Thread: WIP - Dining Table in Maple Silkwood

First piece to attack was one of the boards destined as top parts to get it straight enough to resaw into thinner boards. This was the most twisted board and after I took out the majority of the twist on one side I had to then attend to the cup along its length.

twist.jpg flat.jpg

That's a nice workbench! Are you doing all the dimensioning by hand?

Originally Posted by Alkahestic

That's a nice workbench! Are you doing all the dimensioning by hand?

I'm not all handtools but when I moved and downsized I sold my machines rather than my handtools as I had built the bench for hand tool work.

I did have a 10" jointer thicknesser combo before I moved which would have just handled these 250mm wide boards, but now I use the machines at the men's shed as needed and I do my prep at home. The shed however only has an 8" jointer as well as a wide thicknesser. I'm just flattening one side of the boards by hand for now to give a reference to resaw and then I'll probably run the boards through the shed's thicknesser.

Obviously the table top when glued up will eventually have to be finished by hand.

I've not worked Maple Silkwood but if it is anything like Queensland Maple it would be a pleasure to plane. That said, after the first board or two I'd probably be looking for the jointer/thicknesser! I think my bandsaw, jointer, and thicknesser are the three powered tools I would keep above the other machines.

Looking forward to the rest of your build!

I've been cutting blanks from what I have with my fingers crossed all will stay relatively flat and straight after resawing. For the 250mm wide boards of the table top since I only have 80mm depth of cut on the table saw, after running grooves down each edge of the wide planks I have to complete the removal of the remaining 90mm web with a trusty old Disston rip saw ......

webCut.jpg resawn.jpg

The MSW is a real pleasure to plane when the grain is straight, but is a real challenge around the knots. I'm hoping they all end up tight and well behaved but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to use fillers on some of them and hope the SIL is happy with the 'features'.

A possible layout for the table top. I'm unsure about using pieces with knots for the breadboard ends but I think they do go with the rest of the top. So far they look stable and we are having the first few humid days of the season at the moment. I think I'll leave them alone for a week or so and see what happens. If they start to move I do have one last straight grain board I could use if needed.

tabletop1.jpg

After resawing I set about thicknessing the boards. I felt the resawing and straightening wasn't really leaving me enough meat to get a good thickness for the top. I was down to 22.5mm when I stopped with still a lot of unevenness on the undersides of the boards. I think I would have had to go down to at least 18mm to get mostly clean boards. I instead decided to stay at 22.5 and rearranged the boards to put the best long edges to the outside while keeping in mind there will still be more surfacing required after glueup.

Unfortunately a bit of under thickness remained along an edge that I was originally thinking I will take out by putting an under bevel on the top. As I haven't really decided on the edge treatment yet I thought it might be prudent if I laminated a feather in place along the questionable edges before I continued to the top glue up.

feather.jpg

After planing that down to thickness I went ahead with the top glue up. I have used black epoxy on the knots and they are showing up a bit shiny in this pic where I have planed back the overfill.

tabletop2.jpg

The waney underside....
underside.jpg

Although the knotty boards I roughed out for end cleats hadn't moved significantly I felt it really called out for straight grained cleats so I have now cut up my last good MSW board leaving me with just a bin of offcuts for any new work.

I've been forming and fitting the joints for attaching the cleats mainly using a router, with a lot of hand fitting being required as the router cut depth varied due to the top cupping slightly and with the back side being an inconsistent finish level. The remainder of the mortice depth remains to also be finished by hand.

cleats.jpg

You know the feeling you get when the parts finally fit together?
cleats2.jpg cleats3.jpg

Looking nice Fuzzie. How deep are your mortises? It looks like a lot of chisel in there.

The breadboard end cleats are 100mm wide. I made the mortises about half that. I could hog out to 35mm with the router but had to finish the last 15mm by hand.

There is a je ne sais quoi about cutting joinery by hand isn't there - even with a bit of powered assistance. Are you thinking of any particular finish for the table?

I decided to take a machinery approach to tenoning the rails. I built this jig to run on the slider and it worked quite well. I even had enough headroom to do the long rails and it was quite stable.

tenonJig1.jpg tenonJig2.jpg