Good weekend

I’m sitting in the living room, listening to some music.  Jenny’s taking a shower.  One cat is relaxing with her blanket on the couch.  The other cat is curled up next to me, kneading a little corner of the afghan I’m using.  It’s been a good weekend.  I spent most of yesterday in the shop, working on building a router table.  Having the right tools makes all the difference.  I surfaced the poplar that I’m using for the frame for my table months ago, then moved it to the basement.  I didn’t have a jointer, and knew that I was going to have to build a new jointing sled for the table saw to joint one side of all of the boards before I could rip them to the right size.  I wasn’t comfortable doing that on the little saw that I had at the time, so the boards sat on a shelf. 

Now, with the jointer and a decent table saw, the rest of this process went quickly.  I had all of the pieces ripped and crosscut to final size quickly, and was ready to start working on the joinery.  The frame is four legs (1-1/8″ x 2″), joined by rails at the top and bottom.  The top rails use sliding dovetails to join to the legs, and the bottom rails are simple mortise and tenon.  To stiffen and support the top, there are two internal framing members that cross the 24″ x 24″ open space where the top will be.  These two members also use a simple mortise and tenon to join to the side rails.  The original plan called for these to also be sliding dovetails, but without a router table, I didn’t have a good, safe way to cut the dovetail slots, so I modified the plan to use regular mortise and tenon joinery.  The purpose of those two members is to support the top, not to hold the frame together, so I think that this should be sufficient.  They shouldn’t be subject to a whole lot of stress, either.  I had built a jig to help to cut the dovetail slots in the legs and the dovetail tenons on the rails for the rest of the frame, and that worked quite well.  I had to play with it a bit to get the tenon size fine-tuned, but it worked well once it was set up. 

I finished cutting the rest of the joinery today, and dry-fit everything to make sure that it all worked.  Glue-up will be in two stages, first gluing together the two sides, then gluing those sides to one another.  I don’t have enough clamps to do it all at once, so this will have to suffice.  I actually went to start gluing things together tonight, then realized that I planned to enclose three sides of the table with 1/4″ plywood panels fit into grooves in the frame members.  This is to help keep down on dust being thrown around underneath the table, and helps to add a little mass to the table so that it doesn’t want to slide around on me.  Remembering this, I stopped what I was getting ready to do, and cut the grooves for the plywood panels.  I’ll have to get the plywood this week. 

It’s been a good weekend.  I’ve had some decisions to think over this week, and this weekend gave me some good time to think more on those.  The next several months should be interesting.  It’s been great to just relax with Jenny and spend time in the house without having to work on the house.  🙂 

jonathan