How to Build an Octagon Picnic Table | PART 1

[Music] wow what a beautiful sunday afternoon hey guys and gals welcome back to the shop well over the next couple of videos i'm going to walk you through how to build this octagon picnic table now for the longest time i've always wanted to build an octagon picnic table and i scoured the internet and scoured magazines looking for that perfect design well i found this design in woodcraft magazines volume 10 their april may issue and it was an article written by bill sands and bill sands did a great job with his table now his table was made out of cedar and wow did that thing look great when it was done my picnic table is made out of pressure treated pine which was perfect for me and it was quite inexpensive to build i think it was about 152 dollars in material and then just my time to build it i want to thank bill for doing such a great job with his article it was easy for me to follow and i hope that my videos here are easy for you guys to follow uh so with that being said let's go build a picnic table [Music] do [Music] do [Music] all right well it's very hot outside but it's a beautiful day so i thought it'd be a great time to set up outside and do some work out here now the frame parts both the seat frame parts and the table top frame parts call for 2x4 stock the lower frame parts the seat frames call for uh four 88 and three sixteenths inch uh two by fours and at the end of those two by fours it calls for the ends to be cut at 67 and a half degrees which is equivalent to 22 and a half degrees so i've got my miter saw set up on the tailgate of my truck and i'm going to go ahead and cut those four parts down to the 88 and 3 16 and then the table top frame parts that are made out of two by fours those are 48 inches long so i'm going to go ahead and cut those down and at the end of those boards they also get 22 and a half degree cuts or 67 and a half so we're going to go ahead and start with the longer ones and the measurement is going to be from the long point to the long point on the on the bevel so let's go ahead and get started [Music] now after you make your first bevel cut and you flip the wood around to make your second to cut the board to length make sure that you keep in mind the orientation of this first bevel cut you want the bevels facing the same direction on each board hmm [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now all right so now that i have my two by four parts cut down to size for the uh frame the table frame the bottom and the top you want to go ahead and cut yourself eight of these three and a half inch by three and a half inch two by four spacer blocks um and uh you need eight of those so now before i go inside to do the finish cuts uh because we're going to do kind of a half lap joint on these uh 2x4 stock here so that the leg assembly can be assembled together in a cross pattern before i go do that inside and all the assembly i want to go ahead and cut my two by six parts down to size we're going to start with the table legs the table legs are going to be cut at a 30 or 60 degree angle on each end and they're going to be cut down to a finish length of 33 and 8 inches long we need four of those and unlike the 2x4 table legs where the bevels were facing the same direction this time we're going to have them face opposite directions on the table legs and then we'll get into the seat bases and the seat legs as well i want to go ahead and get all my stock cut down to size out here before i move everything in for the finishing assembly hmm all right so as i said before on our table legs that i just cut we want four of these and they're going to be 33 and an 8 inches in length and the bevel cuts are 60 degree bevels and they're going to be running parallel with one another okay so now that i already have a bevel cut on the end of this board from the first piece that i cut off all i have to do is slide down to my 33 and an eighth inch mark line myself up foreign all right so now we're ready to cut down the seat bases and the seat bases are going to be back on a 22 and a half degree bevel on the ends of them 67.5 22 and a half on the miter saw now the bevel cuts are not going to be parallel one another they are going to be opposite you know facing basically the same direction uh and they're going to be 24 inches in length i've got a 30 degree bevel on the end of this board because i'm still using the same board that i was cutting the legs off of go ahead and make a fresh cut get my measurement and cut my four pieces down to size all right so i got my 24 inch seat base here and notice the bevel cuts are running in the same direction uh basically after you make your first cut go ahead and flip the board over and make your second cut and that's what you need length is 24 inches and we need three more of these all right so i went ahead and moved inside because i want to go ahead and start assembling the cross frame parts for both the table and the seat now i've got the table cross frame parts laid out in front of me here along with the three and a half inch by three and a half inch spacer blocks i got four of them now what i want to do is they're going to be laid out in a cross pattern and they're going to be half lapped so i need to determine the width of the notch that's going to be cut out of each set and in order to do that i'll go ahead and set two of the spacers aside and two of the cross frame parts we'll get those set aside i want to take two of the cross frame parts and i want to put the spacers in between them doesn't matter where you put them right now we just need to put them in between them so we can get the measurement of the spacing here and that's going to tell us how wide our notches have to be cut out of each of the parts so i'll go ahead and clamp those together and then i want to measure and i want to get this measurement as accurate as possible because i don't want any play in my half lap so i've got about four and nine sixteenths make sure that's consistent all the way down 4 9 16. so i'll go ahead and for now i'll write that on these parts and i'll go ahead and i'll get the measurement of the spacing between the other two just to make sure that they're the same and if they're different then i will cut them accordingly all right all right in order to cut the notches on the cross frames i went ahead and set up two stop blocks on both sides of my table that will allow me to register the notches for all four of the frame pieces and i've got a dado stack in my table saw it'll allow me to get through it a little quicker you don't have to have a dado stack you can use a chisel you know to to take out the notches you can use a skill saw you can use your table saw with a single blade i'm just going to use the dado stack because i have it so i've got everything registered and set up i've got all my marks on all of my pieces and now the only thing left to do is cut them out [Music] so [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] all right once you have all your notches cut out for your frame parts and go ahead and put it together i want to make sure that when you put your frame parts in that you're working on a flat surface you want to make sure that you have no rocking when the parts are assembled together what we want to do is we want to go ahead and space these out between those notches we want to take our spacer blocks our three and a half inch by three and a half inch spacer block we'll go ahead and get those into position on all four sides and some of them will take a little bit of persuasion well this comes in handy voila all right once all the spacer blocks are in place and everything's ready to go it's a matter of screwing it all together now we want to make sure that we pre-drill our holes and we want to countersink we're going to use three inch exterior grade screws for this and we're going to put two on each side where this notch is and then we want two screws on each face going into those spacer blocks and a good way to make sure that those screws pass each other instead of hitting each other is one of the tips that was in the plans i'm using is get yourself a three and a half inch by three and a half inch piece of scrap wood go ahead and pre-drill two holes uh at a diagonal and use that to drill your holes on one side and then flip it over and drill your holes on the other side that way the screws pass each other and they don't hit each other it's a good little tip so that's exactly what i'm going to do uh uh all right so once the lower frame is glued and assembled and everything's screwed together we want to repeat the same steps for the upper frame too the table top frame and when those two frames are together we can now move on to the seats and get the seat bases and legs and everything built up because they're going to be attaching to this larger lower frame so let's go ahead and move over to that now

Channel: Laney Shaughnessy

Views: 763,391

Keywords: A Simple Design of Ocala, Laney Shaughnessy, flatiger4u, woodworking, woodworking project, Make a, Learn woodworking, how to, how to make, how to build, woodworking how to, weekend woodworking, woodworking videos, Wood, woodworking Projects and plans, Woodworking Tips, Octagon Picnic Table, Build a picnic table, Woodcraft, Bill Sands, Woodcraft Magazine, Summer project, Picnic table, table, Fall projects, Woodworking picnic table, Clear Vue Cyclones, Digital Wood Carver

Id: DSliTVOxKlc

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 06 2014