Power Carved Picture Frame - A How To With Paul Jackman

Hey, I'm Paul Jackman from JackmanWorks But today I'm gonna teach you how I turned this Pallet wood from the trash into a unique and stunning picture frame shaped entirely with Arbortech's lineup of power carving tools Let's do it. The process starts with gluing up the frame. This can be as simple or as complicated as you want I decided on the more complicated route just because it wouldn't be a true Jackman project otherwise Start by gathering your pallet wood or other material if you prefer making your life easier I run all of my boards through the thickness planer until both faces are smooth to cut the boards to width I start by using the jointing sled on my table saw to cut one edge of each slat straight Then I rip them all down to width putting the jointed edge against the table saw fence This gives me two parallel edges and the width of the slats is just simply equal to whatever the thinnest slat in the bunch is For the faux box joint that I want on the corners of this frame The four pieces in each layer have to be the same thickness Each layer has a different thickness in order to maximize the materials that I'm working with But I organize them simply by ordering them from thinnest to thickest and then separate and label them in groups of four These are then sent through the planer. So all four slats in each group is the same thickness Last step to get the boards to their final shape is to cut them down to length Since the frame is square the length of the boards is equal to the width of the frame for half of the boards and the Other half of the boards are cut down to the length equal to the width of the frame minus two times the width of the slats I split the slats into two groups with two pieces from each set of four and Gang cut them all at the same time to ensure that each group is the exact same length And now we can do the lamination You can see now why I labeled all these pieces previously This helps me to keep things organized during the glue up because it's a lot of glue surface and you have to work fairly Quickly, and if you're smarter than me You'll have everything set up including your clamps before you start applying the glue to create the faux finger joints at the corners I rotate each layer by 90 degrees So the slats alternate at the corners because of all the layers I leave this to dry for the night just to be safe Although you could probably pop it out of the clamps after just a couple of hours the next day I remove all the clamps by the time I'm done with that. It's already the afternoon But at this point I can just move on to cleaning up the edges of the frame I draw straight and square lines on the top and cut those with my circular saw This isn't entirely necessary since we'll be carving all of these surfaces later anyway But this just makes things easier for when I do the layout later at this point I also go ahead and cut out the rabbit on the back inside edge of the frame To give myself a place for the glass in the photo since it will be much harder to do this after it's carved and do Its curvy shape this can be done with a rabbiting bit in the router But I ended up just using my CNC since it allows me to cut a little bit deeper than the router bits that I had on hand would allow And after all of that, it's finally power carving time Although this is future Paul Jackman speaking and those layers were totally worth it The power carving starts by laying out the shape that I want to cut in the frame power carving for me is really just about giving myself some rough guidelines to give the shape some structure and then just let the feeling of The tool and the visual of the wood take it in the direction that it wants a lot of ribbon like shapes that you see are pretty symmetrical or at least mirrored on the corners so I decided to play with that a little bit and make it look more like A sound wave or a water wave where the radius of the curves that I drew got tighter as I moved from left to right Okay. Now we get to begin power carving I start by dishing out the contours in the top surface of the frame with the turbo plane and work my way around the perimeter At the same time I also carved in the edges of the frame since the shape that I chose Bows in the center relative to the corners of the frame the layers of the frame actually help out a lot because they give me Some more guidelines to tell me how deeply I need to carve into the frame That way I can stop carving once I hit a certain layer Now the inside edge gets the same treatment, but these edges are harder to reach So I'm out the frame vertically in my bench vise to help reach these areas easier while I dish out the contours This helps to both reach the inside face in the inside edges that need a slight convex shape as well Now I draw lines on the back of the frame this again is to give myself some rough guidelines I draw a 3 quarters of an inch in from both the inside and outside Edges, this will give me a reference line for the back cut that I'm about to carve now The front edge stays the way that it is while I cut at an angle to connect the corner of the front Surface to the line that I just drew on the back This is what gives the frame its cool 3d shape introducing some more shadows to an already curvy shape Without the back cut the frame looks a lot more blocky But with it it makes a surprising difference to give the frame a more organic and flowing shape that I'm after With the shape of the ribbon complete I switch over to the ball gouge to dish out the corners of the frame I decided to play with the layers and colors a little more by using a circular shape in the corners instead of Continuing the ribbon because the bowl creates a cool visual that plays with the layers to create concentric circles of decreasing size as I carve deeper into the frame With my shaping of the bowls and the ribbons this left an awkward little area between the two shapes But I was able to handle that perfectly with the mini grinder I colored the remaining face that I hadn't carved yet with a marker to be able to see it more easily with some contrast between that and The rest of the wood and then I carved that surface down into a natural transition between the two shapes And with the shape of the frame established I can now switch out the carbide cutter in the mini grinder for the sanding disc and begin the rough sanding This disc just does rotary sanding so it takes the material away quickly and Helps to even out any of the lumps and inconsistencies left behind by the hand shaping done with the power carving tools The surface and the larger contours is already in pretty good shape because of the clean cut left behind by the turbo plane But the end grain and anywhere that has a tighter area and transitional surface needs a bit more work Which is where the mini grinder sanding attachment really shines much like myself And the final power carving tool that I need to complete the frame is the contour sander which I use for all of the finish Sanding this tool has a random orbital motion So it's less aggressive But this means that it leaves behind a really smooth surface since I can sand through the grits up to 320 This little tool doesn't get the glory that it deserves because everyone hates sanding including myself Point being is that this clever little tool makes the process remarkably easy and almost painless Now you'll notice that I've left the sharp edges alone up until this stage of the project I want to leave them at as much of a point as possible to give the eye that clear transition between one side of the Ribbon and the other but it inevitably gets really thin in areas where it's just not strong enough So it splinters off with hand sanding I'm able to smooth out all these inconsistencies by softening the corners all the way around the frame Really? It's all just about tricking the eye into believing that it's looking at a perfect line if that corner was sharp Then you're I could pick up on all the inconsistencies But when it's rounded slightly and smoothed out that tricks the eye into thinking that the edge is perfect Again, the sanding stage of a piece with such an organic shape like this is pretty extensive But that just leaves you with more satisfaction when you're done, or at least that's what I tell myself And now all that's left is to apply the finish I decided to go with a resin modified tongue oil to give it a natural look along with a slight sheen I build up four coats over a few days until I have the right amount of sheen and Then I hit it with some steel wool to remove any little bits of dust that snuck their way into the finish And for holding the actual picture in place I installed some screen door hardware because I wanted to make the picture easily removable since this frame is going to be traveling around and Living in a lot of different locations. I wanted it to be very adaptable Regular picture frame pins would work perfectly fine as well. I Cut these pockets out using my CNC router while I'm also at it I cut out the keyhole that would be used to hang the frame on a wall if that ever needs to be done Of course all this could be done with a handheld palm router as well If you don't have access to a CNC router The last step and maybe the best step in making a picture frame is installing your artwork I figured it was only appropriate to have a frame that I just made display the artwork that is the frame and it kind of just Goes on from there It's fun when the project is Adaptable to any shape that you envision and the best part is that it's easy to change your mind partway through the project if you Want to change direction a bit because you aren't set by the rigid lines like you are in traditional Woodworking projects when you're not power carving So thank you for checking out this build I hope you learned something about my power carving process and how you can apply this technique to make your own picture frame or Really any power carving project that you want check out all the Arbor Tech tools that I use on this project Linked down in the description below now this picture frame You just saw me build is gonna be traveling around to all the woodworking shows this season So be sure to stop by the Arbor Tech booth say hi and while you're there check out the picture frame for more power carving projects You don't want to make sure to subscribe to the Arbor Tech tools YouTube channel and for more projects and shenanigans from me You don't want to subscribe to my channel Jackman works You can also just click on the power carving playlist on the screen right now to see all of my previous power carving projects So I'll see you over there and in the meantime Go throw some chips