Don't worry folks, I'm still here! I've been busy the last couple of weeks as I prepared to separate from the military. I've still been working in the garage, focusing on my cutting boards, but today I wanted to talk about a project I'm working on for my neighbors. It's called a floating mantel. And don't worry, it's not magic.
So what's a floating mantel? Essentially it's just a way of mounting the mantel without externally visible brackets or supports. It looks like the mantel is just a solid beam coming out of the wall or "floating". Now to the question in the title of this post. What is a french cleat? When you look at the picture below you'll see one half of the cleat attached to the top board of the mantel with a Kregg joiner. The cleat itself is just one solid piece of wood, in this case a 1x10 that I cut down the middle lengthwise at a 45 degree angle. One side of that board goes on the mantel, and the other side goes on the wall that you want to mount the mantel too. When you're ready to mount the mantel, you simply slide the cleat on the mantel over the wall mounted side, and you end up with a nice perfectly flush surface!
I'll admit, I didn't know what a French cleat was until my neighbors asked me to build one for them... As it turns out (thankfully for me) it's a very simple and elegant way of mounting something to a wall. I opted to use a Kregg joiner with wood glue to make sure the mantels I'm building are very strong and can support plenty of weight without fear of bending or breaking.
The rest of the mantel is essentially a box. Albeit a slightly more complicated version of a box because the idea is to make the mantel look like one solid piece of wood. I do that by cutting 45 degree miters around the edges (you can see that in the above picture). The top of the mantel, the face (the vertical piece on the front) and the end caps all have a 45 degree miter and in theory would line up nice and flush. Here's where I encountered a challenge. I don't have a miter saw.
I'll digress for a moment. When you're using a table saw it's very difficult to run a long piece of wood across the saw. It's difficult to control and one little slip up means your whole cut is ruined! That's where a miter saw comes into play. Cutting the 45 degree edges into the ends of the wood is immensely easier with a miter saw. You simply set your wood on a stable surface and the saw does the rest! Like I said earlier... I don't have a miter saw (yet). I had to use a couple of extra surfaces to help guide the wood along the table saw and I really had to focus on making as straight a cut as possible. For the most part it worked out pretty well. The seams didn't line up just perfectly, but they were pretty dang close.
The pictures above show various stages of assembly, first putting the face on the board, and then the end caps. I've said it before and I'll say it again. There's a tool for every job! And for this job I got a new tool... an 18 gauge pin nailer. It uses compressed air to drive various sized nails which are very small into the wood. Really it's purpose in this project was just to tack the 45 degree surfaces together and in conjunction with some clamps, make the edges as invisible as possible. I think it turned out pretty well, and with some sanding the edges all but disappeared.
Sorry for the messy garage in the pictures, but hopefully you can see that after I did the finish sanding with 400 grit sand paper and then putting the first coat of stain on the wood, it really turned into a nice finished product. It looks like a solid piece of semi aged wood!
Now I just have to finish it's identical twin (you can see the edges of it in the pictures above). Please let me know what you think! This is my first try at making a mantel and I personally think it turned out pretty great! Hopefully my neighbors think so as well!
