Wednesday, September 19, 2012

El Cheapo Dining Table

I'm making us a new dining table, out of Douglas Fir.  I started with 2 x 10 framing lumber from Home Depot...  I found a couple in my outdoor wood pile that had been temporary supports during one of our remodeling projects.  After two years outside and a trip through the planer they looked too nice to cut up for the fascia boards I had intended them for.  So I went to the big orange store and picked out some more decent pieces of green, soaking wet framing lumber, and let them dry outside for awhile, then brought them to the basement for a couple of months.  Then I ran them all through the planer, bringing them down to 1-1/8" thick.  Today I ripped the pithy centers out of them, leaving strips of quartersawn grain ranging from 3" to 5" wide.  Now I get to joint all the edges in preparation for glue-up.  I don't have a powered jointer, so I'll use the tablesaw to even up the worst of it and then fine tune with my new Veritas jointer plane.

Ten planks ready for jointing


Design?  I don't have a design yet.  Well, it will be a trestle table, and the top will be about 7' x 3'.