An Interesting Table

Do all woodworkers find themselves pouring over interesting bits of furniture, investigating the various joints used whilst admiring good craftsmanship? It’s something I find myself doing more and more at antiques sales or in various houses (preferably while the owners aren’t looking).

A little while ago the family was on holiday, staying in a rented cottage which was home to a table which I thought rather interesting.

I took a few photos (unfortunately I had forgotten to pack my camera and had to rely on my phone) and a few quick measurements. This is a huge table, the top is some 108 in. by 41 in. made from 5 2 in. thick oak (I think) boards. The story from some locals is that it will be sold with the house as there’s no way to get it out, which might suggest that it was moved into the room in ‘flat-pack’ form and put together on site.  

What interested me most, however, was the way the top boards were joined together, at five points along each join in the table top there was a group of 4 visible wooden pegs. My guess is that the boards are joined using using a pegged or draw-bored ‘floating’ tenon or biscuit (I am guessing at terms here – if there is a proper technical term for this joint I’d like to hear it). I’ve seen draw-boring used for mortise and tenon joints but this is a new one for me. The pegs are also clearly square pegs driven into round holes. Overall, I expect this will give a very tight joint without any need for cramps.

The pegs from above

The pegs from below

I did draw a technical drawing of the table, I’ll apologise if the method of drawing isn’t exactly standard – I was never taught technical drawing and have come across my method mostly through intuition (and I can’t do any isometric views etc.). There were also a few measurements I forgot to take, mostly the overhang of the table, so I guessed here.  

When scanning the scale seems to have gone slightly awry but the included dimensions should suffice, and only having an A4 scanner I had to scan this in two parts which put things slightly out of line (and put a big line down the centre of the drawing). 

The Shooting Board Part 2

Having spent some time on some basic skills making the base for the shooing board, this post will tackle the remaining bits of wood. To avoid repetition, and to save the shooting board project from running on to chapters I’ll be skimming through the rest of the build picking out some key aspects, and things I learnt from, which hopefully others can too. 

I’m still struggling out the best balance for these blog entries regarding length.  I don’t want them to run on too long, nor do I want them to be so short that very little actually gets done.  I’m not sure if I’ve (m)any followers yet (I’m expecting most blogs are slow starters and this one will be no exception), but I’d welcome any opinions on the ideal blog length, what do people prefer?

But back to the matter at hand. First up was the upper level of the shooting board. This was first sawn and planed to a size of 24in. long by 4in.. It was taken from the same board as the base piece which was about 1 1/8 in. thick which had to be reduced to 3/4in. thickness. I figured this was too much to plane down, so it would need to be ‘re-sawn’. I did a bit of reading about this, which all made it sound rather challenging and suggested that my rip saw of 6 points-per-inch might be a little fine for such a job but without any obvious alternative I thought I may as well give it a shot.  

To start with I marked out the desired thickness of ¾in. on all four sides of the board using a marking gauge. I then ran a pencil along the marked lines to highlight them

Thickness marked out

I then clamped the board in the vice at an angle so that I could see and follow the line on two sides at once whilst sawing the board.

 I then started the saw cut until it touched the far corner, having sawn out a triangle shaped kerf. I then turned the board around so I could saw from the other side, guided by the previous kerf, nibbling out another triangle. From there it was just a case of turning the board back and forth taking out triangle after triangle.

Nibbling out triangles

When I was roughly half way through I turned the board round so that I could start at the other end and work towards the middle. By trying to follow the line closely I was able to get the cuts to meet up pretty cleanly at the centre.  The job wasn't nearly as hard as I was expecting. It can't have taken me more than 20 minutes and the saw seemed to cut pretty rapidly, especially when I used a two-handed grip. From there it was a simple job to clean up the surface with a plane.

Freshly re-sawn board

Next job was to sort out the stop. This was just a block of wood 5 in. long, 4 in. wide and 1 ¼ in. thick. This was then tapered down to 2 ½ in. at the front. I didn’t record this stage at all, it was a simple job of just marking a point 2 ½ in. from one edge at the front of the block and joining the dots to the back corner.

To hold the block a trench was cut in the upper board of the shooting board. One edge of the trench was marked out from the square and the angle other edge was copied from the stop using a sliding bevel. Having marked these out I cut down ¼ in. deep along these marks using a tenon saw, and a couple extra cuts in the waste were made to make it easier to chisel out later.  

I wasn’t sure how best to chisel out the waste so I sort of guessed here. I first set in a few blows from the chisel from above so, hopefully, the waste could be popped off in nice clean blocks. 

Waste sawn and scored with chisel blows

I then chiseled in from the side, staying above the marked line to take out the bulk of the waste, then carefully paring down to the line with a chisel (I found the depth of the saw cuts also helped as a guide here in trying to get a consistent depth). This was done from each side working towards the centre to avoid blow-out on the sides. This trench could have been finished off with a router plane to level out the bottom of the trench but I didn't feel it was necessary for this sort of work. 

Hogging out the waste

Paring to the line (note the saw cut that went too deep)

At the first dry-fit the trench was a tad narrow and the tapered block couldn't fit all the way to the narrow end.

A tight fit

To fix this I borrowed a side-rebate plane from my Grandpas tool-chest  to widen the trench. I actually found getting this tool to cut across the grain somewhat troublesome but got there in the end.

A Stanley No. 79 side rebate (or rabbet) plane

A Better Fit

From there I planed a slight chamfer on the upper board to allow a cavity for sawdust so that it's not affecting the run of the plane. I puzzled over this for a while as that lower corner of the board is also what stops the plane from taking shavings off the shooting board itself (as described here), in the end I made the chamfer small enough that it will still leave enough wood to act as a lip against the edge of the plane's sole. Most of my planes have about 1/4 in. between the edge of the blade and the side of the plane, so I made the chamfer just under 1/8 in. so there would still be 1/8 in. rubbing against the small bit of sole between the edge of the plane and the iron to stop the plane eating the shooting board.

The chamfer was marked out in pencil using a handy little chamfer template which holds the pencil in place to mark a consistent width which can then be planed to.

Chamfer template

Planing to the lines

From here the stop was glued and screwed in place and the protruding waste was sawn off then planed flush. It was then the work on an instant to screw the upper board to the lower, and, at last, job done.

The finished shooting board

I’ve given it a test run and the results seem pretty good. There may be room for fine tuning as the results were slightly out of square in one direction but this may be down to my technique, I'm possibly tipping the plane slightly, or even to the set of the plane itself.