Sawyer Design: Building the TABLE Apple Inc. (doesn't know they) Designed

Most people don't know that in 1984, Apple didn't just make computers, but also created furniture. We've all heard of the Macintosh, but what do you know about the table? It was known as the Mac table, and the reason you've never heard of this is because it looks like this. So that got me thinking, what would an Apple-designed table look like today? What would that cost? And could I design something good enough to pitch to Apple for official licensing? I'm Nick, and that's the plan for this build, where I also might have destroyed weeks of work with a single router move, then program my $20,000 CNC to eat itself. Got dusty and broke things, but more on all that later. Right now, I've gotta get going on the build because my wife is eight months pregnant, and I only have three weeks to get this done, so I can get paid before this baby comes. This is $3,000 worth of American black walnut, and with a cut list made, step one is turning rough boards into flat, square ones. We'll get more into the finer points of the design, but here is the plan. Two surfaces, the top and the shelf. To support those surfaces, we've got the frame consisting of the skirt around the outside, and the stretchers underneath for mounting. And no table is a table without four legs and some super exciting details. And I wanna start with the legs because they're gonna be the most challenging. All right, I've got the lumber all milled, and starting with the legs for the table, I'm looking at this stack of boards. So I'm thinking, how do I make this look more thoughtful? I've always subscribed to the fact that if there's something to hide, rather than trying to cover it up, make it more evident. Basically, because the pattern and the end grain of the boards stacked together doesn't match because they're not from the same board, I think the best course of action is to lean into the chaos and create more. You can think of it kind of like static on a TV. Up close, the chaos is wild, but from a couple steps back, the chaos reaches sort of a consistency and cohesion. Rather than looking like I half-assed this and just glued a bunch of blocks together, well, I actually don't know if this is gonna work. I could be foolish and say this could all be for nothing and I'll still hate it at the end, but I guess the only thing to do sometimes is try. I could try to sit back and visualize this for hours, and I won't know until I see it. So let's rip these up, slice it out, and see how it comes together. Can't be all chaos, though. I'm using triangles to keep track of which boards are related to one another. To put it simply, each leg is a hollow box, five blocks wide, five blocks deep. This board wants to give me four sticks, but I need five. That's not craftsmanship, that's me being cheap with $3,000 worth of walnut. So every board becomes five square sticks, and the sticks are glued together to make four blocks, and those four blocks are the walls of the legs. I'm gonna call this thoughtful chaos, and I might be overthinking it. See, this was pretty tricky because I wanna pay attention to not only how the leg is going to look from the outside on the vertical walls, but also the end grain, and I want it to be chaos, but not unruly or unkept. So I'm doing my best to grain match such that the end grain on the top of the table and the face grain of the legs of the table all complement in the chaos without clashing. Matchy-matchy, but not too matchy-matchy. Get it? Got it? Good. Solid, this table would weigh 800 pounds. That's a grand piano for about 100 newborn babies, and I'm an overachiever, so I got started early on the dad bod, and I can't lift 800 pounds. So in order to cut weight, the legs are hollow, and each leg consists of four of these glued-up blocks, and the thickness of each block needs to be 1.63 inches. Eh, that's pretty close. As every great engineer knows, math lies. Trust your gut. There's absolutely no way that could come back to bite me later on. So screw it, let's see how it goes. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Ooh, eh. So rough? Hmm. Let's try that again. Uh-uh, that wasn't supposed to happen, but as usual I have no idea why or what happened. I was in here, I left this unattended, and it looks like it ran. So it appears that it took a bite out of the leg, then went to pick up a bit, knocked two bits out of their holders with a tool in the machine spinning at a 18,000 rpm and then went over ate the calibration plate before dropping the bit and parking I'll say I have no idea and I'm not 100% sure how to check what went wrong I will report back. Upon further review, there's nothing to report Because I have no idea. Sometimes robots they just need to let loose a little. I just reset everything and hopefully it works this time Usually this would piss me off, but it's a robot so it does what I tell it to and being mad at the machine is to be mad at myself and That's just not my path Because the test went so well rather than trying to fix that gouge in the surface I'm gonna set these test blanks aside and move straight into production and because Boxes have four sides I think I can cut all the parts for two legs at once and I created a little alignment pin jig to drill holes Into the machine bed and into the bottom of the blank so that everything is in the correct position on the machine And it wasn't even through the roughing pass that I could see there was a problem See, there is glue on the top of this piece Which means, drumroll please, that means that it did not get cut and it is not thick enough Hmm gosh, if only there could have been some way to know this beforehand So one more pass it is which makes these walls thinner than the plan which makes the box smaller than the plan So the two short sides get a little fatter to make up the difference new math Which I hate and I should have trusted the calipers. All right, take two. Let's do this After some trial and tribulation Yahtzee Now we need to figure out how to support the spacing on these So when I clamp them to glue them together They don't squeeze apart or get misaligned and I think I have a good idea for this So whenever you take out Material from the face of a board typically you're releasing Tension the backside is going to do some things. This is expected wood moves because I am so constrained on Thickness here. I can't really run these back through the jointer to make this face perfectly flat So I'm realizing now that I've got these support blocks that they need some relief to allow for variabilities and invariable surfaces contact patches Good, that'll do. My mics are dead. Cameras are dead. My cards are full. What the heck was I doing? Oh, I Need to cut down the legs to their overall height before we get into Gluing them together because it's gonna be a lot easier when they're flat than when they have been assembled in our big-ass blocks Doing that now. If I seem a little frazzled it may be because you forgot that I mentioned There's a baby coming imminently very shortly very very shortly and this needs to be done like yesterday The legs are hollow remember so the top of each one needs a lid and if it needs a lid the lid might as well be the best part of The tape so the center would look something like that But I looked at it once and I saw don't break the ice remember that game like 90s little hammer penguin I have a couple of ideas One of them. Well, let me just show you The edges of all of the boards all of the waste that would otherwise go in the trash can Let's see what this is gonna look like. I'm gonna turn this into a homogenous pile and I don't think you need to see that so homogenous Homogeneous. Nope. That's just a really smart gay gay homogenous. First. I need to glue this up as cubes And this seems like a great opportunity to do an accidental tutorial because this is incidentally how also you make an ingrain Cutting board step one cut hardwood into strips To glue them up side-by-side into a slab or panel You can shuffle them so the grain varies a little bit clean up the boards after the glue has dried Three cross cut the slab in two slices like a loaf of bread and then stand every slice on its side So the cut ends face up Step four flip every other slice in for in so the pattern alternates or arrange it However, you'd like and the final step is to flatten sand and oil Tutorial complete All right decision time. I need to pick my favorite four and I've made some options for each of the legs The grain on the tabletop isn't gonna be anything wild or particularly special and I would call the design fairly conservative So I can get a little wild with the patterns here because this will be the feature of the table and I want attention To be drawn to these legs So I'm looking for color pattern and overall chakras that ground by aura or whatever Now I've seen some pretty cool cutting boards that have a pattern called the chaos pattern and there's some styles of those that I really like So I'm also making a shuffled rando with a bunch of ankles to try and test an arrangement using this method But I decided after making one that it was just taking too long and somebody was getting impatient with me Right, right moving along With all the ingrained patterns glued and the various options I arranged I need to clean up the surfaces and cut them all to the same thickness before cutting the profile out of the blanks The shop-bought CNC and a big-ass two-inch surfacing bit makes really short easy work of all of this The CNC does have a vacuum table which pulls a suction down through the MDF Basically using a shop vac which is a really cool feature in theory I can't say I trust it for small parts So I pretty much belt and suspenders everything with a lot of double-sided tape So if you've got any hot tips for how to hold stuff down to the machine bed better Please enlighten us down in the comments. Now that all the components are together I think I'm safe to glue up the legs and once that's dry I can clean up the edges Those curves will look great after a little cleanup with a rasp hand plane and sanding block And this is probably a good time to tell you about this profile shape because it's not a round over You've made it this far So you're probably into this enough to allow me to do a little deep dive on the nerdy stuff that gets me Excited about this design. I spend a lot of time in the shop With me myself And my own thoughts which as a side note probably explains why i'm getting weirder with age And I also like to listen to books music and podcasts while I work Being a lot adhd. I tend to have a lot of ideas and find a lot of things interesting But as quickly as I find interest I lose it if I don't have a place to put it So over the last few years, I decided to build an app called thought marks like bookmarks But for your brain It's basically a notes app a place to put thoughts and ideas because your best thinking doesn't always happen at a desk Anyway, while I was building it apple changed the shape of every icon on your phone Do you remember this? Did you even notice android did it too? Look at your phone the corner on every app it looks round But it's not and it is specifically and distinctly not a round over Although it looks like a round over It feels so much better than a round over. It's less sterile. It's more human organic I really dig it. But why does it feel different than a round over ----? I wanted to answer that and to do that we've got to look at a little math hang in there You'll be tested on none of this and I worked on this explanation until my editor kyle could understand and he failed algebra Two times remember you don't have to share in someone's passion to share in their joy All right The exciting part see a round over is a circle jammed into a corner Your eye can find the exact spot where the straight line stops and the curve starts as you increase the radius on a round over Eventually the square becomes a circle for this profile. It never stops bending. So your eye Never finds the seam as the radius is increased. It just becomes a softer Square, that's it. It feels softer because it is this version following apple's math is a 12 segment Custom bezier curve that join into one closed path. The nerds call it a super ellipse or a lame curve Colloquially colloquial colloquially the colloquial term is squircle And that feels nice and it's kind of fun to say so I think i'll stick with that squircle. Try it. It's fun squircle Okay, wake up your eyes glazed over a little but wasn't that interesting? There's a lot of words about a corner I'm guessing three of you cared my people and you know what? I love you guys All right, I feel like I got a little deep here my thought was to come around and sort of angle this outside Down into this which I thought would look pretty classy, but I don't know if that would work well in Practice like having a sloped edge here So I think I want to either make these flush or have the center puck inlay Just a little bit higher than the top of the leg then I can sand it down So what i've done is i've made a little insert here that will take that shelf And bring it up. I think this is point zero three. So about a 30 second And last corner All right, so that's about a week chasing gaps on this table Try not to let my furniture have any gaps While a quarter inch gap on my garage door has just been sitting there since you're already here You're coming on a little side quest with me and this one's paid for Because green hinge is paying for this part of the video. See I gotta do something about this photons means there is air getting through And i've got just a solution and it's super easy to install check this out This is what they make. It's a hinge for your garage door With a spring in it And that's the whole product, but it's a pretty clever one The spring pushes the roller towards the track And the track and each panel gets pressed against the side seal of your garage door So each panel can adjust on its own and that closes gaps As big as a quarter of an inch less daylight around the sides less room for drafts dust bugs And moisture to come in green hinge is made of 12 gauge steel. It's powder coated made in the usa with a lifetime warranty Typically a garage door has the hinge hole pattern for various hinges pre-drilled So installation is literally as easy as screwing the new green hinges into place with the existing hole pattern using the fasteners from the old hinge On this door the holes lined up and the hinges drop right in now. I'm not a door guy And installation took me about five minutes But their instructions do call for a professional technician to install the system To see if your doors are compatible green hinge has a one-page sheet that i'll link down in the description below The doors in my shop required just a little bit of modification and some spacer blocks to line up all of the hinges So i'm not going to pretend that is something you should do but know that not everything is supported, but anything is possible That seemed too easy. Let's see how it works Baseline audio tests for how loud this garage door is So our baseline I measure at minus 25.2 luffs Okay audio test after Definitely less of that rattling around in the rail, but the most important part does it seal better lights, please? Here's a comparison before after See how there's no light I mean does it get any easier than that? Thanks again green hinge for sponsoring this video You'll check them out at the link in the description green like the color hinge like stone hinge green hinge check out green hinge Down in the description. I call that a successful side quest. Let's get back to it All right, that's looking pretty good I'm going to set these aside get the top and shelf glued up and then work on the frames There's one under the top and one under the shelf and they are what actually hold the legs together This is eight quarter material which means it's two inches thick and to make the panels that will make up the Top and the shelf surfaces. I'm just resawing this thicker board and filleting it open to make a panel That is three quarters of an inch thick and mirrors itself over the center line And now that's glued up I can head back over to the cnc to make yet another template To cut out the profile for the top that will nest into each one of the legs using this template I can take several passes with a templating router bit to cut out the profile around the edge after roughing it out on the bandsaw Clamp cutting this grain really wanted to tear out and I ripped out the edge of the grain So i've got to stop and repair this weeks of work on the line One router pass but to be fair the router didn't do that. I did that with a router Hopefully I can make a patch out of the scraps Luckily for the bulk of the damage It ripped a big chunk of grain straight out and onto the floor that I could find but there was still some residual Goobers that I had to patch up Not in love with that. That looks better Just trying to glue in the chip that I pulled out of there with the router Left a few gaps still I think I can fix this with a patch and to get the patch the closest possible I can use this section that I cut out of the corner use just the edge of that Then i've got a pretty damn close grain match that I can go ahead and inlay that should tidy everything up So using the corners that I cut out on the bandsaw I was able to grain match pretty closely And hold it up to make sure that the edge grain was going to more or less line up with what i've already got And then it's as simple as a little chisel work and some glue and hopefully Nobody will ever know except for you and me Usually there's a few comments questioning why I didn't do something Some other way and I feel like there's going to be a breadboard guy in the comments For the casual viewer breadboard ends are a strip Capped across each end of a tabletop with the grain running the other way And yes, that would solve the corner problem. I'm about to have But at the cost of changing the entire vibe of the table since the top and the shelf nest around the legs I want the gap around each leg to be consistent Breadboards would put a seam right through that unless I took the breadboard clear past the legs and then 27% Of the top is breadboard So, yes, I considered other options, but I think I landed on what'll look and function best But feel free to disagree with me down below. I'll fight you I'm always up for discussion for the finer points of technical choices with my fellow nerds in the comment section Well, that was an unnecessary setback but worth fixing properly and i'm happy with how that turned out With that obstacle removed i'm clear to move forward with the frame and the stretchers that'll tie everything together For the subframe I've decided that when picking up on the table from one end or the other the joinery becomes the weak spot And I could see a situation where there would be enough flex that like a miter or a butt joint would not suffice So I have selected to use bridal joints for all of the corners That join the subframe together for both the shelf and the top When it comes to joinery, I think a good rule of thumb is surface area the more surface area the better the joint Specifically the more long grain surface area that is touching and glued is going to make a stronger joint So i'm cutting these bridles on the panto router, which really does make super quick work of everything And we're starting here at the corners that will nestle around the legs and ultimately serve as the anchor points Where the legs will bolt to the table These need to be very strong pretty good Now that the corners are done. I can go ahead and glue them up and while that dries I'm going to move my attention over to the skirts These will follow the curves of the table surfaces for which they support to get the curves cut down to size After i've roughed them out on the bandsaw Since these curves need to follow the table shape exactly I'm going to rough them out first on the bandsaw and then using templates I cut over on the cnc. I can bring in the final form over on the router table There was a little funkiness here in my fixturing A fixture is this thing the template plus the structure to hold the workpiece Either my layout was a little off or my bandsawing was a little too generous Anyway, a little bit of funkiness here. So I ended up having to bring the shape home by hand So I ended up having to bring the shape home by hand I don't know about you, but i'm feeling like this is all a bunch of parts. So let's see where we're at so far We've got the top surfaces and the shelf. We've got the legs the skirts corners and the corners are still square So i'm going to need to cut a profile out of those so they nest perfectly in with the legs but one rule that I have learned the hard way many many times is That you should always cut your joinery while the wood is still square Now that i've got out the joinery cut I go ahead and cut that profile out of the corners and But since the corners are so small It's a little dangerous to use that on the router table in the same fashion to cut out the curves that we did on the skirts So i'm going to glue these up first instead and I can bring those corners home after the entire end Skirt assembly has been glued together With everything trimmed for the end assembly I'm about ready to get this skirt completely together But if I do that before I get stretchers joined i'm going to paint myself into a corner And not be able to get the stretchers joined to the skirt So I have to get those done first and for this i'm using the domino joiner because dominoes are stronger than Moncala for this application Now there's going to be two short stretchers and one long stretcher and where the long stretcher Intersects the two shorter ones I have decided to do a cross lap at the place where these meet rather than taking a bunch of measurements I can just lay the parts over one another where they're going to live and I can mark them directly onto the other part Because while woodworking may start with measurements It usually becomes more referential the further you get into any project And I almost always get better results with this method rather than trying to use measurements In this case I was a little too good and bigger hammer did not end up Doing what I wanted it to I ended up splitting the stretcher Just a little too tight Not a big deal off camera I just glued that back together and it'll end up stronger than it was before But I had to take a whisker off of that cheek of the cross lap in order to get everything to fit nicely This top is going to shrink. It's leaving my shop in Oregon Which is basically a rainforest right now for a living room in the desert wood moves This one's going to exhale about three-eighths of an inch So the bolts get slots instead of holes and this will allow the top to slide on the frame And before assembly i'm just going to go ahead and make all of the surfaces smooth like baby bottom It's easier to prep now before any finish goes on than to sand the frame after it's assembled So I plane the subframe smooth That's the skirt and the stretchers near the tops and then knock off the sharp edges with a block plane So it's finish ready before glue up Once the glue is dry I'll come back and trim the bridle joint tenons flush with a helical flush trim compression bit on the router table I left them a hair long just because of that curve at the corner and trimming will make that join super tidy It's easy to take all this machinery I've collected for granted in my little shop and should probably mention for the average Joe that you could do all the joinery and Carving for this project with hand tools and a pretty minimal shop setup And that's exactly how I would have done it not too long ago The tools in my shop just make it easier and more efficient to do what I do so I can make a living doing it Now you may have noticed in these corners. I've left just a little bit of a bump out in each side of these What these are going to serve as is the contact point where the leg meets the frame and thus connects everything together I maybe should have drilled these before I glued up the frame, but I didn't so I made this little guide block that sits Over the bump and keeps the drill straight as I bore these mounting points into the frame Now that I have all the mounting points drilled out I need to address a one little weak spot in the tops for the top of the table and the shelf short grain is Well, it's fragile now. There's a few ways to address this I don't want to lose the aesthetic of these little points, but the nubbins are really weak along the grain here 100% they'll chip off with even a little bump if I don't add a little support here I'm going to add a little pin inside for support kind of like rebar Now drilling on a sloped surface perpendicular to the grain could get pretty ugly trying to freehand And that's where this little guide comes in clutch I also added a little bit of blue tape after the first hole just to support that grain a little on the drill bit Entry point in hopes to prevent chip out I had some other ideas, but my in-house engineer Tim Suggested wood pins so you don't see the support on the final product from the end of the board So that's what i'm doing. The pins are just dowels and I don't have any quarter inch dowel stock on hand So i'll have to make some real quick The dowel plate is such a pain and every time I use it I'm equally glad I have one and wondering why I didn't just go buy some dowel What a silly waste of precious time three weeks to a baby and i'm hand making dowels For reference dowels are a couple bucks. My can do and should do filter could really use some work With those pain in the pins Size and cut I can shove them into the support holes and trim them flush which again I'm doing on the router table since the corner's curved and it's hard to get a chisel or flush cut saw in there without boogering an edge Hot damn consider those nubbins supported nubbin brassiere if you will Next I can move on to attaching the sub frames to the top and the shelf For this i'm using a drill bit to mark out where the threaded inserts go and then drilling and driving the inserts And wham bam solid attachment, man Then it's rinse and repeat for the shelf then the legs And same as before i'm using steel inserts all the way around Basically metal threads sunk into the wood with a bolt to match because that's what I had in stock I might use something a little beefier on the legs if I did this again But that would likely be overkill for any stresses Or forces that this table would ever see but i'm not an engineer There are 16 inserts in the leg each one bedded In a little jb weld since wood glue only works with wood and these are steel Once that cures I can finally bolt the legs to the frame Interestingly the guy who commissioned this table has no idea where the inspiration came from And he is finding out right now same as you his only request was something medieval for his castle I'm, pretty sure it's just a house, but he keeps calling it a castle and a castle in the desert would be pretty dang cool But king arthur wasn't exactly doing a lot of studio furniture back in the good old days So I ended up interpreting this as medieval in its weight and stance But 21st century in the details so heavy like a castle but clean like an iphone This was the original concept with studded forged steel strapping around the edges purely for the look But I had it priced out anyway, and the only smith that got back to me wanted almost five thousand dollars Which put us at one very very expensive coffee table. So we decided to ditch the metal work My customer did mention he could just pound some nails into the edge himself to get that look which Made me a little worried. I'd be okay if he hadn't told me that and i'm still not sure if he was joking or not it's my baby while i've got it, but Once he's got it in his castle. He can pound whatever he wants into it. Not my table. Not my problem, I guess I cut a little groove under the edge. So there is a clean shadow line where the top and shelf meet their frames And after filling some knots and a quick sand I can get the undersides of the top and shelf finished while they're still easy to get at I wasn't quite satisfied With how the tops and the skirts were meeting since if you'll remember wood moves And wood especially doesn't like to stay flat when it's sealed with finish on one side only Which is exactly what I just did. I figured I'd need something here to keep them sandwiched tight So I opted for a few z clips around the legs which are little metal clips that hold the top down But still let it slide around those will handle the gaps And the quarter 20 bolts that anchor the tops to the stretchers handle the alignment and the strength And you can see as I tighten them how that gap closes and the reveal is even all the way around And with that my to-do's are almost done So now it's time to cut the profile around the top edges And a final sanding in preparation for finish starting with the tops and then shifting focus back to the stumps or I mean legs The mosaic tops of the legs were sitting just a little bit low So I shimmed them up glued them in and sanded them flush with the top of the leg Growing up. I used to watch a lot of car shows and motorcycle stuff with my dad on history channel and discovery channel And I distinctly remember how much it pissed me off when they got the bike all fit And built and it was all complete and it looked great And then they had to tear it all down to sand it and finish it different medium But definitely still the same feeling today with wood Got me wondering what influence i'll get to share with my son If you've been following along for a while You'll know the answer to that question has been in limbo far too long and I couldn't be more excited to find out the answer Thanks to all of you for the support over those years and for listening to my rambles as I Tried to catch and often fumbled the curve balls of life on camera. I appreciate you guys Anyway, and enough of the sentimental stuff. Let's get these sanded top coated with 2k Which is a two-part finish that cures pretty hard and should be great for this application Having mugs of ale with the winches, you know in the castle in the desert You got it And then we can move on to that final assembly You made it this far So i'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you like the video and you probably also know somebody else who'd enjoy The build this youtube video brings good luck You should share this with them forward this to 10 friends and you will receive good fortune in four days If you break the chain, you will have bad luck for a year Oh, and in case you were wondering I have not heard back from apple yet. So You tell me down in the comments whether you think this is worthy of a license deal This three-week project took me three months because I forgot to mention that it is a boy His mom was a badass sexy fox and the female body is freaking crazy, dude It's been really fun learning to be a dad and so far He's a pretty cool little guy and I think we're gonna keep him can't keep this table though It's ready for delivery to a castle in the desert and come to think of it apples in silicon valley Which might also be considered a castle in the desert. Whoa A full circle crazy. I love it You want to see it? Check this out. Ready? Go Thanks again i'm nick we'll catch on the next one peace