Thread: A table for semi-outdoors

I've been doing a one day per week course through TAFE Outreach at the local Men's Shed for a couple of semesters, and the theme is furniture from recycled timber.

This is the first large thing I've made, and I thought it might be an idea to make a table for the local Community Garden. They have an undercover area (not walled) with a blackboard, so they obviously sit around there and make plans for whatever it is they are going to undertake. I figured a table might be useful to them.

One of the other course participants is pretty involved with the garden, so I sought her guidance on what might be appropriate. She made some bench seats to go with it.

We figured that 1800x900mm would be a good size. The material was a fence from Mount Victoria, which yielded some very nice pieces, with stacks of character after jointing and thicknessing ("the prize lies beneath - hidden in full view" ). The post became legs, the rails were used as rails, and the top has a layer of palings running lengthwise with another layer perpendicular as the top.

Even a fence seasoned for 30-40 years in the sun et all still had plenty of movement to offer after jointing, particular the back-sawn palings. I had dressed them and taped them together in a stack for a month in a shed, and they were still all nice and flat by the time I got to use them. As soon as they were untaped, and then glued and screwed to the top they started cupping like crazy, and some very nice splits opened up. Epoxy and sawdust to the rescue.

I had all the palings layed out mixing up all the colours (kinda stripy) but Kat suggested that we group the reds at one end and the yellows at the other. I resisted at first, but when we layed them up that way I was sold, no question.









The next project I'm working on will be a similar thing but 900x900, and a different structural design. I'll use Dominoes this time, and correct all many of the other mistakes that I made on this one. It was an excellent learning curve! This one is planned to be a gift to the local Cultural Centre. Lola and I would like to pay our respects to the local people and thank them for having us on their land, and Uncle Ed (a Men's Shed member) tells me that it's traditional to present a gift when doing so.