if you've been around woodworking for any length of time you've heard the term veneer or veneering now veneer is just a super thin piece of solid wood and you often see it in fancy pieces of furniture where they've glued expensive Greenwoods exotics to make it look like solid woodworking but it's really just a thin piece of veneer no veneer is made by single slices or Leafs coming off a log or board and it's often sold in flinches which are those sequential pieces of veneer which allow you to control the grain pattern for things like book matching some people think that veneering is really tricky but in fact it's just woodworking and I'm gonna show you how on a sample piece a practice piece how to go through the basics of veneering and I think you'll be really interested I hope you'll want to give it a try later all veneering is is simply gluing a piece of veneer onto a core or a substrate sometimes called a grounding plywood and MDF work best because they're dimensionally stable now you can't put a veneer on solid wood but if you think about it solid wood expands and contracts with the season and if it expands and contracts differently than the veneer it can have problems so we're gonna try veneering a piece of plywood let me show you how it's done now got your substrate cut to size you need to cut your veneer to length now some people like to cut it over long some people like to cut it just undersized and the reason that both of those techniques work is your substrate needs to be larger than the final size of the panel that you're gonna use so that you cut it to size after the veneer is securely attached now to do that to cut it to length I need to find the length that I need and Mark it off and then put my straightedge on and I'm gonna use a veneer saw to cut this up veneer saws have tiny little teeth very fine and they allow you to cut your veneer without it ripping or tearing nice so it's gonna take two pieces of veneer to cover our substrate which means there will be a seam and we don't want that scene to show so how do we make sure that the seam is tight well we have to trim it so that two perfectly straight edges before we do that decide how you want your veneer to look best I already did that I want this these edges to be the ones that will be joined so now I'm gonna fold it up so both of those edges are together and I can straighten them at one time I'm going to do that by sticking the two pieces of veneer into a sandwich between two perfectly straight pieces of plywood and then I'm gonna plane it let me show you how I get that done so now those two edges of the veneer just barely sticking past the clamp together plywood which are dead straight and now I'm going to use a block plane to just carefully and I will have to perfectly straight joinable edges and it's just that simple now the traditional way to tape or join veneer together is with this water activated veneer tape it's been used forever and once you get skilled at it that might be your choice but if this is your first time and frankly for me every time because this is easier I just use blue masking tape so start off by securing the ends the seam fits together perfectly by the way get them taped together there's one I like to go to the middle there's two now the other end then don't you get this all perfectly aligned one long strip down the center and you're ready for the next step now something that a lot of people do but not everybody is putting a bead of glue between this joint you can see how it hinges open and then we'll flatten it back up and that'll kind of glue these edges together so you do that just like you the way it sounds so I tried to carefully apply a bead of glue into the open joint being more successful in some spots than others after that was done I laid the veneer down flat and then I wiped it with a paper towel that kind of squeegees the glue into the joint even more now I put it into a too little between two pieces of wood like this so you can see that it's flexed like this which is joining that edge together which works kind of like a clamp the glue will bond along that edge now this is one veneer we'll call out the face veneer we need to have a balanced veneer on the core if you have a core and a veneer on one side we call it a balanced veneer that needs to be on the other side and that keeps that panel from warping some veneer is solid wood it expands and contracts if it was just on one side it could flex the whole panel so we're gonna need a second panel tada that I've already had glued up and ready to go just like the last one and now we're gonna get ready to talk about how we're gonna clamp those things together which means we need to make some parts so before you can glue the veneer to the core you're gonna need to make yourself a veneer press which is not as complicated as that sounds what we've got here is that as a traditional veneer press let me describe how it works so we have what we call our clamping call next layer is a platen this is waxed makes the night then would be the veneer now your core another layer of veneer your wax platen and your final clamping call then we use what we call battens little strips of wood to clamp the panels together so traditionally battens like this might be gently curved in order to help put pressure on the center of the panel if you think about it if you only get clamping pressure on the edges of the panel then that will be where the venir is securely joined but it might be loose in the middle so that's why you would put that curve in it we're gonna do a little trick where we take a piece of an ear some draw from the venire that we cut up we're gonna put that in the middle we're gonna tape it on and now when we clamp we're gonna make certain that we have good solid pressure in the middle which will be then evenly distributed out to the edges and we'll get a solid glue up let me show you how we do that so now you've made your veneer press and importantly you've tested it all out so you've done a complete dry test with all of the clamps on all of your calls and all of your battens once you know that it all goes together perfectly now we're ready to put on some glue I'm just going to use this four inch glue roller so you can use white glue you can use yellow glue tight bond makes a great glue that's called cold pressed veneer glue and the advantage that that has is it doesn't strike through as much strikethrough means the glue sticking through that going through the veneer and showing up as a glue spot it's important that you get a nice good coat on here because you're not going to put any glue on the veneer you're just gonna flip I'm just gonna flip this over put it right on top of the veneer now I'm gonna start to move this side so now I'm applying glue to the second face of the core I get a nice full coat on there which I've already got and now I put the next piece of veneer on it's important to line everything up carefully keep things square so that you're ready to clamp the wax side of the platen goes down it gets a line a call and now we're ready to start clamping all right spin the piece put the battens underneath sticking out a little bit from the edge all four of them locate them better as I'm gonna be clamping pull this edge out a little bit is everything aligned it is now hopefully I can get this clamped so obviously I need to repeat this clamp up for all four sets of battens okay now for the big reveal this has been clamped up for 24 hours it's important to keep it clamped up for a long time because as you might guess it's hard for things to dry squeezed into a sandwich like this so I'll see what happened out that's pretty good this is really nice I peeled off that the blue tape checked out the seam and as tight as can be the veneer is laying flat looks just like a solid piece of wood then the final step in this process is I trimmed the panel to size it's ready to go and this veneer will still be laying here a hundred years from now just flat as can be so that's the tried-and-true traditional way of laying up veneer it's not that hard I encourage you to try it anytime you decide to use some veneering but there is a more simple way to do it and that's its advantage it's easier and takes less time let me show you what I'm talking about this is real veneer but it's got an adhesive spray it on the back of it which is covered with this piece of paper you can peel that off then you stick it down on a panel let's secure it with a j-roller and you've got a real veneer on the panel now obviously this adhesive is not as powerful as the glue that we used on a traditional panel and so it has some limitations it's best used within the context of something like a frame and panel where that panel that you're putting this onto is captured by like a door frame or a chest frame something like that but in that case it's a great solution so veneering offers you a lot of versatility in your work you can use different species than you ordinarily would expensive species that become cheaper because you're just buying a flitch of venir it also allows you to use really interesting grain patterns and then that sort of thing so think of that the next time you're making something that has a captured panel or a tabletop or something like that maybe in veneering is just right for you so I'm Rob Johnstone from woodworkers Journal keep on making sawdust you