Dining Table & Benches

[Bmac]

Moving along nicely. Gluing up thinner boards to make thicker stock can be grunt work, but you are right it has it's advantages in that you can pick your best outside surfaces. 

Question on stock, I thought you were using pine for this. Is it going to be pine for the top and birch for the base or did you just decide to go with birch. 

[Chestnut]

7 hours ago, Mark J said:

I always marvel that you can build this way.   

For the trestle sides I had to make a drawing. The dimensions for the angles were too complicated to remember.Though i forgot to dimension my drawing so i had to get the dimensions by scaling off the computer screen.

2 hours ago, Bmac said:

Moving along nicely. Gluing up thinner boards to make thicker stock can be grunt work, but you are right it has it's advantages in that you can pick your best outside surfaces. 

Question on stock, I thought you were using pine for this. Is it going to be pine for the top and birch for the base or did you just decide to go with birch. 

It was always going to be birch. If i mentioned pine somewhere I must have been sleep typing. I get a pretty good allergic reaction to some of the pine species, I think fir, so i try to avoid using them.

[Chestnut]

I took  a couple hour break from the dining table Sunday to make a shelf unit to go next to my miter saw. I just had 2 shelves here before, they were small and tilting away from the wall so objects were likely to roll off. It was instigated by that and also i got sick of the plywood cutoffs from the bed platform project.

After that I milled up 3 pieces of birch to make the stretcher. The stretcher is going to be 46" long with 2 4" long tenons so the legs will be spaced ~38" This will put the leg near the outside knee of someone sitting at the table. With the trestle design their knee shouldn't be close to the leg at all though.

The through mortises were already cut before the trestle legs were glued up so after the beam glue was dry and 3 handles were turned on my lathe i cut the giant tenons. Only tricky part is getting them sized perfectly to the mortise but still slide on easily.

My trick for this is simple. The only critical part that needs to be perfect to eliminate gaps is the portion of the tenon that is right at the face of the leg. I know the legs are 2.125" thick (yeah they are beefy), so i put a mark on the tenon at this point. Now i undersized the tenon everywhere except for 1/4" in either direction from my mark. It's sort of like back cutting a shoulder. These tenons are going to be wedged so glue surface isn't an issue at all which is why this trick is so nice. If you put a strait edge on the tenon each of the 4 surfaces will bulge out slightly 2" down the tenon. The above picture with zero gaps is quite nice.

Next is to cut the shape on the stretcher and then create the mortises in the tenons for the wedges. After that I'll keep working on the benches. The remaining lumber i have for the top needs to dry some more. It's sitting around 11% but I'd like to see that at 10% before I start. This birch is a dream to work with.

[Chestnut]

This is goign to be a longer post. Hopefully not text but mostly images.

I cut out and cleaned up the stretcher exactly the same way I did the legs. There was more alternating grain on this piece so there is some tear-out on the bottom side that I didn't want to chase for fear that it'd cause the strait line on the bottom to look bent slightly.

Next was clean up the legs. I routed a chamfer around the entire piece which had some portions that the bit couldn't quite reach. I handled those with a chisel. Due to using a chisel there was some backward grain that gave me issues. Below shows the area i couldn't reach with the router.

I developed a technique that i want to share. Because of the reversed grain tearout with the chisle was bad. To combat this I used the chisel to sever the long grains with the aim to reduce the tear out. I found holding the chisel at an angle to match the 45 degreee and doing paring slices close together worked well. The angle was a compound angle seen below.

in the short 1/2" i made probably 10 slices.

I then angled the chisel just right to get the 45 degree chamfer to the face. The stroke was not along the edge but close to a slice cut where i moved the chisel strait up and down in the picture above not diagonally. After a couple clean up strokes and a bit of fiddling I got decent results.

I did the same technique on the other side.

The above is a fairly close picture so it doesn't look perfect but after a step back it looks really good in my biased opinion. After sanding it looks even better.

It took me about 5 practice tries to get some what decent at this. I'll include a picture of my first attempt. It didn't turn out well.

Luckily that is on the inside bottom so it'll be covered by the stretcher shoulder mostly.

Following leg cleanup was gettting the tapes cut on the bench legs. I made 1 leg the way i wanted it and used it as a template to mark out all the other legs.

Used the bandsaw to cut the tapers. The pile of off cuts can be seen on the floor to the left. They make good shims but my shim stack is full so these went to the garbage.

The rough bandsaw cuts were cleaned on the jointer first, then will be followed by a smoothing plane after joinery is cut.

Below are the legs standing next to something strait so you can see the subtle angles.

All of the legs came out pretty close to the same. I took a picture with some raking light to highlight any differences. All in all they are more than close enough that no one will be able to spot the difference short of using a ruler.

[Coop]

Some pretty nice chisel work and covered your only mistake at the right location. 

[curlyoak]

On 11/21/2019 at 1:49 PM, Chestnut said:

The big thing wanted is a table around the size of 48" x 32".

Is the size going to be different?

[Chestnut]

7 hours ago, curlyoak said:

Is the size going to be different?

I think I'm going to do 49" instead of 48" I want to make sure that the benches slide underneath the table as that was also a major requirement. Doing 49" allows me to increase the length of the benches slightly to accomplish this. 32" will be the width.

[Mark J]

Ditto on the chisel work. 

[Chip Sawdust]

Whenever I start a project on paper it never ends up the way I drew it. Same kinda goes for purchased plans. But that's part of the beauty of hand made stuff, it's yours, and only yours.

Where's the project at now?  

[Chestnut]

8 hours ago, Chip Sawdust said:

Whenever I start a project on paper it never ends up the way I drew it. Same kinda goes for purchased plans. But that's part of the beauty of hand made stuff, it's yours, and only yours.

Where's the project at now?  

This on is staying pretty close to the design. Last night I was working on getting the rails for the benches milled and joinery cut. Tonight and this weekend will be seats for the benches and the top for the table. I need to mill everything as the material just dipped under 10% MC.

I've had to be strategic because humidity is dropping in my house fast. Just this week it went from 45% to 35%. I do have my acclimation pile located in such a way that the furnace blows on it. So i can dry wood pretty fast, but it can't enter that pile tuneless it's down to 18%-20% or it'll dry too fast.

[Chestnut]

On this installment, I worked on the benches for the bench as well as the lumber for the bench seats and the table top.

The lumber I'm working with, as I've mentioned, is on the thinner side. Most of the pieces are at 13/16" in the rough. It was dried outside in a pile that wasn't really laid flat not stacked particularly well. Getting strait lumber over 36" long has been tricky and requires a good selection process to find nearly strait boards, which there are few, or removing material to the point where the boards are quite thin. I need some parts 50-51" long so drastic measures were necessary.

For the rails of the bench i ended up with some bowed and twisted wood. I rough cut the boards to size to minimize as much jointing as necessary. In the end i only ended up with about 9/16" material. For a bench structure that made me a bit uncomfortable, so i glued a piece to the back but only on the ends for joinery. The long rails are 3.75" tall so i know bending strength wise they will be ok but I'm worried about joinery.

In the picture above you can see how i added material to be able to get a tenon in the rails in a way that doesn't leave a very thin skin over the floating tenon. This worked out well and stiffened the boards a bit as well. Because the short rails were only 9" long, I was able to mill a hair over 3/4 material there so i didn't have to double up on those. After milling and mortises it was just a simple glue up.

The table top and bench seats were another trick. Some of the boards I have are pretty wide at 9.5". Unfortunately just like everything else they have some serious cup and twist. The nice part about cup and twist is that ripping the boards narrower not only allows them to fully fit on my jointer but it also reduces the amount of wood needing to be removed to eliminate the cup and twist.

So now that i took some 105" long 10" wide boards and made them 52" x 5" we're good to go. My goal is to keep the boar parts together and then glue them back together after jointing in hopes that the seam down the middle of the board isn't noticeable. For the most part it worked out quite well. One bench i needed to reduce half of one board down to 2.5" wide because it was just that twisted. Then some epoxy knot filling.

The board below has 4 glue lines on it.

The table top it's self worked out much better. I cleaned it up with a card scraper and it looks pretty dang good.

My plan is changing for the better. I was able to keep the table top thick enough that I'm not going to add material to the edge to make it look thicker. I'm just going to leave it as is and give it less of an edge treatment.

[Chestnut]

I got finish applied. I did 3 coats total on all the base parts for the table and benches. For the seats of the benches and the table top I put down 5 coats. The wood dents fairly easily so I'm a bit concerned on the long term durability. Beings this is for my sister I'm goign to tell her to use it hard and if I need to make a new top for it someday that will not be a problem. Hopefully it fares better than I'm expecting and will just get little dents and scratches giving it good character instead.

Table top thickness at 11/16" looks pretty good all things considered. I was a bit worried that leaning on it would cause the center of the table to sag a bit. I sat on the edge ... nothing. Stood in the center of the table ... nothing. I thought about doing a cleat or two to the underside to keep it flat but in the end i feel the table legs will accomplish that quite well.

The heart wood of this birch is beautiful, Nothing wrong with the white sap wood but it juts doesn't have the depth and chatoyance that the heart wood does. Had to get that to come across in pictures.

This bench was the worst offender for jointing and was cut into 5 parts. The glue lines are almost invisible.

I used walnut wedges for securing the through tenon. I don't know why but I do LOVE wedged through tenons. The idea that i can make something very stable and sturdy and taking it apart and putting it together requires zero tools is just fun. IKEA can take a hike.

[Mark J]

It came out great. 

Now all you gotta do is wrap it.  

[Coop]

Very well done Nut! 

[treeslayer]

Once again well done Drew !

[Chestnut]

Oh i forgot to post. Finis is Minwax wipe on poly.

24 hours after final coat i buffed the tops with a 2000 grit platin pad lubricated with a mixture of mineral oil and mineral spirits. This removed the remaining minor dust nibs and leaves a silky smooth surface.

[pkinneb]

Well that wasn't even close you do know Xmas Eve isn't until Tuesday right 

Great job sir!!

[Chestnut]

50 minutes ago, pkinneb said:

Well that wasn't even close you do know Xmas Eve isn't until Tuesday right 

Great job sir!!

Everyone comes tomorrow and tonight have to clean and prep the house so i really only got it done just in time. Our gift day is Sunday.

Thanks!

[Chet]

That came out super nice Drew.

If the table is going to be a daily user I think that the dings and marks that show up over time are good.  It shows that a family lives here.

[Alan G]

Great work. Great job documenting along the way. Especially since you were so crunched for time.

I am sure they are going to love it, and beat the crap out of it. But that is what it is there for right? To be used.

Awesome job!

[wtnhighlander]

Love it, Drew! Awesome work, as usual. How do you like the horizontal opposing wedges? I've only used vertical single wedges for such a joint.

[Chestnut]

13 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

Love it, Drew! Awesome work, as usual. How do you like the horizontal opposing wedges? I've only used vertical single wedges for such a joint.

So i like the opposing wedges because I can make a square hole and don't have to worry about the angle pushing on just one side of the stretcher tenon.

[Chip Sawdust]

So? What’d they say? Nothing but smiles all around I’m guessing  

[Minnesota Steve]

On 12/20/2019 at 8:27 AM, Chestnut said:

I got finish applied. I did 3 coats total on all the base parts for the table and benches. For the seats of the benches and the table top I put down 5 coats. The wood dents fairly easily so I'm a bit concerned on the long term durability. Beings this is for my sister I'm goign to tell her to use it hard and if I need to make a new top for it someday that will not be a problem. Hopefully it fares better than I'm expecting and will just get little dents and scratches giving it good character instead.

First, I think this turned out really nice.

In terms of the denting... that's the latest fashion.   All the furniture in the stores these days looks like someone took a hammer to it already.   So I wouldn't worry too much.

 

 

[Chestnut]

On 12/23/2019 at 10:48 AM, Minnesota Steve said:

First, I think this turned out really nice.

In terms of the denting... that's the latest fashion.   All the furniture in the stores these days looks like someone took a hammer to it already.   So I wouldn't worry too much.

Thanks. My sister doesn't follow fads or trends much she wanted something nice and timeless.

These fads end up just looking dated in short time.

On 12/23/2019 at 10:08 AM, Chip Sawdust said:

So? What’d they say? Nothing but smiles all around I’m guessing  

They were very excited and happy. The first comment was "this is goign to make the kitchen FAR more useful".