MASTER PERFECT MITERS!!! _ 10 Secrets to Miter Folding

Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to the channel. I've got behind me a full table of miter folded shelves, mantles, columns, all kinds of stuff for the project that I'm getting ready to start. This is a video that's gonna help you a ton. If you can master this technique, I'm gonna give you 10 tips and some of my secrets to give you miters that look like they grew together without using any exposed fasteners. All you need is tape. So we'll dig into this video. You can see how to make floating shelves, mantles, columns, beams, all kinds of stuff, just using tape. And it'll look like it grew together after you're done. Rule number one of successful miter folding, over cut your bevel cuts or miter cuts. So the most important thing is for our outside edge here to come together nice and tight. If you cut your bevel cuts at exactly 45 degrees, you'll find that you don't get a really nice tight outside corner. This can be caused by a number of reasons. Your cut might be slightly inconsistent. Definitely if you undercut your miter, if you're shooting right for 45 degrees and you undercut it to say 44.8, it's definitely not gonna be tight. But then also you're gonna be using glue and that glue is gonna build up a little bit. And by over cutting your miter to 45 and a half degrees, you give that glue somewhere to go and it ensures that outside corner stays super tight and diverts the glue towards the inside. I get asked this a lot, if you should cut at 45 degrees or 46, 45 and a half is the sweet spot for me. 46 is fine, but I find it's a bit too much. Definitely don't get too close to 45 though, 45.5 is ideal. Law number two of successful miter folding, use a digital angle gauge to set your bevel on your table saw. So this is a Wixie gauge. There's all kinds of different makers of these digital gauges. Typically they have magnets on the bottom and what you wanna do is orient your magnets towards the saw blade and then set it down on your table by the saw blade. I'll go ahead and raise your saw blade all the way up and make sure that your digital gauge is zero. If it doesn't read 0.0, press the zero button and that'll zero it at zero degrees in case your base is not level. Then simply slide it over and the magnets will catch on the saw blade and you can tilt your blade over to 45 and a half degrees and you can get a very precise reading this way. And I've found it's the best way to ensure I'm always cutting at that exact 45.5 degree angle. See, there we go. So that brings us to our third law of successful miter folding, which is cut precisely. This is where most amateur woodworkers or hobbyists are gonna struggle the most. Most people who work in industry for a long time and do a lot of cutting have kind of a sixth sense on how to machine wood in a very precise process. But with miter folding, we've already talked about getting your bevel set precisely. The other key is straight lines. Whenever you're miter folding something together, you want those two edges to be perfectly straight. If they're not perfectly straight, then whenever you go to fold it together, it won't want to tighten down equally in certain places if it's not a nice straight cut the whole way or if there's a bow in the board. A couple tips on cutting precisely. Number one, break down your sheet goods into manageably sized pieces before you rip the bevel onto them. Whenever you rip pieces that are close to what your finished dimension is gonna be, that's gonna allow you to keep that piece held down nice and tight to number one, the table saw base and number two, keep it tight to your fence. If you're trying to put a bevel on a big old sheet of plywood that might not be perfectly flat, you may find the different parts of that sheet do not want to sit down nice and tight to the table. If you're ripping a really long board and you're having to stand way back and push it through, you might find it's difficult to tell if you're making good contact with the top of the table. So do whatever you need to do to ensure that you're machining your wood really precisely. For a floating shelf like this, one of the easiest ways for me to ensure that is to break down the large sheet of plywood into smaller pieces and then rip the bevels after that. You can also utilize a track saw. A track saw is gonna keep a perfectly straight edge and the other beauty of a track saw is it's really easy to keep that track nice and tight to your sheet good the whole time as you run the track saw across it. It's a little bit more difficult with a table saw at times. So you may wanna switch up your process depending on the size of material that you're working with. So don't be afraid to break your sheet goods down to smaller, more manageable sizes. Don't be afraid to use a jointer or a track saw to give yourself straight edges to start with and then always be aware that if you don't have straight edges, it's gonna be a little bit more difficult to get that perfect miter on those pieces. That brings us and ties us into tip number four and that is use a track saw on oversized pieces. You may find that you have to say, make some floating shelves that are 80 inches long. Now it's a little bit tricky to get this bevel cut on the end of all of your pieces whenever you're using a table saw that only has a fence that goes to 48 inches and that's where it's nice just to break out the track saw for those bevel cuts on the ends of your floating shelves. So a lot of times what I do is I'll just plop the whole sheet of plywood down on my table and if I need 80 inches long, I'll put that 45 and a half degree bevel on the end of both pieces and then I'll take it over to the table saw and make my narrower rips and that works really well. The thing that that does is it also ensures that your length is perfect with all of your pieces and that is especially important whenever you're going to be doing a long shelf with a finished end cap where the miter fold wraps around all sides. If you don't have your length exactly the same, it makes it a lot more difficult for everything to come together perfectly. That brings us to law number five of miter folding which is use the appropriate tape for your application. Now, what I've been doing right here is miter folding unfinished plywood. So I have a little bit of forgiveness on what tape I'm using because I'm gonna be able to sand it afterwards. That allows me to use a tape that's gonna be more sticky, might even pull the grain up a little bit and if it leaves a little bit of sticky residue, that's not a big deal because I'm gonna sand everything with an orbital sander again anyways. Now, I've been looking for the perfect tape for miter folding for a long time. I've tried a lot of different tapes. I prefer strapping tape whenever I'm using raw material. It's so much stickier. It has more flexibility so it'll kind of flex whenever you're folding things together and I find that that extra flex and elasticity in the tape gives that joint a much tighter pull together whereas more of a traditional shipping tape that is not reinforced like this fiberglass reinforced strapping tape or some might call it filament tape. This stuff does not have the elasticity and it tends to actually, if that miter's not perfectly aligned, the tape will pull off and let loose from the workpiece. Now, this fiberglass reinforced tape that I have here, you can tell that it's reinforced tape because it's got these little lines in the tape of the filament. This stuff is sticky and it's elastic and it does not like to come off. So it works great for a raw material application which is what I'm typically doing but if you're doing a pre-finished material, that's where you gotta be a little bit more careful because you could end up with this possibly messing up your finish or leaving that sticky residue on your pre-finished material. So you gotta be aware of that. But I've looked for a long time. I've done a lot of different things with miter folding with standard heavy duty packing tape. You can do it but in my opinion, there's a better way and that is a good quality, very sticky strapping tape. Now, with your tape, you might be thinking, all right, I'm gonna go on Amazon and get some of this awesome strapping tape that Spencer recommended and get one of these awesome tape dispensing guns. In my experience, these guns are fine for standard shipping tape that is not reinforced but whenever you try to put this reinforced strapping tape on one of these guns, it is a nightmare to try and tear. It just doesn't work very good. So I found one of these tape dispensers on Amazon and they are amazing for either filament tape or your standard heavy duty clear packing tape. So all you gotta do is pull it out and it's got this cutting blade, it's nice and close here and it just tears off really easy. So again, if I can get a little bit close up here to the camera, it just pulls out and then you can see on the back here, it just pulls and tears. The other thing I didn't mention yet about the typical clear tape that is not reinforced, again, let me show you, you can see here, clear tape versus the reinforced tape. Whenever you're trying to tear this clear standard tape off your beams, what'll often happen is it'll actually tear and peel and you get these annoying little pieces that are left on your beam or whatever you're doing and you just spend a lot more time picking and trying to peel this tape off. Now, of course, as always guys, if you're finding the video helpful and the tips helpful, you can support the channel by purchasing these items through the links that I will put in the video notes or in the very top comment underneath the video. Highly recommend this dispenser. They're less than $10 a piece, absolute no-brainer. And then this tape, again, I've tried a lot of different tapes. This is from Amazon, comes in a four-pack. I will link that also. It's been very good stuff for me. Guys, I do want to give a disclaimer on the tape. I do really like how sticky this tape is, but I did pull some off right here. It actually pulled up the veneer. So, you know, just be careful. The longer you leave it sit, the more it's gonna stick and pull it off slowly. That way, if you see that it's starting to pull a piece of your corner or something like that, that you don't rip a chunk of the veneer off like I did here. So it's a two-edge sword. This tape's great in some ways. Maybe a little bit too much in others. And then, you know, standard clear tape like this, you know, it's never gonna be strong enough to pull a piece of veneer like that, but then it's got its own pitfalls as well. So just be advised, you gotta be careful. It's not perfect and test it out before you use it. This is gonna be a miter-folded mantle. Let me go ahead and tape this up and then we'll move on to tip number six for miter folding. But this is gonna show you, again, a couple of things that we've already talked about, the importance of precisely cutting your pieces to length, and then the importance of having a very straight cut on these bevels. You can, a lot of times, if you don't cut it very precisely, you'll end up, you'll put these pieces together and you'll see gaps in certain places. And what that's gonna do is it's not gonna apply really good pressure to the miter whenever you fold it up. So here, I've got my pieces lined up. And again, this tape dispenser, it's nice, it's very precise. We'll pull that out and just move right on down the line and it's gonna be really nice and sticky. Then the nice thing about this tape dispenser is once you get to the end, it's very easy to cut it right where you want on the end. Tip number six is gonna be whether you're doing a miter fold on a floating shelf, a mantle, a column, or a beam, use interior blocking to keep it square and to keep the spacing the way it's supposed to be. So here we've got the top of this mantle taped up. The next step is to flip it. So I just let it fall down the edge of my workbench. Now you'll notice since we cut this thing at 45 and a half degrees, my spacing on the front right here is gonna be more than back here because it's gonna wanna come in. So one of the things that you do to keep everything square and spaced properly is to use interior blocking. So this might look a little bit different depending on if you're doing a beam or a column or whatever it might be, floating shelf. But I cut blocks and I measure exactly what the inside width of this center piece is. And then I cut blocks and we're gonna fasten these blocks on the inside here. And that's gonna keep everything nice and square and spaced exactly like it's supposed to be. Now with the blocking installed, when we go to fold this up, it gives us a nice positive stop that's gonna keep these pieces at 90 degrees. The other thing we do often is add glue to these blocks and that also adds some strength. One thing that you wanna watch out for is whenever you put these blocks in, don't make them the full height of whether it's a beam or a mantle like this because you're gonna need to install a cleat on the wall to actually hang this thing from. So I wanna make sure if I'm gonna use a two by material of some kind to hang this thing on, I need to be an inch and a half away right here plus a little bit more for scribing. So always keep that in mind to keep your blocking back a little bit. But as you can see now with that as a guide, I can fold this thing up and everything's gonna be almost exactly where it needs to be. Tip number seven, the glue that you use matters. So here I've got Titebond 3 and I've got Titebond 1. A lot of you know this already, but for those of you that don't, Titebond 3 has a longer set time or a longer wet time. It's going to allow you to have more working time before it sets up than Titebond 1. That might be important for an application like this. The other key thing that Titebond 3 has that Titebond 1 doesn't is this is a much thinner viscosity glue. It's much thinner. So whenever you're applying it to these miters, if you don't have it spread out quite perfectly even, you push the things together. This is runnier. So it's gonna kind of naturally take the path of least resistance. And I find it allows miters to come together a little bit better and easier whenever you're doing miter folding. And I also, I learned to love Titebond 3 whenever I was doing a lot of lock mitering because whenever you lock miter something, you don't have a lot of space. You don't have any space actually inside the joint. So you need a glue that is very thin. So Titebond 3 works great. You can certainly use Titebond 1. You're just gonna have less working time and it's gonna be a little bit thicker. So you're gonna have to be mindful of that. I can do good work with Titebond 1, but my preference is just easier for me to go with Titebond 3. Just don't wipe it on your clothes because if it dries, it's not coming off. One of the reasons I use Titebond 1 instead of Titebond 2 is because Titebond 1 will wash out of my clothes whenever I wipe it all over myself. Now, before we get to tip number eight, I'll go ahead and just start gluing this thing up. So you guys can actually see these tips in action in real time here. Just try and get a decent amount of glue. Again, the nice thing about Titebond 3 is that if you over glue it a little bit, since your bevel cut is at 45 and a half, and you've got some really sticky tape on the other side that's kind of sealing that outside edge, all of that glue is gonna be diverted towards the inside of the joint. And you're not usually gonna have very much of it actually seep through the outside of that corner joint. Now, that being said, whenever you're doing this, you don't want to get crazy with the glue and over glue it because then it will start to come through the tape because it just has nowhere else to go. And it just takes a little bit more sanding and can be a bit of a pain on the back end after you take the tape off. So I like to just smear this around with my fingers. Another thing you can do is just pop your pieces up and that'll kind of naturally divert and spread all that glue around. Again, for some added strength, go ahead and put glue on your little blocking partitions in here, and that'll help stiffen up this whole thing and ensure that all of these long miters stay together for the long haul. So to keep everything together, often I'll just take a piece of tape and run it over the backside here. And that kind of acts as a clamp just to keep everything nice and tight while the glue sets up. Okay, tip number eight is don't be afraid to use some pin nails. Now, I could try to put this end cap on just with tape so that we wouldn't have any exposed fastener holes. But the reality is a 23 gauge pin on stain grade material is gonna disappear as soon as that painter runs a little stain over the top of that hole. You're really not even gonna know that it's there anymore. Little bit different on pre-finished material. But for these end caps, I've done it before where I've taped one side and folded it in. I find I can get the best alignment whenever I just wait until the end and line everything up at the same time. Then we'll just shoot a couple of pins. Now we'll flip it around and do the other side. Regular viewers of the channel are probably wondering what I'm doing with this Ryobi pin nailer. After I got that new Milwaukee pin nailer, I got accused in the comment section of being a brand loyalist and that the Ryobi was just as good. So I went ahead, I bought one of these Ryobis, put a battery adapter on it, been using it in the shop. It is adequate. That's the most I'm gonna give it right now. But that's what's up. I'll probably have a full review of this versus the Milwaukee in the future. But that's why I've got this gun for now. I succumbed to the criticism of the comment section. Another thing that you can do in place of using a pin nail, 23 gauge pin nail, is to use these Collins clamps. These come in really handy also. The benefit of these is they do apply some additional clamping pressure. But most of the time, if I don't need that, I'm just gonna put a pin in it and be done with it. But these are a good option also. After I've got everything together, that is gonna bring us to tip number nine, which is burnish the edges. Now, you wanna do this, in my opinion, whenever your glue is still wet. I think you get a little bit better result if you burnish the edges whenever the glue is wet. Reason being, especially with Titebond III, once that glue is fully cured, it's extremely hard. And if you try and take a round object and burnish that edge after that glue is dry, there's no give to it anymore. So whenever that glue is wet, it kinda just allows everything on that corner just to compress a little bit, and it'll make it look like that thing grew together. So I just turned it over. I'm gonna just real quick look over this thing and make sure that I can't see any gaps on the corners. And I'm looking at this thing and it's perfectly tight. Again, with a really good quality tape that's nice and sticky and has a little bit of elasticity to it, I find those corners just seal and stretch and pull together really well. So now I'm just gonna take a round object, could be a screwdriver. This is a square drive Kreg bit, nail set, whatever it is, and just lightly go over the corner. The other advantage to using a heavier duty tape is that this tape is thick enough and strong enough. I'm not gonna cut the tape by hitting this corner with my burnishing device while the tape is still on there. So I'm gonna do this to all of my outside corners here. And even on these corners where there is not any tape, sometimes it's even nice whenever your glue is still wet, just lightly hit it with the sandpaper and that dust from the, the sawdust from the sandpaper will mix with that glue and it'll fill any voids that might be there. So just a very light sanding. I don't like to round over the corners a ton, but I also don't like a extremely sharp, crisp corner either because that tends to not take stain really well. And if it gets dinged or bumped, it gets damaged a lot easier. So I like to just very lightly hit it with the sandpaper. All right, time to wrap it up. And tip number 10 is hire yourself a good CPA because you're gonna need them with all that money you're making. This technique is one of the best techniques that you can master as a carpenter. It requires very little tools. It can be performed in the shop or on site very easily. You can accomplish a miter fold using miter saw, table saw, track saw, tools that are available to everyone. And it's fast. Another benefit is you don't have a bunch of nail holes. A lot of guys, and it's really sad nowadays, I've got a, this is gonna be a column right here. It's a nine by nine column. A lot of production trimmers would just be trying to do that on site, put some glue on it and shoot 25 nails up every corner that the painter then has to fill. And you're gonna see them through the finish and all of that. There are no exposed nail holes, almost none, maybe a few 23 gauge pins here and there, but just makes flawless work. So if you haven't used this technique before, you've gotta try it. Whether you're a professional homeowner, it will yield great results. And just with the few, the 10 tips that I shared in this video, that's really all you need to get you well on your way to mastering this technique. So I hope this video helps. I've done other videos on using the miter fold for beams and columns. Look for those videos on my channel also. I'll try and put them up above in the cards. Check those out as well. I use this technique all the time and it's great. So hope you've enjoyed watching this video. I've gotta load all this stuff up and get it to the job site. So have a good one and we'll see you on the next video. ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh ♪