Lego Table #3: Hand Planing and Hand Sanding

On Saturday (the day after our baby was due, and he’s still not here!), my wonderful wife said, “Why don’t you go do some woodworking?” Since I was actually in the mood to tackle the next task on my Lego Table, I went for it!

So the task of the day was to prep the table pieces for assembly. That meant planing and (some) sanding. The boards are in decent shape, being pretty much flat and square, so I only had to smooth them a little and take off the top layer to remove some staining and marring on the surface. (By the way, I went out and bought a replacement board for the cupped one, so I didn’t have to deal with that.) But still, that’s quite a chore when doing it all by hand with no workbench.

My makeshift bench involved placing two 2”x6” boards side by side on my sawing trestles, with the boards butting up against the wall. I used a couple narrower boards (1”x3”) laid parallel to the wall as a planing stop. This mostly worked when planing the shorter boards (the leg pieces). For the aprons, I had to plane one half, then flip it around and plane the other half (while sitting on one end of the board). Oh – I have to mention that the grain on this kapur is so funky, there didn’t really seem to be a “with” or “against” the grain! Kinda nice, wouldn’t you say? I had no tear-out, no matter which way I went.

After all that planing, I went over everything with 100# sandpaper. Good enough for now. Here you can see my setup – my wife took this pic while I was sanding:

And after it was all said and done – what was that, like 2 or 3 hours? – here is what I ended up with: a bunch of pieces that look pretty much exactly like they did when I started:

And here’s a closer look at what the kapur sapwood looks like compared with the heartwood. Very interesting – I’m curious to see how it turns out in the end! These are the leg pieces – I’m matching up one of these heartwood/sapwood pieces with one pure heartwood piece. Still trying to think of where that strip of sapwood should be in my leg assembly (see the Sketchup drawing). Oh, incidentally, in the pic below you can see that one of the 2”x6” boards also has some sapwood mixed, but it’s much more of a pukey dark greyish yellow (can something be a pukey dark greyish yellow?).

On a side note: I really need to fettle my Stanley #4. It would work fine, and then every 10 minutes or so my chipbreaker would jam up with shavings. Aargh!

-- Eric at http://adventuresinwoodworking.com