Been busy working away!

I can't believe it's been more than a month since I posted anything...that's bad.  The good news is that in the last month much progress has been made on my table.  When we got back from Portland I got right into it and so far everything has gone well.

The first step was harvesting the legs from the 12/4 maple I brought back from Vancouver before Christmas.  I chose wisely this time and found five very nice straight, rift sawn legs.  Yes the table only has four but it never hurts to have an extra.  Rift sawn means that the end grain runs 45 degrees, corner to corner.  In some places this meant having to "rotate" the cut.

Rift is important because it gives you the straight grain on all four sides, instead of having some flat graphics which would be ugly on a leg.

The aprons of the table are all veneered, with a lumber core substrate.  This means that the center core is made up of strips of poplar, glued together.  Cutting them releases tension in the wood and allows you to glue them back together in alternating directions so as to make it more stable and less likely to warp.  Next, you laminate commercial veneer (the 2nd and 4th pieces in the photo) with the grain going perpendicular  to the direction that the poplar runs.  This "cross-bands" the poplar, locking in any potential seasonal movement.  Finally, you veneer the core with your nice wood, in this case maple (the two outermost pieces in the photo).  I know this is a lot of blah, blah, blah, but the technique is quite interesting because it frees you from the limitations of solid wood construction by stabilizing it.  It's really just fancy, home-made plywood.

Above you see the applied edges for the bottom of the aprons.  The dooewls are simply to locate it  when it comes to gluing it on.  Sometimes an edge is just an edge but in this case, it will be shaped to give the chamfered profile around the bottom of the table.

 One of the best things about being at school is the different perspectives that everyone has on something.  One day , we had a guest teacher in who looked at my newly applied edges and legs and thought that the edges looked thin and the legs too heavy.  After considering this input I decided that he was right and chose to remedy the problem.  Without going into detail, the leg thickness have a very specific relationship with the apron thickness so this meant major surgery on what I thought were finished pieces.  First I ripped my nicely shaped edges off in order to later apply thicker ones but I also ended up ripping through the middle of my core (above) in order to thin them down to match the legs.  I had to cut through the middle in order to preserve my nice veneers on the outside like liposuction, you have to suck out the fat, not just lop chunks off the outside.

 

Above you see the pieces post-op with their new thicker (taller) edges. 

Sometimes it gets loud in the workshop, especially for the little woodworkers.

As this is beginning to get long, I'm going to make a promise to myself, and to you that I will post again while we're home in Calgary this weekend.  I have many more interesting photos that will show the table taking shape.