100 VIDEO %22WOODWORKING%22 WITH COMPOSITE LUMBER*

Earlier this year I was asked to produce some frames to surround these granite plaques here

They're for outdoor use and I was really reluctant to use wood

These are going to be shown in a prominent public place and if anyone ever forgot to maintain those wood frames properly

it would look pretty bad. So I thought right away of composite deck material

I've got some left over from a deck construction job and I wondered how this would work in a fine woodworking application

As it turns out, I'm pretty impressed. The material machines very well

You can join it strongly even though it's made at least half of plastic

And it looks really well and continues to look good outside for many, many years

So I want to show you what I learned beginning with how you make this deck material flat and true

Using composites for any kind of fine work would be impossible if it didn't machine well

And the reason is because these boards aren't exactly regular and true

In fact, they're intentionally untrue. If you take a close look, you'll see that the top of this board, the wood green, the fake wood green surface, is actually crowned

They do that on purpose so that it'll shed water. And the bottom side too is often dished

So the jointer cures that kind of problem with solid wood and it happens to work every bit as well with composites too

I think one of the most surprising things that I've learned about fine composite woodworking is just how tightly the joints come together

If you take a look at this, this is a cope and style joint here

It's the same sort of thing that you'd use for a regular wood cabinet. But you have to look really, really hard to see that there's any joint line at all there

That's partially because of the 4-hour epoxy that I used to join the pieces together

but also just because the material machines so crisply that there's no error

It just comes together flat and true and without gaps. I've got routed profiles here on the inside of the frame as well as on the outside

And it's as crisp and true as you'd get with any kind of hardwood

Over here on the back, you can see I've chiseled out a corner in order to make it square

because after putting the plaque in place, I'm going to be putting a plywood back behind it to protect the granite

So I needed to have square corners, which I chiseled out with a sharp hand chisel and a mallet

The bottom line, as I've discovered, is that composite deck materials machine every bit as precisely as fine hardwoods

They weather very well outside. You can join them with 4-hour epoxy, and they help out where regular wood just wouldn't be able to handle the weather

I'm Steve Maxwell, and thanks for watching