Watco and yes, but I need another coat.
(I swear it was Watkins Danish Oil but the can says Watco)
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…which led me to realise that a 10mm wide mortice is quite difficult to cut when your narrowest chisel is 13mm.
Off to the Exeter hardware store tomorrow to buy some skinny chisels.
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I cleaned up and repainted my house number. The white background may or may not glow in the dark, but at least there’s visible glitter!
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Two, four, eight, six, who do we… no wait that’s not right.
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And, of course, the Exeter hardware store had no skinny chisels. So I once again rode down to Bunnings in Launceston. In the rain. And fog. Through roadwork. Over mountains.
There are many things I like about rural life. The quality and quantity of smalltown hardware retailers is not one of them.
Anyway…
They’re joined mortices; the two tenons will have ends beveled at 45° and meet up in the middle.
Just three more to go, then I can get onto making the table buttons…
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I mentioned a long time ago I found a cool floor-lamp on the curb that I thought I would make into a monopod for shooting video with my phone.
thing is, I shoot very little video. so it just sat for years.
what I really needed was a freestanding toilet paper holder.
so:
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Still need to:
- Trim the tenons to match the height of the mortices.
- Bevel the ends of the tenons.
- Make the slots for the table buttons and make the table buttons.
- Chamfer the legs.
- Trim the tops of the legs.
- Round off all the sharp edges.
- Sand everything.
- Assemble and glue.
- Oil and varnish.
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Just an unglued loose fitup; still some work to do, but you get the idea.
Among other things, the legs are all still slightly different lengths (and rather too long in general), contributing to the slight crookedness. And the top has acquired a slight warp since I made it (although not leaky, my shed still lets in considerably more humidity than the air-conditioned hardware store and it’s been raining all week), so I need to borrow the use of Geoff’s thicknesser to level it out again.
That’ll all be fixed eventually.
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Top re-flattened, table buttons shaped and cut to length, table buttons half made. Just gotta finish those (which should only take a few minutes), cut the mini-mortices for the buttons (likewise), run a router around the edges of the tabletop and sand everything. Then I can finally assemble and glue it.
If all goes to plan, it should be together by the end of tomorrow, and taking its first coat of varnish the day after that.
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What are “table buttons?”
A method for securing a tabletop securely to its base while still allowing the wood of the top to expand and contract without warping.
Cued to the relevant bit:
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Interesting. I’ve never seen those before.
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With glue in. Finally.
I realised that I’d made the table buttons with the grain running the wrong way, so I had to redo those from scratch. And then I realised that the new versions were too big, so I had to go back and trim them. Lotsa chisel work.
It was only at the last second that I remembered that I needed to check the squareness of the aprons relative to each other as well as getting the legs square with the aprons. Could have been disastrous if I hadn’t checked; the table would have been a parallelogram instead of a rectangle.
With loosefit top:
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Thinking about what I would want if I was setting up for minimal-investment woodwork:
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Ripsaw (i.e. your standard trapezoid carpentry saw, good for long rough ripcuts), tenon saw (the rectangular ones with the reinforced spine; good for straight crosscuts), flushcut saw (flexible blade, used for cutting protrusions off level with a surface; usually a pullcut saw).
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Electric drill. Doubles as a screwdriver. Impact drivers are better at that, but we’re going basic here.
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Chisels. Doesn’t matter how cheap, chisels are chisels. 6mm to 30mm is a good size range,
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Plane. Worth spending a bit here for a decent basic Stanley rather than going ultra-cheap. It’ll take a bit to learn how to use this, but they’re brilliant once you do. You can shape and surface nearly anything with a plane.
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Some means of sharpening your plane and chisel blades. Sandpaper glued to a sheet of glass will do in a pinch.
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Electric sander. Hand sanding is a pain in the arse.
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Some sort of square. Doesn’t matter what, once you have one you can make others.
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A few clamps, including at least one with square sides that can then be clamped down by other clamps. These things are brilliant for that:
…but they’re fiddly to adjust, so you also want a couple of quick-adjust clamps.
The wooden clamp can substitute for a vice in most circumstances, however. Use another clamp to lock it in place.
I haven’t included a hammer because nails are evil outside of specialised circumstances and you can make your own mallet for whacking the chisels. You don’t need fancy woodworking rulers and pencils, go raid your kids’ schoolbags.
That’s about $300 in Oz, but you could probably do it for under $150 in the US if you’re creative. You could make most anything with that kit.
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Table finally properly assembled with buttons and everything:
…and I’ve discovered that the inside corner of the top of one of the legs is about a millimetre taller than it should be, raising that corner of the table just enough for it to be visible if you look closely.
Time to pull it apart again. Fortunately, that just means unscrewing the buttons; no glue.
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Now you need to make a third, smaller table to stand on that one.
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It’s tables all the way down
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Yes, but only periodically.
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