G'day, welcome to Downunder Woodworks. Today's video is part one in
what will probably be a two-part series of how I upgraded our existing dining table.
It's a table that I made about 20 years ago so it was due for a bit of an upgrade.
In this video i'm going to be building a new set of legs for it.
Before we get into the build I'll show a grab of an earlier video of mine where I
actually talk about the old table so you can see what it looked like before the upgrade.
I thought this would be a really good opportunity to have a very quick look
at this dining room table of ours.
The base of the table is, all the components are made of old timber
fence posts. The top of the table was actually a gate of the side of a house.
I picked it up from a demo yard and yeah it's just got so much character and
the timbers on it had dried up so much over the years that these gaps......
It was good to have a project where I could use some of
my huge supply of reclaimed Australian hardwood.
There's a lot of projects in that rack.
Once I'd picked out some promising looking boards I gave them a quick skip
plane to get an idea of their colour and these ones were all pretty similar.
Next I trimmed them up and cut them to rough length.
I was really impressed with this circular saw.
You can hear it struggling a little cutting through these super hard timbers
but I managed to trim all boards with the one battery.
So this is what I ended up with. The boards were cut much longer than I
needed and I did that so that once they were all milled up I could have a better
look at them and pick out the best sections of each length.
These boards were really flat and straight as you can see here which was a real
bonus because they didn't need a lot of milling and I wanted to maintain as much
thickness as I could and it also meant less strain and wear and tear on my machines.
So all the boards went through the usual milling processes.
I have to say when working with this super tough old hardwood
you need to take things a little slower but it's definitely worth it.
First I flattened one face on the jointer
and then flattened one edge 90 degrees to that face.
Then all the boards went through the thicknesser to flatten the second face
parallel to the first and to bring them all down to the same thickness.
Then on the table saw with the jointed edge against the fence I ripped all the
boards to their final width of around 90 mm.
Last step in the process was another pass through the thicknesser
on their edge to remove any saw blade marks.
After the boards were all milled up they were then cut to final length using the
cross cut sled on the table saw.
At this stage the ends were all cut at right angles.
The legs are going to be a trapezoid shape and all the ends will be later cut
at five degrees.
The joinery method for the legs was DIY floating tenons.
The mortises were cut using the router and a half inch spiral up cut bit.
The mortises in the top and bottom plates or rails were cut in the ends of the
pieces using my workbench and the top of the vice jaws as a reference surface.
These mortises were plunged straight down into the ends of the pieces.
Each joint had two floating tenons.
After cutting the mortises I then cut the ends of all the boards
at 5 degrees or is that 85 degrees? You know what I mean
I've said it before how easy it is to cut angles or mitres the wrong way
around so I always mark the direction of the cut.
I set up this simple jig nailed to the jaw of my vice which used the top of the
jaws and the bench as the reference surface.
The uprights for the legs needed to have their mortises cut at five degrees on the inside
face at both ends so they'd line up with the mortises on the top and bottom rails.
I clamped an off cut of MDF to my bench to act as a stop so the mortises were cut
at the right distance from the end of each piece and then it was basically the same
process again of plunging straight down with the router to cut the mortises.
Now this is where I should have taken my own advice and marked the direction of
the mortises on each piece because i just flipped each board around and cut the
mortises at the other end using the same jig but this ended up with them all cut
in the wrong direction.
My only solution was to plug the mortises and re-cut them.
I thought about cutting the legs down and redoing them but that would have affected
the height of the table and I just didn't feel like milling up four new boards.
I let the plugs fully set for a day and then made another simple jig to cut the
mortises in the right direction this time and it actually worked out really well.
Luckily none of the joinery is seen when the legs are assembled.
Anyone who's worked with old Aussie hardwood knows how sharp and brittle the surface grain
can be so I sealed the grain with a thinned out mix of oil-based clear varnish and turps.
Once that had dried I sanded most of the finish off, leaving only what had soaked into the grain.
To assemble the legs together I was thinking about how to easily clamp them
considering the 5 degree angle of the sides.
We all know how stressful glue ups can be.
What I decided to do was nail some timbers to my bench top at the right angle
to act as a clamping guide which worked out really well.
Time to finally get these legs together.
As you can see, when I cut those mortises I had my router set to the loose setting
which made for a stress free glue up.
The tenons were made by cutting strips of oak to the appropriate size and
rounding over the edges on the router table.
I'll leave a link below to a video where you can see how I make them.
I used some F-clamps to hold the leg against the gluing guides
which held everything nicely in position while the glue dried
and here's a close-up of the leg assembly clamped to those strips on my benchtop.
These legs were way heavier than they look thanks to this old hardwood being so dense.
Very happy with how they turned out.
I gave the legs a real good sanding up to 180 grit with the orbital sander and then
finished them off by hand sanding with the grain to get rid of any swirl marks.
Last thing to do was to drill the holes for the mounting screws.
To allow for movement I drilled a shallow recess with a 25 mm forstner bit
for the head of the screws which were 15mm diameter
and then drilled an eight mm hole all the way through for the screws
which were six mm diameter.
Well the legs are looking great and I think they're going to be a real modern
upgrade for this table. The second video will be the actual tabletop and the upgrades
that I do to that so make sure you look out for that video.
If you don't want to miss out on seeing that video make sure you subscribe to the channel
and hit that notification bell. If you want to know what I'm up to in between
videos as always you can follow me on instagram
but until the next one, you guys all have a great day.
you