The grain direction discussion made me wonder about making them out of laminated wood like plywood. From the outside you wouldn't even be able to see it is plywood.
Why are you surrounded in purpleheart? That is a bad wood. The color isnt worth it's poor working characteristics. I have 2 walls of lumber, 45+ species, my remaining PH I'd burn if I couldn't sell it. Fortunately people buy offcuts tho.
I've always wondered about the bowtie, and I've never seen the other versions but always wondered if you could make it decorative. For the straight one, I wonder if it makes any difference if you were to cant it at an angle instead of straight/perpendicular, despite it being surprisingly impressive to begin with.
It would have been interesting to see a couple of those straight ones installed at a slight angle, since I assume a lot of people would be doing that just for the aesthetic side of things. Maybe a future test where you can see how much of an angle makes a difference (I suspect it wouldn't take more than a few degrees off of 90 to transfer the pulling force from the glue to the grain of the two joined pieces). Also: please pick better sponsors. I know there are only so many options, but BetterHelp seems to have shown zero remorse for their terrible mistreatment of both their (severely underpaid) therapists and customers (sharing private health info with advertisers and other third parties).
I have a 1960's era George Nakashima table that has a few bowties to hold the two halves of the top together. The top is about ¾" thick and the bowties are screwed in from the bottom (not well known).
Seems to me that most of the strength from these joints as tested comes from the face grain to face grain glue joint area that also falls within the continuous long grain of the tie, regardless of shape. Yes, the taper of the bow tie/x/I do add some more mechanical strength, but less than I had expected. I see a lot of people depending on that mechanical strength who don't make sure the back surface of the tie and the bottom surface of the cutout mate cleanly for a good glue bond. It makes sense to me that the larger long grain surface area of the X tie should be the strongest, when properly glued face to face with the parent board.
Oversight on my part. I thought it would have enough strength considering how thick the cherry was. Putting the bolts further apart would require quite a bit more material and I didn’t think it was necessary.
Suman has a new vid.....I drop everything to watch!!!!! Super informative and educational!! Thanks for all you do!! Really appreciated!!! Thank you Suman!!!!!
Never thought of bow ties as a double dovetail. So you believe .003 is enough along with glue? I’d think anything over 1000 pounds holding strength is good enough for me for wood projects. Otherwise I’d think metal ‘wood’ be the answer. 🤷🏻♂️ Newest sub and enjoyed your zingers. Especially banging yo moma and the wood taken off the tree. Now that had me laughing. 🤣
haha. yea 3 thou seemed to work well. I've tried 1 and 5 and 10 thou and they were either too tight or too loose for the kind of fit i was looking for.
I think that the failure of the cherry as important as the inlay itself. The cherry failed with the grain too. How the female inset is carved could be weakening the cherry too much. For this reason, I wouldn't discount the overall joint failure of these tests one bit.
I’m gonna be at work for the next two days anyway… So any reason why I can’t just leave the clamps on the entire time? Or does leaving a clamp that long somehow produce a weaker bond? Trying to understand why we all don’t just leave them on the whole time.
You can leave them on longer. Some folks have to take the clamps off and move on with new projects. This is especially true for small production shops.
Excellent video and tackled a topic I was curious about the how the results would turn out. I appreciate the effort you put into these test videos. Just an observation (as of the time of this comment), but since you had to go with a clickbait-ish title (to appeal to the algorithm I am sure, I'm not hating) you don't specifically state in the title or the description of the video what exactly the video covers. I wonder how this might affect people searching for this very topic based off of keywords. Granted RU-vid might also search the transcript of the video for those keywords or whatever tags you might have input. Something to perhaps consider.
I love it! The combo of real-life data, concise presentation, and entertainment (Yo Mama 🤣) is unparalleled, Suman. It's so cool that you've got over 31K subscribers in less than 4 years of creating videos, and now you've even got sponsors!!! I wish you had more time to devote to creating this content, because I always look forward to your next video, but definitely understand the exhausting demand of being an adult, husband and father...I don't have time to do half of what you do, so bravo. Congrats on your progress with this channel, because you have earned every bit of what you've accomplished here thus far.
Thanks Aaron! It means a lot, especially coming from you as a long time supporter of the channel. Folks often think of the content and that’s great, but the person behind it is often overlooked. It’s like a busy kitchen in a restaurant and the judgement is what’s on the table and not the efforts went on in the kitchen. As you know, I am a one person production team. I don’t have filmmakers, editors, or anything of that nature. So cheers to progress and small victories!
The question I have is since most bowties seem to be used to stabilize cracks for spreading, how much force will really be applied to the bowtie in those applications by wood movement? I have no idea how to quantify that.
A very interesting test!! So... a question / idea about bow ties that is probably sacrilegious. Given the direction of the stressing forces and how important grain direction is, how would plywood based bow ties fair? It seems like this would be the perfect application for plywood given it's shearing force strength is massive, and you can source plywood with whatever decorative veneer you want, so would a plywood bow tie potentially be superior to a hardwood version?
Awesome video! Im just about to get into doing bow ties. Unfortunately you didn't test any duck themed ones 😅. Grain direction.. hopefully I remember that 😂
What a great video. But just a gut feel kind of a thing, I think it would take more force to to Crack open than to push it back together. I mean you have to break the lignin, which is not replicated (the force)when pushing it back together.
Your videos are awesome! Your approach is refreshing and I truly appreciate the effort you put in. Thanks for doing what you do and please keep them coming.
