Turned shaker table (2 long, pix)
Darrell in Oakville
>Yet another summer holiday, and another piece inspired by Roy Underhill... Last time I made a wooden bucket, and this time it's a turned shaker table.
Roy did this on one of his shows, and as Kathy was asking for an outdoor table, I figured it was perfect. I could use the pole lathe and shaving horse a lot. The table will sit firmly on uneven ground (being three-legged). And I could use up some firewood and offcuts. Wins all round!
Instead of some complex bit of joinery like sliding dovetails or mortice and tenon joints, this table uses simple drilled holes. I guess that kinda qualifies as a M&T joint, but the intent (on my part) was to keep it simple. I dunno what Roy intended, except perhaps a turning exercise.
So I needed three skinny stick-legs, which would be fit into intersecting drilled holes in a roughly baseball bat sized column. Plus a support block and the top, which was some white pine offcuts from the toybox I built a few years ago.
I had hoped that the pine would be wide enough but Kathy thought that the 14 inch board would make too small a top. So I had to do a glue-up to get a wide enough table for her. Ended up with a 17 inch diameter top. The pine had been face jointed some time ago, but not thicknessed. It was still flat enough to use, but varied in thickness from 7/8 to 5/4! Lots of planing to get the top to an even thickness, a bit shy of 3/4 inch.
The legs are red oak, from a tree that came down in the Great Ice Storm of '98. This was the tree that mashed the bow of our canoe, which I had, in a fit of laziness, left on the floating dock instead of hauling it up the hill and tarping it down with the fishing boat. So not only did I get a bit of oak for future projects (like this table) but I also got to do some really hideous fibreglass repair work on the canoe. Gosh, that's ugly. But I digress...
I had some rough splits of oak drying in the wood storage area, so I took a few of them and cut them to length and marked approximate centres for turning.
I chucked the leg blanks in the pole lathe and quickly turned down both ends of each leg. Then I took the legs to the shaving horse, and drawknifed them close to the turned sections. Even dried out, that oak works nicely on the shaving horse. Back to the lathe with the legs and this time they were much better balanced and quite easy to turn into nice mostly-straight cylinders. I set my calipers to an arbitrary size, and turned the legs to that. Then I set the calipers to the auger bit I was going to use to bore the holes in the column and turned tenons on the tops of the legs. Dang, I wish I had brought more calipers with me. Vacation woodworking is always a chancey thing, as I can never seem to guess what tools I'll need or fit them into the limited luggage space.
The column was a chunk of ash, which I cut to "about this big". I just cut off the ends to get rid of some slight checking. I turned a cylinder, and finished off the base of the turning. Then I built a cradle like Roy did with a hole bored at an angle. I marked off the 120 degree intervals around the column's diameter and then proceeded to bore the holes. Once I had the holes done I remounted the column in the lathe and turned some swoopy bits.
Last bit of turning was the tenon to fit the hole in the support block. The block is just a 4 1/2 inch square of 2-by stock with a hole bored through the middle and a couple of countersunk screw holes for holding the top.
When I cut the top out I used a japanese carpentry saw to cut a lot of facets close to the line (forgot the bowsaw) and cleaned up with a spokeshave (didn't bring the compass plane). I used a gravity clamp to hold the top in place whilst I was sawing. She didn't mind, as it was cool down in the basement shop, and she got to critique my technique.
The table ended up 28 inches high, which may be too tall for an occasional table. I can always shorten the legs of even remount the column in the lathe and turn a new tenon on the top end and cut it back a bit. The table hasn't been glued together yet so adjustments can still be made. I figure that by the time the dry fit joints loosen to the point where they MUST be glued to stay together, she will have decided what the correct height should be. Till then, my part of the project is complete.
Kathy's next project is to finish her new table, maybe with some nice spar varnish, as it's supposed to be for outdoor use.
Darrell
Wood Hoarder, Blade Sharpener, and Occasional Tool User
