Dining room table


BillN

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Sometime last year I promised my daughter that I would make her a dining room table. This from a very amateur woodworker who barely got through shop class. I decided on a trestle table design because the "legs" tend to not interfere with where people put their legs. Since she and her husband tend to be informal, the trestle table design suited their tastes. As a warm up I built a small 30x60 table for my wife in the breakfast nook of my house. Although my basement shop could handle that size I realized that I would never be able to work on the 44x75 dining table size. Solution: say goodbye to half the garage for the tabletop work

The trestle leg assembly were done in the shop. It's all QSWO for two reasons: I really like the dramatic ray flecks and there tends to be far less movement with quater sawn wood. As I cast around for good examples of trestle tables I got lucky in that my office conference room has a 40x68 one I bought 15 years ago. I used that for dimensional reference. It seemed that the distance from the edge of the table to the vertical part of the trestle assembly (where your knees would be) needed to be 15 inches or more in order to avoid any chance of banging ones knees. As a result, I built a large trammel and curved the verticals inward. If anyone goes this route make sure you mark out how the trestle (verticals and horizontal) will join BEFORE cutting the curves. I didn't do this so I had to mark everything from the top and bottom as opposed to across the width - MAJOR PIA! For the crosspiece of the trstle I doubled up to 4/4 boards. I did this for the mass of the piece. I also attached boards on the long side to give the illusion of greater mass. At the ends I cut 3" off and tucked the cutoffs under. This avoided the problem of movement since it was all end grain. I considered breadboarding the ends but I don't like the idea that the bread board ends will not stay lined up because of seasonal movement. The tradeoff was the exposed endgrain. For joinery of the vertical part of the trestle I used M&T. Because I wanted the table to disassemble easily I used two crossdowels at each end and used one of the cheaper doweling jigs to center the holes on the horizontal piece. As with all cross dowel asemblies it is a bit of a trick to get the male part to match up with the female part inside horizontal member. One neat trick is to use a rare earth magnet on the female piece. This allows you to move the female piece up and down in its hole until the male piece matches up. An allen wrench tightens the whole lower assembly together. I considered the idea of a wedge mortise (I've seen both vertical and horizontal versions) to tie the trestle together, but the mechanical approach seemed fine to me.

Used Marc's disc on finishing (worth every penny)for the trestle assembly. Except for the tabletop where I used an HVLP unit, I wiped the finish on and it came out quite nice.

One major obstacle was the fact that I do not have a jointer and this is a real issue when it comes to the tabletop. Fortunately my source of wood has all the big equipment I lack and surfaced all the tabletop wood and jointed the edges - mostly. For $.50 per board foot having him surface and joint saved me hours of getting it wrong. I think I will have him surface my wood from here on out. (This is sort of like the first time you realize that the big box store will use its panel saw to cut those 4x8 sheets of plywood or even worse MDF to size for NOTHING and you're wondering why you've killed yourself wrestling with those suckers for years.) I have a jig for my tablesaw that allows me to to a faux jointing job and it works farily well as long as I start with boards that are not too far off the mark. Several tweaks later I was reasonably happy with the joint lines. Problem: Not nearly enough 48" clamps. Solution: Assemble the tabletop upside down board by board and Kreg screw it together every 5 inches. Registration was almost perfect and those joints are NEVER going to come apart even if the glueup was less than perfect.

Finish: Belt sand off the high spots. RO Sand to 180. Use Marc's epoxy trick on a knot that had a divit in it. Dyed the wood using Transtint Medium Brown at half strength. If you use this stuff consider using alcohol rather than water to avoid raising the grain. Filled the pores with Behlens water base pore filler. If you try this, work with small patches and rub it off BEFORE it dries. I didn't (even though I knew better) and wound up having to resand the whole thing all over. Used a hand held lamp held at a very low angle to inspect the top for sanding marks (thanks, Marc). Bought a cheap HVLP unit from Rockler and ran unthinned General Finishes satin oil & urethane through it. Not too bad. Three coats got me pretty close. No brush marks. To take the roughness off the finish I used some synthetic steel wool and 2500 or so Abranet.

To attach the tabletop to the trestle assembly I used my domino to cut six slots in each top plate and then screwed up through the midpoint of each slot into the tabletop underside. This will give the tabletop the slop to move seasonally while still keeping the tabletop firmly attahced

Carted the whole thing to Boston together with a platform bed and a computer table (that I was given 5 days to construct as an "Oh by the way, could you whip this out as long as you're not doing anything.") Delivered, assembled, drove home, three days later an early delivery and now I'm "Grandpa" and my wife hasn't been seen since.

Things I could have done better:

1. Fill pores first in small batches and remove before it completely dries.

2. Dye after filling pores.

3. Leave more time (a week or more) to allow the finish to fully cure before trying to rub it out.

At any rate, my daughter and her husband now have a new daughter, a really ugly platform bed, a quick and dirty computer table and a pretty nice dining room table... now about those dining room chairs... any advice?

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From what I see, very nice finish. Would love to see some close ups of the joinery. Also, for the feet, do you have any concerns about wood stability (ie warpage due to moisture pocked up from spills)? Reason I ask is I plan on making a dining set one day and am trying to soak in as much info as I can before tackling it.

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From what I see, very nice finish. Would love to see some close ups of the joinery. Also, for the feet, do you have any concerns about wood stability (ie warpage due to moisture pocked up from spills)? Reason I ask is I plan on making a dining set one day and am trying to soak in as much info as I can before tackling it.

Mike:

There are something like three coats of oil and urethane on the tabletop and two coats on the pieces holding the tabletop. It is the General Finishes Arm-R-Seal that Marc prefers. It is a wiping finish that I sprayed on. That should be realtively impervious to moisture from water or alcohol. Obviously, one would not want to leave pools of liquid on any piece of furniture, but that aside, this is the most durable finish I could think of without going to one of those pour on epoxies - not what I wanted for a dining room table. The one drawback to any urethane finish is the way it cures. The very thing that makes it so durable, a chemical cross-linking as the solvent disappears means that repairs are more difficult. In theory, an evaporative finish, like shellac can be repaired by simply sanding a little and putting more shellac down on that spot. The alcohol in the new shellac dissolves into the exisitng shellac and when dry it all appears as one coat. Not so with urethanes. New uretane will not dissolve into the underlying coat. Anything less than recoating the entire surface will likely result in "witness" lines where the new finish is lying on the old finish. Since a dining room table (esp. one with a baby, toddler, adolescent, teenager, (as she grows up) will take some abuse I wanted a hard finish.

If you research tabletops (esp. big ones) you will find that the warpage issue is not going to come from moisture from spills. It comes from how the wood is cut at the mill and how the finish is applied. Quater sawn wood is much more stable that plain sawn wood. If you look at the end of two boards, one quarter sawn and one plain sawn you will see the quarter sawn will show what would be the "rings" of the tree standing almost straight up whereas the plain sawn will be either an arch or near horizontal. Over time the plain sawn board will want to curl whereas the quarter sawn won't. In addition, the quarter sawn will remain more stable across its width. It will only move about half as much over the course of a year. The other issue is the finish. Oddly enough, it is essential that you put as much finish on the underside as you do on the top. The finish impedes the rate of absorption of moisture (which all woods do, regardless of finish). If you only finsh the top the ambient moisture over the course of the year will go into the underside much more rapidly than the top. That can cause the underside to swell faster than the top - result, warpage. Quarter sawn wood, depending on the species, can give you some spectacular effects like I have in my QSWO table. It is, however, significantly more expensive than plainsawn because it is more difficult to mill and the yield is much less than plain sawn. Since this is likely to be the only dining room table I will ever build, the cost of wood was not a factor.

If you use plain sawn wood, consider breadboarding the ends (you may want to do this anyway for aesthetic reasons, but I didn't). The breadboarding (capturing the ends of the table with a board running perpendicular to the direction of the tabletop) will resist warping and tend to keep the table nice and flat. Keep in mind that the breadboard will not always be flush at the ends with the rest of the tabletop since the top will move in and out over the course of low and high humidity.

For me, the biggest issue with a one peice dining room table is the size of the project. You need more room than most hobbyists have available. You should have at least three feet beyond the table dimensions on all sides. That's why I waited until summer to take on the top itself so I could use part of my garage - better ventilation for spray finishing also. The other major issue is jointing very long boards. Few hobbyists have a jointer with a very long bed. You can handplane it, but my skills with a plane are not very good - must be a misspent youth!

All in all, a very satisfying project. Many weeks with weeks taken off in between, lots of thought and planning. The nice thing is that when I am long gone it is likely that people in my family will be enjoying good meals and good company around that table and that makes all the effort worthwhile.

If I can get someone to take some pictures - the table is 400 miles away - I will try to post some closeups. It's just edge joined board. There were a few iffy spots, but considering the size and my skill level, not bad.

Bill

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