Over the weekend I put in some overtime in the garage. I didn't punch a time card, but I believe that I was in there on Friday for 5 hours, Saturday for 4 hours and on Sunday for well over 8.  Building a table out of rough sawn lumber is quite the task, let me tell ya. It's not that it is a huge burden, but I am learning every step of the way. New methods to flatten and square the wood. New methods on how to make one face flat when you don't have a jointer large enough to flatten the entire face of a board... The list goes on and on.

Matt Sparx
Matt Sparx
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I did, however, make a pretty awesome discovery on Sunday. I knew that there were some purple dashes in the grain, I didn't know how figured it would be. After planing the 12" boards, I was pleasantly surprised! Above is a small dash of purple surrounding a knot in the lumber...

Matt Sparx
Matt Sparx
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This is what the other two boards yielded in the purple department! One half of the board is smooth and the other is rough. These are 12 inch boards and my jointer only can face joint boards at a capacity of 6 inches. So... Off came the blade guard and jointing 8 12 inch wide, 48 inch boards commenced. After a "step" is made in the wood, I take a piece of plywood and double side tape it to the "step". I then proceed to send that piece through the planer until the opposite side is flat and true. When that side is flat, I take off the plywood and double side stick tape and plane the step out of the wood... Leaving me with flat, parallel boards! That was a very hard process as each board had to go through a minimum of 15 times to achieve the final thickness. Let's say I got my workout on Sunday for sure.

When the boards were square and I had a true surface to glue the edges together, it was time to get to work on the top! But first... Let's go spend almost $100 on clamps... OUCH! Thankfully, I don't have to buy them again!

Matt Sparx
Matt Sparx
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Since I have limited capacity due to my tools, I couldn't go with my initial 4 boards wide, 8 feet long. So what to do? Improvise of course! Since my max capacity is 48 inches on my jointer, I will make two panels and join them together with breadboards on the ends as well as one in the middle. Doing this will give me the desired length on the tools that I have to work with.

Matt sparx
Matt sparx
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Here you can see the assembled legs looking over their soon to be table top neighbor. The pair of legs got a light sanding to remove the glue residue left over from the glue up. Final sanding of the legs should happen this evening.

 

I have come to the conclusion that the table will not be ready in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Not from a pessimistic stand point, but a reality. There is simply too much work to do and not enough time to get it done. I also have to seal the table with polyurethane and the final cure takes 3-4 days... We don't have that long until turkey day.

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