Now that I had the arm rail attached to the table I could
work on the last two parts of it’s router work.
I held off routing the top outside edge because I want the round over to
flow seamlessly around the corner. If
there had been any mismatch at the miter joints then I would have needed to fix
that before routing or would have had to re-route the edge. I also wanted to use the hard corner where
the two pieces came together for alignment.
Because of the change in grain direction at the corners I back each end
cut up to reduce the chance of the bit blowing the corner out. Another one of those experience lessons.
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| Backing on Corner for Routing |
For the round over I will use a ¼” radius bit. I went with a slightly larger radius here
than on other parts of the table because this edge is where people will be
leaning while playing games. I think the
larger radius will just make it a little more comfortable.
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| Routed Edge |
This is a little closer look. Here on the left you can see how the
backed-up corner prevented any blow out as the router exited the cut. The non-routed edge is the chipped one seen
before. The photo on the right is after
I had routed that edge. You can see the
chip got completely cut away when routing that edge.
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| Left, First Cut & Right Finished Corner |
With the nice soft rounded edges done so far it makes
little sense to leave a hard 90-degree point at the corners. To take care of that pointy hip-killing
corner the last bit of routing will be to round it over using a 3/16” radius
bit. This is a little tricky in that you
have to hold the router horizontal and there is very little for the router base
or the guide bearing to ride on. All
which make it easy to get out plumb/level causing a misaligned cut.
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| Routing Corner |
A couple of gentle passes with the router gets rid of the
hard edge, softening it up quite a bit and giving me a 95% completed
corner. I ended up with a little burning
from the router bit and the round over needing a little hand work to make it
smoothly flow in all three dimensions.
Both are easily take care of with a little hand sanding.
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| Left, Routed Corner & Right, Finished Corner |
This completes the work on the arm rail except for one
thing, how to lock the table top in place.
We have narrowed it down to two options first is a notch in the rail and
second is to use a removable brass locating pin. Until that is decided I will do some work on
the removable table top.
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| Top, Notch & Bottom, Pin |
A couple of weeks ago I had milled the rough sawn oak
planks into oversized straight, flat and square boards to be used for the
top. It was my hope that they would stay
straight, flat and square the way I had left them. Well, the red oak gods must be smiling at me,
after checking all 12 pieces I found that everything was as I had left
them. When I originally was surfacing
the planks I just took each one down to where the surface was 99% good but not
necessarily to a consistent thickness.
Now I did two things, sorted the pieces by thickness and selected the
face needing the most work.
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| Top Planks Sorted by Thickness |
With that done I started with the thickest piece and ran
it though surface planer cleaning up the worse looking face until it matched
the next thickest piece. Planing the
worse face both pieces were then run through the planer until they matched the
third thickest then that one was added to the batch. I kept this process up until all the pieces
were the same thickness. Here I stopped
and reviewed the faces again deciding which needed work and which were done
keeping in mind that I need one perfect face and one almost perfect face. I kept this process of making a pass through
the planer and evaluating the faces until I got what I needed. The thickness at this point is 1 3/16”.
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| Planing Setup |
With all the boards the same thickness and all but the
tiniest blemishes removed (the final surface work will remove them) I took each
of the 12 boards through a 3-step process.
First, pick the best-looking face for the exposed table top then select
the best-looking edge. Second, put the
piece in the routing jig with the best face up and the best edge out. I will run the router along this edge to get
a dead straight surface for gluing.
Third, cut the piece using my rip blade on the table saw to get an edge
parallel to the routed edge about 3/16” oversize. Here is a shot of all phases in process.
Once that was done I spent about 30 minutes shuffling all
the pieces around until I was satisfied I had the best arrangement I could get
where the grain and color flowed from one piece to the next.
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| Top Pieces Ordered for Grain & Color Flow |
The completed top consists of two removable pieces each
made up from six boards. My general plan
for assembly is to glue two boards together then add the third and finally run
them through the thickness sander. This
will flatten them and take care of any miss-match at the glue joints. I will then repeat to get two flattened
sub-assemblies then glue them together to form one completed half of the
top. My hope is for the last glue-up to
result in a perfect joint but in reality, I expect some minor differences. At least that’s the plan, we’ll see how it
actually plays out.
Next Up – Christmas Ornaments
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