While waiting on the drawer slides, I started work on the
top. It starts out with one of the
original planks. Here are the two
halves, they give me plenty of material to make the top. The bottom photo is of the right side of the
two boards shown in the top photo. In it
you can see how well the grain is going to match up.
After cutting to rough length, I spent some time playing
with the boards to get the best-looking grain flow across it. This is the best arrangement that I could
come up with and it looks good to me.
Total width needed is a bit less than 16”. Right now, the stack is close to 18” wide so
there is some room to bring the boards to equal width and trim out or at least
reduce some things like the light-colored band at the first joint from the bottom.
Nothing has been done with these planks since they had been surfaced and the edges squared up. When checking them after rough cutting to length all of them had a little bit of bow along their length as the photos below show. It’s not a lot, about 1/16” along their 24” length. A jointer would make quick work of flattening but I don’t have one. The other alternative is to use a hand plane or the thickness sander. Because the boards meet the following criteria, they can be flattened using the thickness sander which is both easier and faster than the plane.
- The pieces are thick enough to resist the downward pressure of the sander’s rollers so they remain bowed. Too thin and the rollers flatten the board during its run through the sander which does nothing to remove the bow.
- They are short enough for almost the full length of the board to be in contact with the sander’s drive belt. Since the sander’s platen plus infeed and outfeed tables only register the length of the board going across them the sander does not “see” the bow in a long board. I once had a small jointer with about a 30” long bed and it was useless in trying to straighten edges of long boards for gluing together because of that.
The process to flatten the boards begins with selecting
the crown side and crosshatching it as the first side to flatten. The crown goes up so the board’s end corners
are the contact points on the sander’s base with the drum sanding of the top. If the crown went down the board would pivot
following the curve as it passes through the sander. The top photo shows the result after a couple
of passes through the sander loaded with 36 grit paper. The center is flat since the crosshatching is
gone but still visible at the ends. The
bottom photo is a closer look. Once all
the crosshatching is gone the piece is flipped and the flattening steps
repeated.
For the top there are also a couple of end pieces called
breadboards. I don’t really know why but
it may be because they helped keep bread boards flat??? There are a lot of ways to attach them to the
top. Right now, the plan is to use a
long tenon on the center part of the top with matching grooves in the
breadboards along with wood dowels installed from the bottom. A set of ebonized inlaid pieces are added to
strengthen the joint. 
The breadboards come from the remaining length of one of
the boards used to make the top.
After the four pieces that make up the center section of
the top set for a couple of days, I checked to make sure they are still
straight and flat. They were so after a
skim cut of the edges, I started gluing them together. Here is a photo of one of the initial two
board glue-ups.
The next day after removing the clamps the surfaces were
crosshatched then run though the thickness sander to remove any little
variances in the surface. Below are the
two-initial glue-ups flattened.
The previous evening the drawer slides arrived so today I
am going to install them. They are
two-piece, side mounted, ball bearing, full extension ones with a 100-pound
limit. The weight limit is overkill but
I like this kind of slide since they work so easy and will last practically
forever. The photo below shows the table
on its left side with the front at the right.
The cabinet mounted half of the slide is in place. For spacing a couple of shims are used so
it’s easy to get both slides mounted in the same location. One mounting screw on it right has already
been installed with one more on the left to go.
The hole is drilled with a self-centering bit assembly mounted in the
drill. In use it will center the hole in
the slot.
Here is the left side of the drawer with the half of the
slide that gets attached to it. It’s
located by setting the drawer in place then marking the center of the cabinet
mounted slide half on the drawer. The
center of the drawer half of the slide is centered on that line and screwed in
place. The vertical slots are used to
make any fine height adjustments later on.
Below is the drawer mounted in place. It still needs the false front with matching
veneer but otherwise is built. It’s a
little hard to tell from the photo but the drawer is recessed into the table so when the
false front gets added its face will align with the small panels on either side
of the drawer. 
The next step is to rip a piece of oak to ½” thick then cut it to rough width and length. That’s all been done before so need to go through it again. However, when getting ready to glue the leopardwood veneer on I ran into a problem. Earlier when making the veneered panels a leopardwood/cedar one was made for the drawer front and that was an error. I should have left the veneer piece for the drawer front alone and not glued it to the cedar backing. Now I have a grain matched panel specifically for the drawer front since it’s cut from the same piece as the side panels but with cedar backing that I don’t need. That’s a problem I will have to sleep on.
Next Up – Drawer False Front & Plugs Part 1
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