As if revamping this website isn't project enough (thankfully, Peter Martin is in charge of this colossal effort), I just started a new furniture project, a dining table for our summer place in Canada made of local bigleaf maple. The table will be a trestle table approximately 36" x 78". The top will be a bookmatch of two slabs, possibly with a faux-waney edge treatment on the sides. I'm still waiting to get things dimensioned to see if I can use any of the natural edge.
These slabs started off at 2 1/2" thick and will finish out at 1 1/2" thick. They air dried under cover for two years before I bought them, and sat in a warm living room, on sticks, for the past 10 months, and they're finally dry enough. In this final drying period, they have cupped and twisted a small amount, which is one of the reasons I can't utilize the whole 2 1/2" thickness. So, my first chore, which I accomplished yesterday with the help of my neighbor Alfred, was to establish flat reference surfaces on the bookmatch faces; so we loaded each slab in turn on Alfred's somewhat funky band mill and sliced the thinnest piece off that would flatten the whole slab corner to corner. From here on, I'll be working with another neighbor's 24" planer to plane the slabs to finish thickness prior to gluing.
This project will be quite a test of my resourcefulness, since I don't have a shop up here and I'm forced to work around all kinds of obstacles, mostly lack of tools and equipment, workbench space, clamps, etc. -- sort of back to the primeval way of doing things. (I'm reminded of one of my first case pieces which I built -- on sawhorses, using a hand saw, a block plane and a 1" butt chisel.) So, we'll see if I can manage. It's a classic case of "making do," and a reminder that no matter where you are on the tools/skills curves, every project is a series of compromises -- some small, some bigger -- to push the ball along. I'm just happy to be doing some woodworking instead of home improvements and maintenance. ( I guess you might consider a dining table to be a home improvement.)
More posts as I start making more progress.
Ellis
Added later 18 d 22 h 07 min 30 s:
Here's a glimpse of recent progress on my dining table project. I took the slabs that we flattened on the band mill and thickness-sanded them on a friend's TimeSaver. Then we jointed the straight edges and I shot them with a #6 for a really tight glueline. Nest step will be to crown the ends and somehow work the long edges, which are currently still natural.
And here is the finished product.
