In good shape, I use a pencil to place some indicator marks on one side and then I joint that face. You might notice throughout this video that I am wearing a pair of gloves. Normally, I do not do wearing gloves in the shop. But, in my opinion, a pair of cold bare hands is much more dangerous than a pair of gloved warm hands. But, if you do any work with the drill press or any tool that requires close encounters with the business end of the tool, I recommend taking off the gloves.
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After one face is joined, nice and flat, I turn the leg 90 degrees and join the adjoining face. Be sure to place the previously jointed face against the fence. Three to four passes should do the trick.
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Next, I used the planner to square up the leg and make the remaining faces flat and parallel. Once the leg is square, I run it through the planner once on one side then once again on the adjacent face before lowering the cutter head for the next cut. This ensures that my leg stays square.
I used my miter saw to cut the legs to length. I start by un-touching the zero clearance or auxiliary fence using the scarp piece of plywood and double stick tape. This will ensure a tear out free cut. Before taking any measurements, I clean up one end of each leg. And then place a stop lock 29 – ¼” away from the blade. Placing the freshly cut ends against the stop lock, I cut each leg to the exact length of 29 – ¼”.
Now, you can see here, I have selected all of my boards for the table top. Everything looks good, I like the way the grain looks together and what I’d like to do is gang them up, clamp them together and then actually cut them at about 73”. I am giving myself about an extra inch just for error and things that I may confront, problems I may have.
Now, it is a good idea if you have extra long boards to move them left or right, whichever way necessary to avoid any flows, any knots or anything. I got a big knot on this side so I just push my board over a little bit more so that when I actually cut this down, we are going to get that know out of there. So, a few different ways you can approach this. Again, you can always use something like a jigsaw and just zip across and trim each piece.
You could do each piece individually on the table saw with the miter slitter a cross cut sled and if you have a sliding compound miter saw, you can just zip them off that way too. Unfortunately, I just have a 10” compound miter saw so I can actually clip this down. Each board is about 6” or 7” wide. So, one cool option, I do not know if you guides have ever seen this, this is a clamp and tool guide. It basically got a built in clamp and it has as straight edge at the same time. So, you space it for your work, set it up, it is a little bit short there. Bring this little lever down and boom, you actually got your pieces clamped together and you got a beautiful straight edge right there so you could take a circle or saw or even a jigsaw and get a nice straight cut.
The system that I prefer to use which is a nice luxury to have is FESTO circular saw system. It does not require any clamping, you essentially lay it down, this edge marks exactly where the blade is going to cut and that is what I will demonstrate right now. I use saw horses to catch the board as they fall. Well, most of the boards.
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I would like to double check and make sure I have enough width. I give myself about four extra inches. Now, when doing a wide table top like this, you are almost always going to confront this issue. That is how to join this face? How flat in the face without cutting it down to strips that are small enough to fit on our joiner. I only got a 6” joiner so if these are over 6”, I am going to waste a lot of material or I am going to have to do a lot of gluing back together when it is all set and done.
So for me, the best thing to do, when you are at the lumber store, pick the flattest, straightest boards as possible. And then, when we get them back to the shop, we can actually avoid using the joiner all together and just pass this a couple times through the planner and get a relatively flat board out of it. When we join everything together, there is a little hump here or there, we can pull it up with a clamp and if anything pursues Steven after the glue up, at that point, we can just stand everything nice and flat. And, if you are good with hand plains, you could do that method as well.
I give the boards a few passes on each side to clean up each face. Since I want the top to be as thick as possible, once each of my board has two clean faces, I stop planning. After planning, we head to the jointing. Jointing extra long boards can be pretty tricky. So I like to break up the process and make a few steps. First, I establish a nice stable edge that is pretty close to 90 degrees. One or two passes up against the fence does the trick.
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Now that I have a nice stable edge that will not rock too much, I join the board deliberately away from the fence so that I can focus on my downward pressure and balance. I find that I get a much straighter edge this way.
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And then take my last pass right up against the fence just to ensure a perfect 90 degree edge.
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I finish up, I am making sure the edge is perfectly squared. After joining, I clean up the last edge of the table’s off. I only remove the material that is required to clean up the edge. No more, no less.
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