If you’ve been following along with this project, you know that I completed the inlay and the glue-up in my last post. So, it was on to sanding and finishing tasks.
I’m not sure how I liked working with the Hard Maple on this project. Even with careful reading of the grain of each board, the wood was very prone to tear-out with the planer and jointer. This was with wood of only relatively moderate figure. Because of this, the stock required a lot of work with my smoothing plane and a card scraper in order to smooth the areas that showed torn out grain. I usually smooth the surfaces of project parts to eliminate mill marks but this wood required more that that.
Of course, I did all of this smoothing work as I went along creating the various parts for the table so all that was left after assembly was sanding. I always hand sand my projects using a cork-faced sanding block and this was no exception. The wood was generally smooth from the planning and scraping. So, all that was necessary was a bit of blending of the planed and scraped areas – I did this with 180-grit paper.
The finish on the table is a simple one. I did not want to add too much color to the Maple but, I did want to warm it up a bit. I made a test board surfaced with the same processes as the table and tried applying Boiled Linseed Oil, blonde Shellac, and General Finishes Arm-R-Seal in various combinations. In the end, I chose straight Arm-R-Seal. For the first coat, I scrubbed it into the surface with 400 wet/dry paper. After that coat dried over night, I scuff sanded the finish with the same grit paper, wiped the sanding dust with Naptha coated cloth and applied second a third coats of the finish. After letting the finish cure for a week, I applied paste wax with 0000 steel wool and buffed the surface.
In the pictures, you can see the finished result. Sorry for the quality of the pictures, they were taken in a hurry just before the table was packed up and sent off to its new home in South Carolina with my in laws.
In the end, I think that the arched aprons and top, the inlay and the splayed legs on this table helped to modernize the basic shaker-inspired design. After it arrived in its new home I received a report that it looked great and that the Maple/Cherry combination worked perfectly with the dark wood floors of the house. I’m hoping for a picture of it in place to see for myself.
All of the table components were completed so, it was now time to tackle milling and installing the string inlay.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, this table is going into a house with very dark wood floors. Because of this, I chose Hard Maple for the main wood to provide contrast with the floors. However, the Maple alone was too bland for my liking and I wanted to give this table a bit of a contemporary flair. So, I decided to add some Cherry string inlay along the arched aprons as well as bordering the entire top. I felt that this would provide some visual interest along with a more modern look while not being too overbearing. Just a subtle design element.
The first task was to lay out the inlay lines on the parts to be embellished. On the aprons this was just a simple arch parallel with the bottom of each apron. On the top things were a bit more complex. I wanted the inlay to border the top at a fixed distance from the edges. To mark this, I layed out and marked the intersecting points at the corners. Then I connected the points with a straight edge and compass set at the desired offset distance for the inlay. The compass was used on the curved sections running the point along the curve while tracing out a line with the pencil side.
The trick to routing the channel for the inlay was to keep the router bit running parallel with all of the edges of the parts – this included running along the straight sides of the top, the concave edges of the aprons and also along the convex edges of the ends of the top. To do this I used my Bosch Colt router with an edge guide. I milled two small arched blocks. One block had a convex curve and the other a concave curve – these curves were made slightly sharper than those of the table to allow me to maneuver the router to track the inlay lines . I (separately) double-stick taped these blocks to the edge guide. The convex block was used on the aprons and the concave block was used on the ends of the top – as I routed, I concentrated on keeping the center of the guide block against the edge of the part while tracking my lines. At the intersection points on the top I stopped short of each intersection with the router and finished the corner with a small chisel.
The next task was to rip some Cherry stringing at about 3/16″ wide by an 1/8″ high. I did this by ripping a few 1/8″ pieces from a 3/4″ Cherry board. I then placed these pieces flat on their wide sides and set up the band saw to rip strips slightly wider than 3/16″ – leaving room to clean them up with a hand plane. I used double-stick tape to hold the pieces of stringing to my bench and dressed the edges with my plane until they just fit into the routed channels.
For the aprons, fitting and gluing the stringing was straight forward. I applied a bit of glue into each channel and pressed the inlay into position leaving the ends a bit long for trimming later. With a bit of waxed paper in between the pieces, I butted the aprons face to face and clamped them together to dry. The top was a bit more challenging because four pieces of stringing had to be cut to fit. I contemplated mitering the corners but finally opted on a slightly different technique. I first cut and fit the shorter arched end pieces. With these pieces temporarily and lightly in place, I marked one end of each long piece to match the angle where they met the end pieces. I made those cuts with a sharp chisel. With those ends temporarily set in place, I then marked the opposite ends where they met the arched pieces on the opposite ends of the top. Again, I cut the pieces with a chisel, however, I initially stayed away from my line and gradually trimmed away the ends until I had a good fit. With these pieces fit, I again put glue into the channels and set the stringing in place. I clamped on waxed paper and cauls over the stringing and left it to dry. Once the glued stringing had dried I leveled it all with the surface of the parts using a block plane and card scraper.
With all of the stringing glued in place and leveled I did a some sanding on all of the parts and then moved on to the the glue up of the table. In the pictures you can see the table being clamped during the glue up as well as after a final hand sanding and ready for finish. In the next post I’ll cover the finishing process and show the completed table.
Tags: cutting stringing, Modern Shaker Table, routing inlay channel, string inlay
When readying parts to be edge glued, most of us probably trust the surface left after a pass over the jointer knives as being smooth and ready for gluing. After all, it feels smooth, and when the boards are placed edge to edge the fit looks pretty darn good. We don’t see how the fit could be much better and we forge ahead, slop on some glue and clamp the pieces together until we think we’ve pressured them far enough into submission such that they will yield a seamless joint. I know I’ve been down this road – and sometimes the joints are fine, but sometimes they are less than perfect.
I was working with some pieces of Walnut today and nearby there was some white chalk on the bench that I was using for marking out parts on the dark wood. The pieces I was working with were about 2 inches thick and 8 inches long and I needed to edge glue them. As is the norm, I held two of the pieces together edge to edge and inspected the joint it offered after a pass over the jointer knives – it looked OK, but not perfect.
I spotted the chalk again and thought maybe I should see just how good that jointed surface was. In the pictures you can see the surface of one of the boards after rubbing the edge lightly with the white chalk (the second one is a close-up of the same board). You can clearly see the uneven surface left by the jointer. As you can see, the rotating knives of this tool leave little scallops on the wood surface – in fact the width of these scallops changes depending on how fast the piece is moved over the knives. The slower you go, the closer together the scallops are and the better the resulting surface – better yes, but not perfect.
After seeing this, I felt I could make the surface better. I don’t have a jointer plane, so, I pulled out my #4 smoothing plane to see what I could do. I made a few passes along the edge of the board watching as the plane removed the white chalk leaving a stripe of chocolate colored wood in its wake. The first picture is the resulting surface (the second picture is a close-up of the hand planed edge). I put some Naptha on a paper towel and wiped away the residual chalk that was still in the pores of the wood. The smoothing plane only removed one or two thousandths of an inch of material, however, as seen in the pictures, the surface quality was now infinitely better.
I often use my smoothing plane on the faces of panels and other parts that have been face jointed in order to remove these milling marks. However, I don’t always edge joint with a hand plane after using the jointer. My edge-glued joints are usually pretty good but, I sometimes think that they can be better. After this little experiement, I’m sure of it. Of course, a smoothing plane is not the best tool for this job…so, it looks like I’ve got a good reason for a jointer plane to be the next entry in my hand tool arsenal!
Tags: edge joint, Hand Planing, jointer, jointer plane, smoothing plane
With the top and the legs completed I moved on to make the aprons for the table. The stock was already cut to rough width and length so, the first order of business was to it bring the lengths to finished dimension.
However, you may recall, the design for this table calls for the legs to splay outward to the left and right by 2 degrees. In order to accomplish this I needed to accurately cut the ends of the front and back aprons at 2 degrees. I used my miter gauge at the table saw for this operation. With the guage set to 2 degrees, I cross cut one end of each of the aprons. To bring the aprons to the exact length I next added an extended fence to the miter gauge. I placed a stop block on the extension so that I could cross cut each of the aprons to the same exact length – again at 2 degrees on the opposite ends. In the picture you can see the result of these cuts on the font and back aprons.
The aprons for the left and right ends were easier. With the apron stock already cut to finished width I simply cross cut the pieces square with the miter gauge square at the exact needed dimension. Again to assure that the parts were dimensioned exactly the same I used a stop block for the second cut on each apron. The reason that I mention the use of the stop block and the batching of these cuts is that by following this procedure you can machine parts to their exact dimension without changing setups and possibly introducing error. The fact that both pairs of these aprons are cut to exactly the same length assures that I will have a much easier time of creating a square assembly when the table is ultimately glued up.
After getting the aprons cut to length I moved on to creating the arches in them. I laid out a fair cure using a flexible piece of scrap stock and transferring the curve to the stock with a pencil. I then used double-stick tape to temporarily stick the aprons together and cut the curves on the band saw. I stayed about 1/32″ away from my lines and after the curves were rough cut I smoothed them with the sander. This operation was also done while they were still taped in pairs to assure that the curves for each set of aprons would be identical.
After shapiing the curves on the aprons I moved on to creating the mortises in both sets. Usually I would do this with the stock still square to allow for easier clamping and squaring. However, for the loose tenon joinery I’m using to work properly on the front and back aprons, the mortises need to be cut perpendicular to the angled ends of the stock at the as they will be installed. This allows me to use the simple mortises already cut perpendicular into the legs (recall that the top and bottom of the legs were previously trimmed to 2 degrees to make everything flush at the top after the aprons and legs are assembled). I used the same router mortising jig for this task. The picture shows an apron in place and one of the two mortises already cut.
Next I’ll tackle adding the cherry inlay into the aprons and the top. Then it’s on to assembly.
Tags: aprons, band saw, Modern Shaker Table, router mortise
With the legs for the table complete, I set my aim toward making the top. I did not have any stock wide enough to accommodate the top in a single piece so, I needed to glue two boards together.
In this case I used two rough boards about 6 inches wide to create the top. I followed my normal milling process to machine the boards square and true and cut to rough length and width. I took a good look at these boards to determine their best top sides and also which edges to glue together as the center of the table top.
With Hard Maple like this, the sap wood (the wood that grew toward the outside of the tree) usually has the nicest creamy color. So, I first tried to orient the boards with the growth rings curving downward when viewed from the ends (i.e. with the sap wood facing up). I then tried different orientations of the boards shifting them slightly until I found the most pleasing transition of grain at the center seam. I settled on an orientation and glued the boards together. In the pictures you can see the steps for the glue up. I some used Parallel Jaw clamps to apply even pressure to the boards along their edges and also some Quick-Grip clamps at the ends across the center seam to keep them as even as possible while the glue dried.
After a few hours drying I unclamped the boards and scraped the glue squeeze-out away with a sharp cabinet scraper. After the dried drops of glue were removed I applied some mineral spirits to the top to see where I may have missed some glue – it’s a little difficult to see the glue on the creamy colored Maple. The mineral spirits helped to highlight any remaining dried glue. In the picture, you can see that I marked the areas with glue and any tearout from the planer with a pencil. With that done I went at the top with my #4 smoothing plane and the cabinet scraper until I had removed all traces of glue, mill marks and tearout from the top.
The next step was to mark and cut the arches on the ends of the top. As you can see in the picture, I made a simple trammel with a long piece of scrap, a pencil and a screw as a trammel point. Nothing real scientific here, I just varied the location of the screw until I obtained the arc that I was looking for. Once I had that location I simply marked the length of the top at the center line and placed the pencil point there. Then I held the screw point lightly against the top on the center line and swung an arc across each end of the top. No need for any fancy tools or jigs.
With the arcs marked on the top I set up some auxillary support at the band saw. I first contemplated creating a jig similar to the trammel to cut the arcs but, after thinking about it I felt it would be easy enough to just freehand the cuts and then clean them up on the sander. So, I went the freehand route. No problems there. With the extra support helping to hold the top I just swung it in an arc following about 1/16 of an inch outside the lines. Once the cuts were made I cleaned them up on the edge sander until I reached the marked lines.
Next up will be milling and mortising the arched aprons and assembling the base.
Tags: band saw, glue up, Modern Shaker Table, top, trammel
