With the first leg in place I moved on to mounting the
rest of the rails to the legs. I could
have stood the legs on the floor holding them in place with one hand on each,
balance the rails in place with another hand, square the leg to the rail with a
couple more hands and with my other two hands put on the clamps so I could
drive the screws in. As near as I can
count that means I need to be at least an octopus. A better alternative is to locate, square,
clamp and screw in place the other leg while it is lying flat on the work
bench. From there I could balance the
side rails vertically, square them, attach a clamp then screw them in place
with just two hands.
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| Attaching Rails to Legs |
Next was to remove the side rails and set the first
leg/long rail/leg sub-assembly aside. I
went through the same process with the other long rail and the two previously
mounted side rails. I took the side
rails off the first sub-assembly and mounted them to the second sub-assembly
for a reason. When I go to put all the
pieces together I don’t have to be as precise as when I put it together the
first time. I can just screw the side
rails into place using the previously made holes. That way as I tighten the screws down the
rails and legs are going back exactly where they were when I had it flat on the
bench squaring everything in the process.
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| All 4 Legs Attached |
When all done this is what the leg to rail connection
looks like.
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| Leg to Rail Attachment |
With the legs and rails together I could start on the
support structure for the playing surface.
Another discussion with my son has reduced the playing surface down to
two options. The only real difference is
a thickness variation of 1 mm. Now I
could work out the final details of how the playing surface structural support,
outer rails, interior rails and the top arm rest would all tie together. Four designs and three prototypes later I
believe I have all the details worked out.
For now this is a section showing how all the components fit together. There are quite a few screws that hold the
parts together and I will get into them later as the pieces go together.
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| Table Section |
With the design done I can begin working my up from the
bottom of the structural support. Here
are the pieces that form the first layer, I will start with them.
 |
| Structural Base Layer |
First, I went through my stack of oak looking for a
couple of pieces that were the ugliest.
Since these are under the table hidden from sight. They needed to be structurally sound but do
not need to look quite as nice as the ones exposed to view. After laying out the needed pieces I cut the
boards to length and checked for a good edge.
Straight and true does not describe what I had to work with. The top part of the photo below shows the
piece in the routing jig I use to cut a straight edge and the three bottom
images show a close-up of the ends and center.
There is more than a 3/16” curve to this edge I needed to take out.
 |
| Straightening Curved Edge |
With the piece clamped in place I just had to run the
router along the edge using the square tube as a guide. Talk about a bad hair day!
 |
Once done I have a clean, straight and true edge to work
with.
 |
| Straight Edge |
Using that straight edge I cut the needed pieces about
1/8” wider than the final width. As I
was cutting the last piece I noticed that there must have been some internal
tension as the saw kerf started getting wider and wider the farther I cut
through the piece. Sure enough when I
had completed the cut I had a piece with a nice curve to it. Now seemed like a good time to quit for the
day so I set all the pieces aside to see if any of the others were going to
move around on me. The next day I found
two pieces had problems. Easy fix, since
I had cut the pieces slightly wider that the finished dimension. I just set them in the routing jig I had
used, cut a new straight edge then ripped all the parts to their final width.
 |
| Structural Support Pieces |
Next is to cut the long side pieces to their final length
and set them in place. I then marked the
ends for a notch that allows for clearance of a screw head that holds the end
rail to the leg. When I laid out the
location of these screws I could have offset this one but decided to go with a
location that gave me maximum leg to rail joint strength.
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| Structural Support & Screw Conflict |
I cut the notch on the table saw using a regular blade, a
stop block and making two passes.
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| Cutting Notch |
I could have used the dado blade to make the cut but
would have spent more time doing the setup than taking two passes to make each
of the four notches. Here is what the
notched piece looks like just set in place.
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| Finished Notch in Structural Support |
With the long rails done I could run all the pieces through
the thickness sander to clean up the scallops from the planer and give me a
smooth surface. I could have left them
as-is because these are out of sight but I would know they were rough and I
wanted to do it right. Following that I
cut the cross rails to length and temporarily clamped everything in place.
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| Base Structural Layer in Place |
You would think that assembling these pieces to form the
support structure would be next but there is one more thing to deal with before
I do that.
Next Up – Building a Flitch Beam & Installing MDF
Playing Surface Support
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