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The process is pretty similar from the top, so, here it is at lightning speed.
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And that my friends, is why we do what we do. And here is what I have decided to do. I got really excited when I had the thought of actually being able to use solid wood for this top and like I said before in casing you know when you got four points, that are not going to move and you put a panel in the middle, you are going to have a problem, just like a raised panel door, needs to float. That panel means to able to move. So there is really no normal way that you can encase that panel or drop the panel in here.
So, what they decided to do is use a dowel on each side to suspend that panel. They almost make it look like it is floating. And each dowel will penetrate the leg and then into the side of this center panel. So, of course at this point we have the question “Well, this is already together, how do you get this down there? You cannot exactly just drill the holes and pop it in and it will not fit. So, what I am going to do is route them. What I am going to do is actually use a straight pit, that is the same size as my dowel rod I am going to rout a straight line in each one this.
That is going to be a perfect size for this to fit in. So as you could see I have got blue tape around each leg and that is going to help avoid tear-up when the router beat pushes all the way through. And that is really the goal, is to plough each leg. So, what I need to do first is to use a little adjustable square and I usually line it up, What looks to be about center, lock it in place and then put one line on each side and what that does is give you a line or at least two lines that tell you where the center point is. And my router has a mark on it that tells exactly where the center of that beat is and once I line those up, I am good to go.
So, we need a stable way to do this, right? You can not just balance a router up on its leg and expected to work. So, what I have devised here is a little system of router rails and one of each side. You can see I cut a little hole. Just give me that extra bit of room that I need. One of this on each side and clamp it in place. So now, I have got a stable surface that I can rind the router on and I can reference my edge guide up against the side of this material here.
So, let us do it right. So now we have a very stable work surface, in which we could rest our router. The key to doing this now is your edge guide. Okay now, most routers should have this mark here. It is a mark that tells you exactly where the center of that beat is. So sometimes it is actually much easier to work in terms of center points than it is to worry about the absolute left or right of a data or a channel, in this case to groove in the leg.
Okay, this line, right there, represents the center. So all I need to do is set my edge guide at the appropriate distance. So that line is perfectly lined up and when it is, it is pretty close, tighten it down, and that is it.
So, here are our four slots, nice and clean, no going back now. Alright, so, I apologize for moving a little bit fast but I really got into this and needed to focus and that was a little hard to keep the camera running and worrying about all the stuff at the same time.
So let me catch you up real quick. First things first, I need to make a template for the top and this is the shape I decided on. Kind of a whimsical, you know, reminiscing of a flower petal, you know, they just seem to appeal to the designed that I already established of smooth, soft curves, okay. So, this is going to be balanced in between the legs. The way I want to do that—before I go there let me tell you about the template real quick.
Template was really just a matter of grabbing what I had access to make this curves. I started out with the square then I rounded each corner, believe it or not, using paint can. It was the perfect diameter that I was looking for. So, I basically put the paint cans into the corner, trace the round, then for this inside curves, I used this long compass, okay. And I actually put the work piece in the same position each time and have this at a set length and went back and forth and drew on my curves and turn the template, do the other one.
Then I rough cut everything out and I realized that these two curves did not blend as well as wanted them two. So that is for the French curve comes in. So it has to be one of my most underestimated but most used tools in the shop are a French curve. And I used that to blend these two curves together in a way that was visually appealing. There was once we had a template, you know how that goes, we have done out before. I basically get a panel of solid wood and in this case it was from a really nice board of figured maple that I have here.
Okay, jointed, glue two together and went to the router table, do the flush trim and this is what we wind up with. Okay, really nice shape, beautiful wood. Okay, so at this point, we needed to put holes in the sides because i am going to suspend the table top with the steel dowels, okay, little three inch steel dowels that were cut from a long rod. This is a 3/16th of an inch and I actually got this, pretty sure I just got this at Home Depot.
This or 3/16th hole into each center point on each side, okay. And I use my Drill Press to do that, pretty straight forward, okay. The only other thing that I needed to do in preparation for putting everything together is this top slot here, okay. This is where these dowels are going to rest. What I am going to do is actually fill those, make it look like an in-lay. I am going to fill them with a piece of material that I created; it is a sandwich of two pieces of maple and a piece of walnut in the middle.
That is actually going to take up that extra room there, cover it up and make it look like it was an inlay and it is just one of those things. A good example of how the solution to an issue or a problem that you have can sometimes turn into a design feature. And you will see what mean when it is all said and done, it is going to look like an in-lay, no one is really going to—the average person that looks at this is not going to two and two together and realize that, that actually is a result of a solution to a problem as opposed to a Design Feature that we had decided on at the very beginning of the project. It is going to be look like an in lay.
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Now, it is really going to be the person that looks that this is not going to put you in together and realized that is actually is a result of a solution to a problem we will design feature that we have decided on the very beginning on the project.
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