My Next Project

Laurie , the tree guy, dropped by this morning with a trailer load of silky oak for me. The deal is I make a table for him in exchange for half the wood. Sounds good to me. Not sure if it will be indoor furniture grade or something more rustic for outside. I guess the wood will tell me after I clean it up a bit.
Stay posted for a picture of the build.

Ran the plane over the silky oak this morning, it comes up a treat. I will be getting lots of plane blade sharpening practice in the near future.

Friday 1st November 2013 update.
Ok it Friday and we have roughed out a couple of pieces of the silky oak and made our selection for the table top.

Thursday 13th November 2013
More work on the silky oak table to today. We discovered the outside patio wasn't flat enough to get a true surface to Mark the slabs off, so started looking around for something more suitable. Well Gaye's kitchen floor proved to be just right, so inside with the slabs for marking.

Then off to the backyard for more flattening.

 Gaye can't help herself. When she sees a planed piece of wood .... Out comes the shellac.

Wednesday November 27th 2013.
The table is moving along. We found some legs at the Big Shed and some lovely recycled Oregon  at the Wood Zoo which I have managed to make into a suitable table base. So here we are taking over Gaye's kitchen for the dry set up. .. It's the flattest piece of floor in the house. ... The Oregon, I think is the imported variety of Douglas Fir fromNW North America. The original plank was 10" x 4 meters and cost $80. I split it for the rails and ends an made a couple of stretchers from another $10 length. I'm happy I found it. I was concerned Ithat I may not be able to find the right species to compliment the the silky oak top.

All in all the project costs to date are;
Legs $20
Fasteners $30.. A bloody rip odd. (8 mm  washers cost 0.19 c each )
Epoxy glue .. $15
Blood... A little
Sweat... Heaps
Tears.. Non to date. Oh except for the price of washers.

December 12th and the work on the table continues after a brief pause. I was concerned that the timber had not stopped moving around, especially cupping.so left it a while to settle down. I determined to glue a piece of 12mm marine ply to the back of the central plank. The purpose was two fold, 1 to bring its thickness in line with the outer slabs and 2 to help stabilise and flatten it.

Once again Gaye's kitchen floor was utilised for the glue up. In the fist pic you can see where we have  clued in some spacers to fill up the deeper saw cuts which were too deep for the planer to take out.

 In the pic below Gaye is vacuuming the red back spiders which had taken up residence in  lumps of gum I used as weights for the glue up. Hmm,, maybe I should have checked that before I brought them inside.

December 18 2013 table update. Today we slotted the edges for inserts and glued up the table top using West 105 epoxy resin and adhesive filler.