Thread: Makiking a lazy susan circular top - lessons learnt

Hello, I have been planning a lazy susan circular top with the help of the following threads I started, and learnt lots from:

1. How to edge glue ?

2. Dowels v Biscuits for edge jointing

3. Routing a circular table edge ogee profile

4. Damage resistant food safe finish needed

5. Best dowelling drill bit

6. Damage resistant food safe finish needed

Many thanks to all the contributors who provided such valuable insights. I have never done edge gluing before, nor used biscuits, so needed a lot of information.

Of course I made mistakes, some of them quite devastating at the time, requiring a restart of the days work.

Firstly, despite a lot of previous success with pine, I could not drill the dowels in correct alignment, probably because of the hard kwila timber and the poor quality drill bits. I am getting a CMT and a Colt 5 Star brad point drills to have a go, I am told there is no comparison with the cheap Chinese junk I have been using.

One of the 4 board joints is by dowels, the rest by biscuits after I gave that away. I am told the biscuits are for alignment, but personally I found them a waste of time for edge joining. While dry they are not a tight fit, by design, and by the time the glue up of 4 boards is done, using cauls, one has to wonder why the biscuits were used. The cauls did the alignment, not the biscuits.

Learnt a good lesson about applying glue. Spread it on about 4 mm wide bead, then used a tooth brush to spread the glue, then rubbed the boards together, feeling them get tighter and nicely sealed - no excess glue at this stage - perfect.. Now for the silly part - I pulled this joint apart, fitted more glue in the biscuit slot, and fitted the glue - result - excess glue oozing from the edge joins.

Took the precaution of putting masking tape on the rails of the clamps, and put ducting tape on the adjoining faces of the 70 x 35 mm cauls I made up. The cauls are framing timber with one face machined exactly flat with my jointer.

Overtightended the clamps causing a bow in the board, was able to put a credit card between the board and the caul, so eased off the tension, everything went back into alignment, except for the centre join - ended up clamping either side of the join with a block of pine at each end of the join.

The glue along each join was a series of small beads, which after 20 minutes were able to be scraped off easily with an obsolete credit card. Did the same underneath the board, but there w as lot more excess glue there.

Left it for nearly 24 hours, undid the clamps - BIG DISAPPOINTMENT - the board was not flat, it rocked on the table saw top Turned it over , found a couple of big globs of glue I had missed, took them off easily with a chisel, and VOILA ! the board sat flat on the table saw top

To make a circular board, I used a bit of flat timber with two holes at 350mm apart - one for the awl and one for the pencil. Tipped the board over and with the awl at the centre of the proposed circle, drew the circle to give a perfect 700mm diameter circle.

Did a rough cut with the jigsaw, no problems there, then used the router to trim it to exactly 700mm. BIG problems there. Straight bit chewed a 15mm piece off the outer edge, and then subsequently chewed another piece a bit further along the circumference of the round table. Start again with the jigsaw on a 670mm diameter board.

Anyway, all this didn't happen unless there are photos, eh, and you will find them all here Thanks for persevering with this long winded narrative, hope you enjoy the lessons I learnt, and thanks for all your help and support.