One Day Build: Cat Stairs - 356

0:01 hey folks how you guys doing hopefully you're having a great day today hopefully you can hear me it's pouring down rain on this beautiful morning here in mississippi and i've got a fun little quick project to knock out hopefully this morning that is a set of stairs for our cat we have a 12 year old cat who has really shown me signs of decreased mobility so her normal one very confident leap up to where her food platform is we keep her food elevated from the dogs has turned into two very hesitant leaves so i want to make a set of stairs to go behind a chair in a very specific spot in my living room uh for the cat to climb up so for the stringer i'm using a piece of walnut we have kind of brown chocolatey colored walls in our living room and this will not necessarily blend but i think it'll

0:48 be a good fit to uh to use as the stringer and for a little bit increased visibility to see the platforms of the stair treads as she walks up i'm going to use white oak

2:06 [Music] so [Music] all right i got all of my pieces cut and i completely forgot about the top shelf the top platform not shelf platform is going to be a little bit larger and how large i don't even know this board looks like it's going to work and that's the size that i'm going to go with it's one of those projects where dimensions aren't too critical other than getting up to the correct elevation every everything else is just open for interpretation so this top platform is going to be whatever size this is all of these stair treads are ready to have the dados cut for the joinery and then after that we'll do a round over on all four of these should we go all four just the front hmm i'm not sure yet but we'll find out uh when i get to that stage the walnut

2:53 is the final width which is eight inches three quarter inches thick but it's too long at this stage that's because i have to cut out the the stair shape the stringer and for that i went ahead and put together a little cad drawing just to get all my my my measurements figured out this is a lot of repetition with different angles so i'm going to go ahead and mark it out right here with a speed square mainly because it's a four inch rise four inch run so it's a it's a 45 degree angle so i can use a speed square to speed things up speed square speed things up there you go uh and then we'll actually use that as an edge guide with a jigsaw to cut all this this line right here is the floor this is my first rise my first run second rise run rise run and so on up the stairs

3:41 now my distance from here to here from the point to the back side of the stringer is eight inches and i thought that would be appropriate but this is for a five pound cat this is going to look way too bulky in my opinion for the this much space to be behind here so i think before i cut up this angle with a jigsaw i think i'm gonna go back to the table saw and really only leave about an inch and a half between this vertex right here with the rise and run or this point uh to this side over here so i'm gonna cut a big chunk of this off [Applause] [Music]

4:29 [Applause] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music]

5:17 the final step before assembly is to add a like a 1 8 of an inch radius to all these edges just to break them up but before i do that i want to add a radius to these corners several different ways to do that trace something with a pencil sand it down shape it however you want but one of the fastest ways is to use a radius jig and a flush trim bit in the router table which is what we're going to do here so this is one of those radius jigs and actually they have there's a bunch of different radiuses to choose from here each one of these corners has a different radius and i've got three different plates so between these three that's 12 different radiuses to choose from i'm going to go with a one inch radius this blue piece clips into place with the radius that you want right in the center if you go to the back side you have some grippy material to hold onto your work piece but you also have some tabs on either direction so those tabs will

6:04 stop the material in either direction allowing you to put it into the corner so that the jig straddles the corner of your material then you can use a flush trim bit on the jig to transfer the radius of the jig onto the material perfectly every time no guesswork involved the only thing to take into consideration is you want to route downhill this is wood grain that is going in this direction with the end grain over here so picture this wood grain as a bunch of straws you have a whole bundle of straws with the ends up here if i rake my hand this way we know that'll just just slide over the top of those straws but if i push my hand this direction it's going to snag those straws into the end

6:50 the end of those straws and bend them over the same thing is going to happen with wood grain on the end grain here if i come in like so it's going to grab that that material the the end of the straws the end of grain and break it off you're gonna you're gonna get a bunch of tear out so you wanna go in the downhill direction to make a nice smooth cut so what we're gonna do is cut this one skip this one spin it around cut this one downhill skip this one spin it around and now we can cut downhill and then downhill once again so it's a little bit of an order of operations

8:22 [Music] [Applause] so [Music] um

9:13 for a finish i went with just basic sprayed shellac and let it dry overnight there's there's nothing fancy that's necessary for this project as far as the finish goes i don't need to go with any more protection than this it's simply here to serve a purpose of letting the cat go up and down uh in less pain with without having to jump so much so uh will she use it yes i know for sure she will use it because i'm currently using a piece of half inch pine cd plywood to test out the concept and uh she uses it just fine so i'm i'm excited to get that piece of half inch pine cd plywood out of my living room actually let me rephrase that my wife is excited to get that piece of plywood out of the living room and put this one there in its place thank you to rockler woodworking hardware for supporting this video i'll have links down in the description below

9:58 where you can check out some of the tools that i use to make this and if you're just generally in a need or if you have a general need to purchase a tool consider checking out rockler i think that's it for this project there's really not much to say it was just a quick win one day build if you want to stay up to date with everything that i publish go to my website jacecustomcreations.com newsletter and sign up for my email newsletter i'm going to quit talking and show you some i guess some cell phone footage of the cat actually going up and down it because i doubt i could get her to do it right now when i'm shooting this outro you guys take care have a great day and i'll talk to you in the next video

11:01 oh you went up faster than i was hoping all right driving the dogs nuts