i made this table top 13 years ago by gluing thin bits of hardwood onto a tabletop made out of
construction lumber but unfortunately it's gotten too small for us now so i need to make a bigger
one
now face jointed and jointed on both sides i have my boards that make up enough width
and i'm going to glue them together in pairs that just barely still fit through my thickness
planer
i had to use one of my long reach clamps to get these two boards flush with each other in
the middle i much prefer that to using dowels or something like that to line them up with the glue
drying on these pieces i've been going through all of my small pieces of oak picking out stuff
that would be uh good for this sort of thing and i'm going to resaw that into five millimeter thick
strips using a really thin table saw blade i've been cutting and cutting and cutting pieces on
the table saw and i was wondering if i had enough so i arranged the pieces on this workbench which
is almost the size of the table i want to make and it looks like between this and this that i
may have enough i just squared off the ends of all of these and cut out the defective
bits and i think by now the glue is dry enough on these to run them through the thickness cleaner
i'm starting to glue on strips of wood like that and i waited to explain what i'm doing because i
don't really know what i'm doing i made all these clamping calls that actually split the force
between two points so i can more evenly apply that with fewer clamps but with the third row i'm
already running out of range with the conventional clamps and so for the next row i can only use my
long reach clamps that i only have four of and also applying glue above your work piece not a
good idea i realized this was going to take way too long with just four of these long reach clamps
so i made six more simpler long reach clamps just for this glue up i'm covering this thick
spruce plank with thin strips of hardwood like so and i have to get those all tied up against
each other so there's no gap and then once it's all glued down i'll plane that top flat
this one's done starting the next one i have to make sure
these start exactly flush here so that everything is straight and the next run lines up completely
flush
managed to get three strips on this one and one go plus the two strips i just glued on
here so i'm finally making some progress gluing these up here's gluing up the middle of the last
plank and i ran out of long reach clamps so i've been using these uh clamping calls
as sort of a lever to give me an extra three centimeters to reach that middle strip
i got my planks covered with thin pieces of oak but i also want to cover the ends
and for that i have to cut this part back so that this ends up flush with the end
just like i did for the ends of these boards i want to cut the side with another piece of oak
so i'm going to cut away a rabbet here and then insert this piece there to cover it up
i'm getting very close to joining these three pieces together now but before i do that i need
to plane these to final thickness and left a little bit extra on them in case i marred them
up you can see there's a bit of a ridge line there and i left the pieces overhanging the ends because
that way when i plane them the planar snipe will be on the off cut not on the actual table
now i'm ready to join pieces together and i've got these two and this joint needs to close along the
whole way and the problem is there's very little flex in these wide boards so these need to come
together flush along the whole way and that is a function of how precise the jointer is in this
case my homemade wooden jointer i also have to make sure this joint is flat along the whole way
and i was going to use my long reach clamps but unfortunately they're maybe two centimeters too
short to do that even my longest ones and this board does go up a little bit in the middle but
uh 20 pounds on here is enough to force that joint flat right there i'm forcing it flat just with a
little clamp on the ends here so now i'm confident i can glue at least these two together but before
i do that i'll cut the outside corners round on the bandsaw easier when it's smaller pieces
i filmed quite a bit about varnishing this table but i'll put that in a separate video
and that turned out pretty nice considering that all the hardwood on here is essentially scraps