hey everybody I'm here with Johnny Brooks from crafted workshop this week and we are working on a really really awesome project yeah it is a molten metal aluminum live-edge Conley table yeah it's it's hard to describe what's going on but for that I wanted to make some DIY hairpin legs you've seen me use them quite a bit in my videos so let's go ahead and get started on modern builds nailed a nice so you may be asking yourself why make a pin legs you can get a perfectly good set of 16 and chair pin legs for about 50 bucks on Amazon I'll leave these links below and to that question I have two answers hairpin legs come in standard sizes 16 inch for coffee tables this size is perfect for about 90% of tables but the table that Johnny and I are working on has a really really thick slab tabletop so instead of 16 inch legs we are gonna be shooting for an overall dimension of 14 inches tall the other reason I want to make my own aside from just enjoying making things is that these have a 5 degree pitch to them which is standard 2 hairpin legs I think they'll look cooler if they have a little bit more of a dramatic angle we'll be shooting for 15 degrees in this video buying pre-made hairpin legs is totally fine they're affordable they look really cool but if you're interested in customizing and getting something a bit more unique that's when you start building things yourself so let's get started I started by cutting my 3/8 inch steel rod to link normally I would just use a cut-off wheel in an angle grinder but Johnny had a portable bandsaw than I tried out and I gotta say this thing was a lot of fun once I had all of my pieces I got some mineral spirits and I cleaned off all of the mill scale and the gunk off of all of the steel now I'm not the first person in the world to make a hairpin leg video in fact I will link a couple more in the description the jig that I'm going to be making is extremely rudimentary in the videos I have linked there are a couple more robust two jigs but I just wanted to show how simple and how easy it is to cold bend steel rods before we got started Johnny and I were Believe It or Not a little apprehensive to whether this would actually work but it turned out that with a little bit of mechanical advantage you can bend steel rod like this pretty easily without adding any heat so let's go ahead and start making this jig to keep things simple I just use pieces from around Johnny's shop and I'll go through them as I use them Johnny's welding table has all of these holes drilled in it which made it really convenient but you could also build this jig on a piece of plywood and then screw that to your workbench top first I've threaded the bolt through the workbench top using a couple of pieces of plate steel then I got a fifteen sixteenth inch socket or you could just get a one inch socket and I screwed that down on the same bolt there was a piece of angle iron laying around that I used as the fence and I used a scrap piece of the 3/8 inch steel rod as a spacer so that I could make a zero clearance gap between the fulcrum point in the fence we wanted to test and figure out where the fulcrum point was so I made a bunch of lines starting at the center of working out about every inch you want to make sure you're bending around a piece that has a similar diameter as what you want your output to be we also found that bending one half one way and then flipping the piece over and bending the rest of it and that gives you a good symmetrical curve rather at being a little bit lopsided like this first one we made so if the center of your rod is where I put this X you want to start your Bend about an inch back where I have this line that's circled you'll also want plenty of leverage that's why I use this one-inch square tube to get some mechanical advantage once I had it half of the way I flipped my piece over and then I bent it the rest of the way keeping everything symmetrical like I just said and you'll notice the rods have a little bit of spring back to them that's why I over bent so that they would come back square after seven tries and for successful legs I used this quick jig to mark and cut my legs square at 14 inches like I mentioned I'm using eighth inch hot rolled steel plate for my base and I use an existing hairpin leg to mark the outline in the holes I needed to drill but if you're doing this yourself make sure and check out the written article I'll have a printable template that you can attach with a little bit of spray adhesive and cut out your shapes speaking of I just used a cut-off wheel and an angle grinder to cut the base plates to shape once that was done I moved over to the drill press and I drilled out the holes for the screws to attach to the tabletop a drill press does make this way easier but regardless make sure you use cutting oil so that you don't burn out your bits once everything was sanded smooth I could get prepped for welding ooh I love welding having Johnny there has an extra set of hands and well as that stand in welding coach was really really helpful he was able to hold the piece at 15 degrees why I tacked welded the pieces where they needed to be my welds definitely weren't pretty but they were strong especially once I came back and filled in all the way around the rods and if you are somebody that hasn't but is interested in welding Johnny and I made a video to hopefully help to walk you through that a bit make sure and check out the link in the description to that today's video is brought to you by Dollar Shave Club we all know that razors in personal care products at department stores are way overpriced and there are way too many options well Dollar Shave Club is the answer it doesn't matter whether you're a clean-shaven or if you've got some facial hair having a good razor is essential to maintaining a good clean look and right now for a limited time Dollar Shave Club is offering their Shh our shave starter pack for only $5 to new members each box includes an executive razor along with three of their most popular products in trial sizes to help you stay fresh and clean it'll include their shave butter body wash and their one wipe Charlie butt wipes now I know what you're thinking but wipes yes they're amazing alongside the executive razor that features a premium weighty handle you'll also receive a full kiss set of cartridges to go along with it and after your first box replacement cartridges are sent directly to you for only a few bucks a month this offer is available exclusively at dollarshaveclub.com slash modern builds once again this dollarshaveclub.com slash modern builds link is in the description supporting my sponsors directly supports modern builds so thanks in advance to you all and thanks to Dollar Shave Club after hitting my welds with the wire brush I came back with a little bit of acetone to make sure my legs were perfectly clean before we painted them we wanted a paint dipped look but could only get the paint we wanted at the store we were at in spray cans so we masked off a line about six inches up from the bottom of the leg and spray painted them with three coats of rust-oleum appliance epoxy it's in the name o based paint that's supposed to be really strong and it's supposed to be able to get cleaned off easily if they ever get scuffed needless to say I was really happy with how the paint job came out but I still needed to protect the metal from rusting so I put on a coat of paste wax which is a really low gloss natural looking finish especially compared to any varnish that you would paint on or spray on so all in all I am really happy with how this project came out the white tips look amazing and most of the time and effort that was spent into this was figuring out how to get the jig to work as best as possible plus it was good welding experience which is something that I need and we figured if we were gonna spend all of this time making an incredibly impressive aluminum live-edge Lake table it should also have some impressive legs to go along with it rather than some stock hairpin legs that everyone else in the world has it's kind of funny in almost every video that I use hairpin legs on I get the comment asking well what about wooden floors won't it scratch it or dip them and to that I would say yes if you are rough with your furniture or if you're moving it around a lot metal is definitely harder than wood so if you're jumping up and down on your table or if you have kids running around there's a good chance that it's either gonna dent your wood floors or you might scrape them sliding the table around and because of that I spent some time 3d modeling some hairpin leg floor protectors last week these are really simple plastic bumpers that your hairpin legs set into I designed two versions of this one with a 3/8 inch recess and another with a half inch recess which are the two standard hairpin leg sizes the leg is able to set into this recess and your weight is distributed across this entire base not to mention this is a smooth surface so that shouldn't scratch your floors if you happen to move your table around now I don't have much 3d modeling experience let alone any 3d printing experience so I use this service called Shapeways which is not a sponsor at least yet and what they are is a custom 3d printing service what you do is you upload your 3d model to their website they're able to scan it to make sure there's no problem areas in your design then once it's approved they print your 3d model to order so I have uploaded these designs through the shape way store which is a community based platform where you can design and sell your own designs to print for other people so if you're interested I will leave a link to both of the half inch set as well as the 3/8 inch set of hairpin leg protectors but more importantly than buying my own I would really urge you to design your own it doesn't have to be a pyramid like I made maybe you want a diamond shape or an oval shape you can design it and Sketch up fusion 360 really whatever platform you prefer they're surprisingly affordable and the prints look really really nice so thanks a lot shapeways for providing these for me so I was pretty surprised these things slap together pretty well and it and they're all pretty symmetrical let's be real I pay 30 bucks tombé xxx bucket is yeah I think the paint looks really really good yeah exactly I think that really takes it over the top thanks for watching if you plan on building this project make sure and follow the link down in the description that way you can have a downloadable template to the plate that they're attached to make sure and follow the link to Johnny's video where we are attaching these legs to that live edge molten metal aluminum slab table we're working out a better title for that yeah it's gonna be awesome it's gonna be a really really cool here's some kind of way shots to it oh and when we initially recorded the outro I forgot to think Kressel Anderson from the channel maker sighs linked below he was the integral piece to us being able to melt the aluminum and pour it into the voids of the live edge slab he had the foundry along with the experience that we needed so make sure to check out his channel - linked below if you're not already make sure and click the subscribe button I'm not gonna cover Johnny I'll cover me right here you want to watch a couple more of my videos the slab table is gonna be right here and then here's another video that you can check out if you haven't seen it already thanks a lot for watching guys hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you next time on modern build modern mill nice awesome