Stupid Table

Although it has been a couple months (!) since I have posted last, it doesn't mean I haven't been doing any woodworking.

Just not much.

Most notably, I finished our stupid walnut (Juglans nigra) table.  It is not a stupid table, it is just one of those stupid projects that takes years to finish just because it is no fun.  Now that I think about it, it wasn't no fun because it was a dining table, it was no fun because of the particular nature of the walnut I used.  It wanted to tear out no matter which way it was planed.

I did all of the joinery, which included gluing up the top panel, planing it flat, and cutting all of the mortises and tenons by hand at the Army woodshop on the post where I work.

Once that was done, I took all the parts to our Garmisch apartment for assembly and finish.  The Frau helped with several parts of this build, most notably the finishing.

Many of you probably won't approve of our choice of finishes, but we are pretty gentle with our furniture, so we used boiled linseed oil followed by pure beeswax applied with a polisoir.  This is truly an amazing finish on walnut.

The walnut panel resting on top of our old, temporary table. 

This is the underside of the table, which shows some of the tearout I was dealing with.  There also are a couple knot holes that don't go all the way through.

M+T joinery with drawbored pins.  This was the most pleasant part of the build.  I really took my time to make sure these joints all fit together perfect before hammering the pegs home.  The goo is just some paste wax which lubricates and assists the pin when driving home.   I chose to drawbore these joints using no glue at all.  Great choice.  It made for a completely stress free assembly.  Oh, and you might notice the end grain looking weird compared to the face grain.  I laminated 8/4 stock together to make the thick legs, then veneered the faces of the legs that showed the glue line.  It looks awesome.

Done.

A close-up of the finished top.

The finish is amazing.  However, it turned out a bit different than we expected.  On the base, we went straight from a planed surface to the BLO, then applied the beeswax with straw burnishers.  On the top, we added the step of burnishing the raw wood before applying any finish.  The base looks just the way we wanted, but the top practically glows in the dark.  It is a bit glossy-er than we envisioned.  It almost looks like French Polish.  We wanted a little bit more of a matte finish.  I have let it set for about six weeks to cure, hoping the gloss would mute over time a little bit like paste wax would, but no luck.  I am thinking we might have to apply something else over the top of the wax to subdue the shine a little.

In other news, I have two unfinished projects sitting on my bench in a state of only needing a little more work until they are finished - the Welsh stick chair and the Shaker side table.  I have some time off to myself this week so I should be able to get them both finished - unless I start another project which is exactly what I did.

I need to get a Christmas gift built, so no time for anything until this is done.  Unfortunately, I left my camera in Garmisch so I have no pictures of this chair yet.  I spent two days at the Dictum shop in Munich working on it, so it is almost done.  Diane talked me into using some lumber I already had rather than buying some new ash or oak for this project.  I'm glad she did.

I had some wenge (Millettia laurentii) intended for something else that I haven't started yet laying around from when I used to think that exotic wood was good to use in every project.  I probably will stay away from using exotics for future hand tool projects, but I had this stuff laying around and it looked like it would make a freaking bad-ass Roorkee.  All of the woodworking is done, and it indeed looks bad-ass.  The leather is almost done, and it looks cool, too.  I am using leather from a whole hide of hair-on leather I got a few months back for exactly this project.  I thought it was going to look kind of silly-western, but with the wenge it looks super refined and swanky.  I can't wait to put a picture of it up.  I've decided to call it Coffee and Cream.  Coffee, because the pile of shavings left from the lathe looked exactly like coffee grounds, and Cream, because the rest of the chair was obviously made from cow, and Coffee and Steak just doesn't have the right ring to it.

It would have been finished yesterday, as I had the whole day to myself (The Frau works on Thanksgiving, being it isn't a German federal holiday).  While I was getting my shop ready for working on the Roorkee, I cut my finger bad enough on a loose tool while rooting around in the trunk of my car to earn a trip to the emergency room.  I sliced a chunk of skin off of the end of my finger.  The slice wasn't terribly big, but it was deep enough that it started to bleed like crazy and wouldn't stop.  Note to self - keep your car clean.

Hopefully, in a day or two I'll be back in the shop and the Roorkee will be in the mail.

Using Veneer to Improve Laminated Table Legs

Two years is a long time to be working on a simple dining table.  This project technically does not have so many steps that it should take so long.

Why is it that it is still under the "in-progress" heading, you ask?

The answer is, I have no idea. This is just one of those projects that is taking me forever, mostly because this project really hasn't excited me yet.

No reason, just 'cause.

We are really getting tired of using an old, borrowed, ugly, flimsy dining table in our Garmisch apartment, though. That means it is time to light the fire under this table.

I mean - light the fire under me to finish this table. Lighting an actual fire under this table would be a perfectly good waste of lumber.

Ahem.

Moving on.

Here is the state of this project at the moment:

• The top is glued up and partially flattened
• All of the legs are laminated together - I used the same 8/4 stock that was used for the top.
• The legs were flattened on a face and one edge squared up by hand before I took them to Dictum to finish the milling using their power planer.
• Stock for the aprons has been chosen.

What is left to do:

• Make the legs look pretty.
• Smooth the table top after cutting to finish size.
• Cut the aprons to size and smooth them.
• Cut mortise and tenons.
• Glue-up the base using drawbore pegs.
• Attach the top with shop-made buttons.
• Finish.

I thought I didn't really have that much left to do, but now that I am looking at this list, it appears I haven't really started yet.  So much for two years worth of work on this thing.

Let's move on.

First on the list is making the legs look pretty.  I made the legs by laminating two pieces of 8/4 lumber together and milling square.

I did the best I could to match color and grain up, but while a couple looked OK, the others just wound up with so obvious a glue line that there is no way these legs would look anything but "jarring."

My solution was to pull a trick I used on a quarter sawn oak arts & crafts dining table I built for my in-laws a while back: veneer used to give the appearance of quarter sawn grain on all four faces of the leg.

Here's my process: My cousin lives near a veneer factory, so I sent him over to get me about a square meter of veneer for this project.  They just laughed, as usually the smallest they would sell is about a billion square meters of something.  They gave him this roll of walnut veneer, probably about ten square meters, and charged him ten Euros.  I think this was probably for their coffee money while they were able to get rid of some scrap or a sample or something.

What I got was a nice roll of veneer with about a dozen pieces from the same flitch.

The table legs in need along with the veneer I had to work with.

It is perfect having so much for this project, as I can really be picky in picking the perfect part of a piece of veneer to match the leg I want to put it on.

I decided to do the ugliest leg first, one which had a nice dark piece laminated to a board that showed sapwood.  What I needed to do here was find a section of the veneer that had no flatsawn grain, and which had sapwood all along one edge.

Although these sheets of veneer all came from the same part of the same log, they were not all exactly the same.  The ones closer to the bark side of the tree had a little more sapwood than the others.  I chose one of these and went to work.

The unrolled veneer.

The next step was to actually glue everything up.  I decided to do one face of two legs at a time, clamping them both up together with some termite poop for clamping cauls.

Here is a photo of everything set up.  I have just poured glue on both of the legs.

Notice I'm working at the kitchen table.

I used a purpose-made glue roller to even out everything for a nice glue up.

This shot shows most of the tools I used.

I couldn't photo the process, but all I did was place the veneer in the orientation I wanted on the table leg.  I used that yellow roller (not a paint roller, it has a harder rubber surface) to flatten everything the best I could.  Sometimes the veneer shifts around at this point, so one must be careful it doesn't move too far out of position.

I found out that the veneer can curl up when you just place it on the glue dry.  No biggie, as it will be flattened down again when clamped up, but it makes it hard to tell if it is in the right place or if it shifted.  To fix this I just wiped the dry side of the veneer with a damp cloth.

Once that was done, I stacked them up so the two veneer faces faced each other, separated by some termite poop and wax paper.

The whole glue up.

Here is a shot of this table leg in it's eventual intended location.  How ironic!

The legs only required being in the clamps for an hour or so, according to the veneer glue I used.  I then repeated the process on the opposite faces of these two legs.

Here is the result:

fresh out of the clamps

No more ugly laminating lines!  Looking at these legs, it really is hard to tell which faces are veneered and which ones are solid wood.  You really have to look at the end grain to tell.

So far, so good.  We'll have to wait until the finish goes on to really be sure everything matches, but to my eye right now it appears to be a perfect match.

Two more table legs to veneer up in this way and I'll be ready to move on with this project.  Another two years and maybe the table will be done!