How To Build a Round Trestle Table / DIY Trestle Table

[Music] this video was sponsored by woodpeckers tools because they're flippin awesome hey you want to you want to learn how to build a table well you should watch the video you're already watching the video you should keep watching the video for this project you will need approximately 45 board feet of five quarter white oak now any good piece of furniture starts with first selecting your lumber sure you could go down to the lumber store and grab some wood willy-nilly off the lumber rack but your end results not going to be that great you want to handpick each piece that's gonna go into your final product making sure to eliminate any pieces that are bowed corkscrewed or have any undesirable features when it comes to building any table one of the most time-consuming parts is going to be your tabletop itself is it for multiple reasons number one you have to glue the whole thing together and then let it sit and then there's a lot of finishing work that goes into that top to make it look good so I like to start building my table from the top down so obviously the first thing they have to do is get the wood to a point that we can glue it all together in a slab that will make up our top so once we cut each piece down on our chop saw roughly two lengths we run them all through our Grizzly jointer to get a straight edge after we've joined each board we take him over to our table saw and we cut them down to get our desired width with our length and width figured out it's time to finalize our thickness so we take all of our pieces and we run them through our planer to try and get a uniformity across the board now the thickness here doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent consistent thickness means consistent glue up and a consistent glue up means less cussing and self degradation as you orient your boards for glue up you want to pay close attention to the growth patterns of each board each growth pattern should be alternated back and forth across the top of your slab this will help prevent any warping or cupping across your surface we do your final glue up because we're doing a round top for this pedestal table we have to get all of our boards lined up and in order and figure out exactly where our circle will land before we do any of our joinery will be using Festool dominoes to join this piece and the last thing we want to do is cut one of them at half when drawing your circle simple is better you don't have to have an exactly perfect circle at this point just a rough idea of where that circle will land so that you can place your dominoes before it blew up so we simply grabbed our 36 inch woodpecker rule placed it on our center pivot and held a pencil at our 24 inch mark this will give us a 48 inch circle to use as a reference as we lay out our Domino's and prevent us from running into any of those dominoes when we cut out our final circle with all of our pieces drilled out and ready for Domino's it's time to watch me do something very very stupid and that is attempt to glue up this 48 by 48 oak slab entirely by myself here's a friendly word of advice before you start gluing up your slab go ask a friend husband wife family member street youth to come and help you not only will it be much less stressful it'll be much easier and you won't look like a doofus like myself look I'm I'm up on a step store and literally using a step stool to try and glue this up shameful I am embarrassed with myself [Music] but whether it's skill or more likely just dumb luck and managed to get this lab together clamped and glued now it's time to start on our base starting our base looks very much like starting the top of our table in that we have to first start by cutting all of our base pieces to length now we'll be starting with the center support of our pedestal base we have to glue up a solid block of white oak of which we can build off the rest of our pedestal glue them all together you say why don't you just get one big piece of wood for your center support now this does seem like an easy logical thing to do but this all comes down to lumber availability if you can find a consistent source of 16 quarter white oak solid pieces please let me know in the comments I would love to get on that train but the nice thing about woodworking if they don't have it you can make it now I'm gonna try and show this build in the way that I actually do it which means I jump back and forth from my base to my top depending on what's ready to work I just glued up my base pedestal but my top is ready to go so I'm gonna jump over to my top and start working on cutting out my circle now at this point we have a five quarter thick white oak top but as you might have noticed in the first shot of the table at the beginning of the video it looked more like ten quarter now we didn't want to spend the money on ten quarter white oak to do this entire top but we wanted that thickness so before you cut out your circle you need to build up that perimeter thickness with another layer of five quarter white oak now when doing this it is important to account for seasonal wood movement you want each individual piece to be floating independent from each other you'll also find it much easier to glue each individual piece on the bottom if you first trim off any excess wood that's just getting in your way once our slab is trimmed down you can start gluing on those pieces now like I said you want them to be independently floating from one another so you're just gluing each piece to the tabletop but not to one another to cut our circle we'll be using the router circle jig from Rockler I have used this jig a number of times and I can attest that it does in fact cut a circle so with our router jig installed and our router securely fastened it's time to spin some circles up in this heezy fo sheezy [Music] and just like that you're ugly mismatched of glued together pieces has become a perfect circle which just goes to show that sometimes you have to cut corners in order to do things right with our circle cut out it's time to start making it all nice looking so I like to go over the entire top of a hand plane to get rid of any ridges glue lines or ugly imperfections I follow that up with the palm sander both on the top and around my perimeter to get rid of any marks left behind by my router bit then finally I like to go over the entire thing by hands to get rid of any swirl marks left behind by my orbital sander and with that my top is done and ready to finish I'll set it aside and get back to work on my base once our glue has had sufficient time to dry we can remove our clamps and begin to square up our Center pedestal the easiest and most effective way to do this is by simply running it through your joining if you don't have a jointer well you can kind of use your table saw but I'm not going to show you how it gets a little sketchy and I don't want to be responsible for you losing a finger now when you're milling up your Center posts you want to make sure that each side is exactly equal to the other this will come in very handy when it comes to cutting our support pieces but with our center support done you can set that aside and we will start constructing our top and bottom cross braces each one of these cross braces will be hooked together with a classic half lap joint so in order to cut these out we first have to find the center of each one of our pieces using an offcut from one of my other cross pieces I mark out exactly where I need to remove material in order to make my half lap joint now there are a couple of ways that I could remove the material for this joint one of the easiest would be to use a data stack on the table saw but when I only have to cut a few pieces I like to use the trenching feature on my capex miter saw I find that it goes fairly quickly and I can make minor adjustments when it comes to fitting my pieces together with your half laps cut it's time to fit your board your ultimate goal is a nice snug fit I employ the same goal when I'm shopping for pants underwear socks once you're happy with your fit you can glue your joints together and clamp them down once your joints are good and dry it's time to attach your Center pedestal to your cross pieces you start by marking out the center of your cross piece and tracing where your Center pedestal will fall on that piece for this particular base we'll be attaching our Center pedestal with screws so we'll drill out some corresponding holes on each cross piece so that those screws can be countersunk up into our pedestal and not interfere with the bottom or top of the table if there's one thing you should know about me it's that I'll find any and every excuse to make a jig in this case I wanted to make a simple jig in order to perfectly determine the center of my cross piece and place my Center pedestal for this I'm simply using some scrap plywood and some instant bond adhesive from Titebond I find that the corresponding glue and accelerator works wonders when you need to throw a quick jig together you simply apply the glue to one surface the accelerator to the other press down and voila you instantly have two pieces of wood that are hooked together and ready to use next I take those pieces of scrap plywood that I just glued together making sure they're snug both towards the middle and to the left and right of my piece then I clamp them down so they can't move around on it next I take my Center pedestal and again I find exactly where it should be located on the corresponding traced out marks I put down previously once I'm happy with its location i lock it in place with another piece of scrap this time I fasten it down with a 16 gauge Brad now and I repeat the same process on the other side finally I apply two more pieces of scrap ply holding the center pedestal in from the final direction what this leaves me with is a very functional and very simple jig that allows me to perfectly find the center of each one of my cross pieces with my jig made it's now time to attach all of my pieces together you can of course do this without the jig simply by holding your cross piece in place and screwing it together however the jig makes it so simple and easy that I highly recommend taking the time to make one and because we simply use plywood scrap once you're all done you can just break the jig apart and you're good to go next it's time to make our brace pieces attach them to the pedestal and start making this look like a true trestle style table I start by first cutting a piece of scrap wood that I can use as a guide to determine the length of each one of my side supports once I have my guide cut and sized exactly how I like it I then use it to trace out my corresponding brace pieces and cut them accordingly for this particular project we will be attaching our brace pieces using screws in order to hide our screws we will be countersinking a hole at the end of each brace piece and covering up our screw with a plug in order to make sure we drill every hole exactly the same I created another jig that will allow us to mark each and every board now if you have to do something repetitive like Mark boards over and over again I like to make it a little bit more and in this case I decided to make my jig look like Adolf Hitler that way as I mark each board I could also imagine I'm poking him in the eyes over and over and over again but I digress with all of our boards marked it's now time to drill them out to accept our screws and eventually our concealing plugs with all of your pieces now cut drilled and ready for assembly you will next want to clean off each piece with a tack cloth to remove any dust or debris that may interfere with your finishing process and then you'll want to go ahead and pre finish all of your pieces before attaching them together to finish this particular table will be using rubio monocoat two-part hardener and oil in cotton white we love using rubio monocoat on white oak especially the cotton white color as it leaves the white oak looking very natural and untouched not to mention it is an absolute breeze to apply because we are pre finishing these pieces before we finish the entire piece you only need to finish these sections of the wood that you will not be able to get to once the piece is assembled in this case we are only finishing the bottom portion of each one of our brace pieces once we have all of our brace pieces finished we will then move on to our pedestal base and do the same thing there I always try and do things in an order that will be most productive so while you have your finish already made up and your gloves on you might as well finish your table top as well [Music] and with our pre-finishing behind us it is finally time to transform the lowly caterpillar which is our pedestal base into a beautiful and magnificent butterfly which will be our trestle base it's important to note that when attaching your brace pieces you want to attach them using screws pre-drilled but no glue we simply do this to allow for seasonal movement as the wood will want to move throughout the year and well if you made it through the bottom half you should be able to make it through the top so with all of our brace pieces attached it's now time to cover up our screws using some pre-drilled plugs now when drilling your plugs you want to make sure that you select a piece of wood as similar to your brace pieces as possible as this will give you the best concealment when you insert your plugs once you have successfully plugged up every hole you can go back with a flush cut saw and cut them smooth to each brace this is another reason why we only pre finished the bottom of each piece as you now must go back and sand down any marks you made by your saw as well as each one and finally to level out our base we attach four simple wooden feet to the bottom of the structure and we call it good and with that we are ready to apply the rest of our finish to our base as you can see this final coat of finish is made exponentially easier due to the fact that we pre finished all of our brace pieces and our pedestal base just don't forget to finish those feet last but not least you need to drill four holes on the underside of the intestine base these holes will allow for you to attach the base to the top using four screws at this point you should be able to step back and see something that somewhat resembles a round trestle table if you are currently staring at a different piece of furniture or a lowly pile of wood I hate to be the bearer of bad news but apparently you are no good at woodworking and you might want to choose a different career and/or hobby or go back and watch this video again lord knows we could use the views [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Bourbon Moth Woodworking

Views: 216,929

Rating: 4.9475346 out of 5

Keywords: table, dining table, round dining table, oak dinng table, trestle table, diy, how to cut a circle, woodworking, pedestal table, kitchen table, how to build a table, how to make a dining table, diy dining table, diy round dining table, how to make a round dining table, how to make a trestle base, trestle base table, how to make an oak dining table, easy dining table, easy kitchen table, diy kitchen table, how to finish oak, best finish for oak, best wood finish, shop tips, hack

Id: icoAZh5I86M

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 17 2018