12′ Cherry Conference room table – day 3

Made a lot of progress on the table today. I have a lot of joinery on this table so I decided to try several different methods of creating my mortises and tenons. Today, I will be trying mostly hand tools for the joinery. It is not my strong suit, so bear with me if I screw anything up…

I started by pairing up the two pieces that will make up each vertical in the legs, then held them together with double-sided tape. I taped the outside surfaces together on the inside so the visible surfaces would not be damaged by tear-out.

I marked the location of the through-mortise and hogged-out a large amount of the waste material with a 3/4″ brad-point drill bit.

 

I removed the tape and flipped the boards back around and glued them up.

 

When the glue was dry, I used a couple of chisels and a rubber mallet to chop out the rest of the mortises as neatly as I could. I made a mock-up of the tenons that would eventually be going in the hole to test the fit.

 

I used the first one to mark the opening on the rest and repeated the process on the other three verticals.

 

With those complete, I moved on the top horizontal beam of the legs. I clamped the two boards together, lining up the mortise holes, then marked the notch locations.

I used my marking gauge to set the depth of the notch, then cut the sides of the notch by hand, with my pull saw.

 

I used my 1″ chisel to chop out the waste, once the sides were cut. Not really happy with the bottom of the notch, it broke away, instead of being cleanly cut. Luckily the bottom of the notch will not be seen, once the top beams are attached. I will use a different method to cut the beam notches out.

 

I had to get creative laying out the rounded ends of the legs. I wound up using a 6″ router base from my shop, and a small platter from the kitchen, as well as a roll of masking tape to get the different diameters that I needed.

 

Once I finished laying out the curves, I went to the band saw and made some relief cuts.

 

I really didn’t like the curve with the relief cuts. They left too much to be sanded away. I have a 1/4″ blade, so I didn’t bother with relief cuts on the rest of the curves…

 

When the upper and lower leg components were cut out, I ran them across the spindle sander to make all the curves smooth.

 

I did a dry-fit of all the leg parts and marked the parts of the tenons that stuck out the bottom. I took them over to the band saw and cut off the excess.

 

 

I took everything back apart and started applying glue to all of the mating surfaces.

I clamped up the first leg and wound up using all of my smaller clamps, so I let that one set for a few hours, then did the second one.

 

When the legs were dry, I loaded up my new router bit to round over all of the outer edges of the legs. I bought a four-bladed Quadra-cut bit for trimming up the laminate, when I do the top. I thought it would work good in this application as well.

It made a lot of chips, but it cut really smoothly and made less noise than a standard two-blade bit.

When I pulled the clamps on the second leg, I went ahead and clamped up the cross-bars for the bottom stretchers. I don’t need them yet, but I have a lot of glue-ups to do on this table, so I thought I would get them out of the way.

 

With the legs out of the way, I cut all the pieces for the upper beams, down to their correct lengths.

I applied glue to the 13″ pieces that would go on the ends and clamped them to the 60″ pieces. Since I was using a bunch of my clamps elsewhere, I gang clamped all of them. It uses less clamps, but things can shift if you are not careful.

While they were drying I went back to the legs. I did a little touch-up sanding on the glue squeeze-out on the second leg, then rounded over all of the outside edges on that leg as well.

I spent a while sanding the legs down, working up from 80 grit to 220 grit.

The legs are super smooth and they look great.

 

I pulled the clamps on the beam halves and marked out the curved ends.

I repeated the cut and sand process with them while they were only 5′ long. I couldn’t swing the full 10′ long beams around the bandsaw, so I have to cut them now.

 

When that was done, I started applying glue to the inside surfaces.

I added in the 94″ long pieces and clamped up both beams to their full 10′ length.

One of the 94″ pieces was accidentally cut about 1/16″ short so I cut a 1/16″ thick piece and glued it in the slot. When the glue dries, I will plane and sand it till you won’t be able to see it.

I made a good bit of progress today, hopefully I will be able to do a lot more of the table this weekend.