few things going on.

One, we're gonna talk about a very specific style of clamp that makes putting this together really, really, really simple. We're also gonna look at a specific procedure of events, order of operations here that makes this a lot easier. So first step, I've already got the blade on my table saw set to the right spot, right angle. And what I'm gonna do is just start ripping the six pieces I need for this project, and then we'll look at assembly. Let's head over to the gluing table and I'll give you some tricks to make this a whole lot easier to put together.

Order of operations, so that's about doing stuff in the right sequence to make your life easier, and make this come out well. Here's the thing to think about: just made a lot of cuts on the table saw, and in order for this to be a hexagon those cuts need to be at 30 degrees. Lets say every cut is at 29.9 or 30.1. Tiny, tiny, tiny bit of variation. If that's the case, when I close this, it's not gonna close.

The joints won't be right. So this is what's important: we need to do this in halfsies, and when we get ready to close everything, strap clamps are what's gonna really make this work because they're a great way to get uniform pressure on everything at one time. First step, we're gonna lay these out, knife edge to knife edge, and use masking tape simply as a hinge so that we can flip them over and make it easy to put this stuff together. Same thing is gonna happen to these three but let's go through this first half. Carefully flip this - there, cool.

Now, no glue on the outside boards. And get some tape ready. 'Cause now what we'll do is we'll just close this half and bridge that. So here's what's happening: because of the way that we've hinged this on the other side with the masking tape, and the way that we're pulling it together now, these two seams are going to close. Even if the angles are off a little bit, the seams are gonna close.

Because we're not making a complete hexagon at this stage. Then, I'm gonna show you the trick that makes uber sure this half fits perfectly with the other half. And that's gonna be a machining step and then a clamping step to make sure everything comes together okay. Once this is done, once you have these bridges in place, these pieces of masking tape, you can then flip. And just double check your seams, see if we need to do any additional taping, like there.

Just to make sure everything's pulled tight. And then, watch glue dry. I'm gonna do the same thing to the other half. Once the glue is dry, we'll come back and look at how we end up with a perfect hexagonal column. This is part of the secret to making this work.

Let the glue dry, take the masking tape off. Now think about what we've got here. If each of those angles was off just a tiny bit, then when we go to put this half to that half they're not gonna close. So, on a nice flat surface, this bench is dead flat, my table saw is dead flat. Or, using face jointing on a jointer, what we want to do is get that bottom, these two edges, in plane with each other, we want to get those dead flat across that way.

And and easy way to do that is self-adhesive sand paper on that dead flat surface. And what we're doing is we're truing that. We're making it flat until you get to a point where we do this, and we do this. And it closes like that. Now, let me get this out of the way.

And it's got barely used, I can roll it back up and use it again. For gluing, this is where the strap clamps are really gonna earn their keep. And again, with this kind of project, what I like is getting uniform pressure wrapped all the way around the object and that's what the strap clamps are good at. Now the way this works is, with this handle I can take up most of the slack. And then, finish it with this handle.

Very cool. Now since we're talking about, these kind of clamps and uniform pressure and the benefits of that on, not round stuff, but when we want to grab all the way around something, let me show you - When I'm making frames, similar concept. Basically I find the easiest way to put this kind of thing together, just like our column, is by wrapping it. There we go. So same idea, we want to close all four miters at one time, just like we want to close that all at one time and the strap clamp is a great way to get that uniform pressure from every side.

So this came out cool. And this is gonna end up being, for me, a column on a plant stand. And easy way to do it, is to do it in sub-steps like that and then close everything off with our strap clamps.