This morning for a change I am sitting not in a bar but in the new coffeeshop recently opened in my little town. When we first moved here we came from another little town in a different state. That little town had two colleges. Nothing supports a coffee house better than college students. What I referred to as “quality layabouts” who could spend the bulk of the day lounging, sucking up the free wifi and dollar refills. Here in this town in the coffeeshops have struggled. Finally though, this one has opened and seems to be doing pretty well. At least it is very busy on this fall Saturday morning. Hopefully they keep enough business through the frozen season to still be here in the spring.
I love my new table. This design is really perfect for everything I want and I am starting to think about what to build it out of. As I see it, the table is going to spend the majority of its time in the down position with the leaf folded up. So thinking about that I want to have it look it’s most attractive in this position. Building something attractive out of wood (affordably) means another trip to the Amish sawmill close to my house.
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| The mockup legs along with the wood to build the new ones. |
Initially I thought it would be cool to incorporate some birds eye maple in the design. I even thought it would be really awesome to get a couple of sheets of birds eye plywood for the ceiling. I could put a lite stain on them to bring out the grain pattern and have this beautiful ceiling. Mentioning this to The Wife, she was less excited. She is more of a painted wood girl these days. She felt like it would darken the interior to have wood up there. And, she is probably right about that. What really sealed the deal though was the price of birds eye maple plywood. Six hundred dollars a sheet!!!! Wow! I had no clue. Paint it is then, honey. Great idea!
I still wanted some figured wood someplace though and hoped my Amish friend Herman could help me out. The Wife donned some conservative (for her) clothing and off to the mill we went. I was in luck, Herman was there and I told him what I was looking for. I was thinking some quarter sawn oak for the table legs. Then some 5/4 birds eye maple for the top. He did have some some, but when we were looking at it he was telling me about some really attractive curly maple they had cut just a few days before. As it turned out, he wasn’t kidding. The birds eye stuff was ok but the curly was really quite outstanding.
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| Cutting the mortis into the table leg using and old school wood chisel. |
Amish mill prices, for just a touch over a hundred dollars I came home with enough wood to build the table including the legs and some extra oak to use as a trim piece next to the bed and a couple of other spots that could use the attractiveness or strength of oak.
The first thing I did was build the legs. I took some of 5/4 oak and cut it into some slightly under 2” strips and cut them to length plus about four inches. (The planer always munges up the ends) Then, I glued up the strips to make roughly a 2x2. The next day when the glue had dried up I ran them through the planner to square them off. I was shooting for making them 1-3/4” but I got a little carried away with the planner and made them 1-5/8” While I was, there I planed down some of the 3/4”x6” oak to a little over half an inch. These will be the cross piece supports between the two legs. I cut this wood to length, about ten inches, then marked them to build a tendon joint into the legs. The shop isn’t setup for doing easy dado work. I just gave my pieces a whole bunch of passes through the table saw to make the tendon. On the legs, because I wanted the figured wood to be prominent from two different sides, I cut one mortis into the face of the leg toward the front of the van. Then into the side of the other leg. That way the attractive face of the quarter sawn wood can be seen both from the front of the van (the kitchen) as well as the end of the table. …You know, it is the little things in life that make it worth living.
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| The mortis and tendon one side ready for assembly. |
I looked into the tool selection at the shop. I thought of maybe using a half inch router bit in a table to cut the mortis into the leg. But then, in the end, just cut them by hand with a chisel. The tool was good and sharp and they had a well balanced chisel mallet to strike it with. It didn’t really take too long and I had them cut. I glued it all up and by the next morning had my set of legs. I cut them to length and mounted them to the table. But all of this, really for the last three posts, has been buildup. With the finished table legs in place came the moment I have been waiting for almost since the beginning of the project. I could finish laying the floor!
The floor has been on hold a bit. I started out installing it, but had a realization after experiencing the effort and precision involved in building the frame around the floor vent. One of my early design ideas was to have pockets in the floor the table legs would drop into. This would keep the leg secure. I wouldn’t need a brace going down to the legs. Some time back when I was at Craigie’s house we built the wood frames for the legs. Squares built out of walnut. But my realization was, they had to be installed in *exactly* the right spot for the table legs.
A man has to understand his limitations. One of mine is if I am going to build two parts that have to fit together routinely at a high degree of precision, I pretty much have to have those two parts in my hands at the same time. But now, I have the table legs, I have the squares. The van is loaded up with the walnut flooring. There is just one thing missing…
I texted Craigie. “Hey, I’m thinking I am ready to finish installing that floor, you be around at all this week?”
A couple of days later I was parked in his driveway. The whole neighborhood has started to follow my project. So yeah, we figure a job might take a couple of hours but we spend another hour giving progress tours and answering questions. The floor certainly isn’t large. Just 26 square feet. I have some extra wood so I ran it back under the bed a couple of feet. Lots of cuts though. Most every board had to be cut at least once. We had an angle square and we had to fit around some things.
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| The pocket holes ready to be installed. |
The last time I had visited Craigie I told him what I was planning on doing around the door. Basically building around the existing step for both doors. He suggesting I just build right over the step for the secondary door. That gives me more floor space. I could actually put a chair on the opposite side of the table from the bed. That idea had taken hold by this visit. I was onboard.
Then we started getting close to the pocket holes. When I built the original squares I left the tongues on the boards, thinking I would cut the floorboards with grooves so the flooring would still lock together. Locking the pocket holes into the floor when it was all done. Craigie convinced me this was insane. The corners would have had to been hand carved with a chisel to some pretty tight tolerances. “Just use some glue!” he told me.
He was right, of course. I did the measuring and marking. He did the cutting. I did the nailing down. For most of the floor I used an air nailgun. I had a flooring gun there but mostly couldn’t use it because of the close quarters. You have to have room for the gun itself, plus room to swing the hammer that fires it. Mostly I just used some 2” nails in an 18ga pin nailer.
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| One leg pocket in position, working on getting the second one in place. |
It was fully dark when we got done. But *it* *was* *amazing*. I have something twenty six square feet, the largest single object of the project excluding the van itself. Every time I touch it, step on it, sit on it or look at it, reminds me of home. We are making it work.
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| The legs in position where they will be when attached to the table. Notice the gap around the leg bases. I left room for a thin strip of padauk trim. |
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