Attaching Legs to Log Table
Lee Ohmart
Some of you may recall I posted here about drying out a pine log to use it to make a pair of cribbage tables. It ended up drying nicely with ends sealed by applying a combination of bees wax and turpentine. Only a few cracks appeared and they were relatively small. Unfortunately, blue stain appeared and an application of wood bleach did nothing to fix that. I've come to accept it as part of the project by recalling the advice I was given at the School for Furniture Craftsmanship, "It's only a defect if you say it's a defect." Now I'm attaching legs. After calculating the angles, I mad a jig to hold an electric hand drill fitted with a Forstner bit on an extension. That resulted in 4 inch holes with nice flat bottoms. I was considering two different methods of attaching the oak dowel legs. The first idea was to use a fox joint and two-part epoxy. Reading about the joint in my Modern Joinery book I find that executing this is a little tricky. The other option was to cut grooves in the end of the leg captured in the hole and again use two-part epoxy. I'm leaning towards to grooving method but open to other ideas.
