{"id":8,"date":"2005-05-15T00:29:45","date_gmt":"2005-05-14T14:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=8"},"modified":"2005-06-26T18:06:01","modified_gmt":"2005-06-26T08:06:01","slug":"a-simple-garden-table","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/?p=8","title":{"rendered":"A simple garden table"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simple garden table<\/p>\n

With the timber from the old gum tree that was partly burnt during the Canberra bushfires outside the front of our house now nearly ready for use, I thought I’d better start thinking about table structures. One thing we don’t have is a garden table, so armed with a pile of pallets left over from all the rebuilding in the district I set to work to design and build a simple garden table from recycled timber. <\/p>\n

After removing the usable boards from about three pallets I had enough pieces for a top about 900mm x 800mm – perfect for a small garden table. I removed the nails from two of the better thick supporting timbers from the pallet and gave all the timbers a quick once-over through the thicknesser to see what sort of timber I had. The main uprights and most of the thin boards were redgum, while there were also some thin boards of a pale eucalypt, possibly ribbon gum. I also had about four metres of thin pine stock that I thought I might use for the frame skirting.<\/p>\n

\"Table<\/p>\n

I ripped the thick timbers down the middle with the Mk3 triton saw bench using a GMC saw, so I had four pieces that I squared off and thicknessed smooth. I then cut the legs to length at about 700mm.<\/p>\n

Now most table designs use a mortice-and-tenon joint to connect the skirting pieces to the legs. But I thought I’d try something different. After cutting the skirting to length I set them up with the legs in the cheapo dovetail jig with a view to building a frame that would use sliding dovetails instead of the traditional mortice and tenon joints. This would give me a strong structure with a rapid construction time. The result wasn’t as neat as it might have been, but it was certainly functional.<\/p>\n

\"sliding<\/p>\n

The next challenge was the table top. I wanted to practice making a table top that could also be used indoors, so this would involve edge jointing the timbers. Here I used the triton router table with a ryobi half-inch router and a straight cutter. This gave a surprisingly good and true edge to the timbers – and without the high cost (and extra space) of a dedicated planer\/jointer. <\/p>\n

Then using the biscuit jointer on the triton router table (yes you can cut biscuit slots along a long edge by simply removing the end stop) I cut four biscuit slots for each join and glued the pieces up in threes and clamped them, setting them aside to dry. <\/p>\n

\"table<\/p>\n

Once dry, the three panels of three boards would each still fit through the thicknesser, so I leveled each of the panels and brought them all to the same thickness ready for the final glue-up. By now the three panels were a bit unwieldy for the biscuit jointer so I doweled the boards together and glued them and clamped them ready for final trimming and finishing tomorrow. All in all, not a bad day’s work! I should have the table finished tomorrow with luck \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Cheers
\nJerry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simple garden table With the timber from the old gum tree that was partly burnt during the Canberra bushfires outside the front of our house now nearly ready for use, I thought I’d better start thinking about table structures. One thing we don’t have is a garden table, so armed with a pile of pallets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-woodwork"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lostbiro.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}