Occasional Table for Fundraiser #2: Top, legs and starting the joinery

When I left off before I was just heading out to the shop to start working on this project and was quite excited. Here’s a walk through of what my day off work and in the shop looked like:

Starting by jointing and gluing up the panel for the top:

It had a slight cup in it after clamping so you can see the C clamp holding the bar from another clamp against the top to keep it flat. I didn’t expect it to work but it did, the top is all but dead flat!

Then it was off to tracing out the template onto the legs so I could layout joinery and do the rough cut on the bandsaw.

Here you can see the mortises that I cut while the legs were still square. I used a mortising attachment on the shopsmith. It wasn’t the best ever and will take a decent amount of cleaning up with a chisel, but it sure did save a lot of time over hand chiseling them.

Then it was on to the bandsaw to cut out the shape! I cut one side first and then taped the cutoffs back on and cut the other side. That way I maintained a flat surface for all the cuts. It wasn’t until after I was done cutting that I realized I was in too much of a hurry. The plan was to cut one side and re-attach the template and move to the router table to make a nice perfect copy of the template and then cut the other side but I forgot so I missed out on the smooth surface from the router. I’m trying to figure out if I can still do it on the router table or if I just have significant work to do with my card scrapers.

Then I jointed, planed and cut the apron stock long so I can cut my 1” x 3/4” tenons on the ends.

The top had about 6 hours to set so I went at the glue joint with a scraper and really quickly had a nice looking joint, I like it!

That’s it for this time. Next time I hope to finish shaping the legs, cut the tenons on the aprons and chop a few mortises for the spacers between the apron pieces. Then it’s time to fit the tenons and do a dry assembly. Maybe, I’ll even get to cut the top to size and taper the edges! And maybe, just maybe I’ll be able to cut the channels and open ended dovetails for the top.

-- Andy, PA ~Finding satisfaction in creation