Hello again, I'm feeling a bit guilty as I haven't been on the site in over a year. We did a knock-down/rebuild with our house, so everything, including all my woodworking stuff went into storage and I neglected to visit. But now we're back in, most of my tools are still in storage, but with my workbench at my in-laws I can start making things again!
My first project is to make a dining table for our new house, out of our old house. More precisely, before it got demolished, I saved some floorboards and joists and my wife has commissioned me to make a dining table from them more fitting in quality and size to the new residence than our current ikea one.
Dimensions are going to be 1500mm x 2500mm (following the golden mean), which will allow us to seat 10-12. The top is going to be around 38mm thick, which I was going to do by having two layers of the floorboards running longitudinally. But my wife wants the top to be a double chevron pattern (like a wide W), so I needed to come up with an alternate plan. Because I'm worried about wood movement, I didn't want to have the bottom layer run longitudinally and the top layer as chevrons for fear of splits and cracks, so I have decided to make the base layer from 19mm plywood and edge it with the floorboards. Also, to make the top manageable solo, and to give freedom of movement, I'm making the top in two pieces - one chevron on each.
Here's the first plywood piece - it's too short (by 100mm) and too narrow (by 150mm), so I need to glue on some wood to the edges. To help make it a stronger connection, I thought I would do a tongue and groove joint.
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Out came the trusty Record 044, which I hadn't used since I made the bench I'm using to build the table. It worked well in the plywood, but needed a fair amount of effort to push through the layers.
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2.4m of groove. All up today, I ploughed about 11m. (It sounds better in imperial: "I ploughed through over 30ft of wood today")
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Using a test piece to work out the correct fence setting to make the tongue. Using the 044 in wood was like a hot knife through butter after the grunt-work of the plywood.
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Then, after the tongue was shaped, I put a 45 degree chamfer on the bottom of the wood. Drawknife close to the line, then plane to finish.
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And then, the glue-up.
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That's all I had time for today. Tomorrow, I hope to put the side pieces on and maybe put the rear liner board on as well (but that one I'm going to do as a half-lap joint, partly for practice, and partly because it will be supported by the legs/frame, whereas the outer liner boards won't be).