How to Make a SOLID WOOD TABLE Top WITHOUT Stress

hey welcome back so this is my new desktop it's solid Walnut 29 inches wide 61 inches long I glued this up from hand-picked boards flattened smoothed it out right here in my own shop I've got it oiled got it finished it's looking so good it's time to take it down to the office but before I do that I thought you might like to see how this is done so I'm here to help you understand the ins and outs of using hardwood lumber in your woodworking project so let me just take you through this every step of the way when I pick out boards for a project like this I really focus on finding ones that look interesting and look like they'll go good together but since I want to end up with a 29 inch wide panel I just know that the boards I choose need to add up to somewhere around 33 34 maybe 35 inches or so somewhere in that department and that'll give me enough margin to straighten out the edges since I'm going to be gluing these boards together it's super important that I've got good clean smooth edges there's a bunch of tools that you can use to do that but what I have is a table saw and I just throw in a dedicated ripping blade so the anatomy of this blade just makes it easier to get a nice smooth cut when I'm ripping you can use other blades but I think you're going to struggle to get great results especially when you're using harder Woods a note I wanted to make here is that I'm just trimming off the bare minimum off of these boards so they come to their maximum width sometimes that's a little sliver off of The Edge and sometimes it's an inch or two to get rid of a defect the point is I'm not trying to rip these boards in a way so they add up to exactly 29 inches going for maximum width then I'll glue the entire thing up and once that's dry I'll just take the panel and rip that to 29 inches so I've got it just right and now we're at the fun part where we arrange these boards and we plan the Masterpiece this is more art than science I just flip through the boards until the color grain and characteristics look good to me but I also try to hide the glue joints by doing it one of two ways first is by matching the edges that have straight grain because this just hides The Joint so naturally and so easily but second is actually the opposite if I've got boards with nice sweeping grain I try to match those together and you will be amazed at how well that hides the blue joint and then as a rule of thumb I take a look at the end grain to see if the growth rings are alternating from board to board in theory this helps limit how much your panel will cup over time but this is a soft rule in my book because one if I'm screwing it down to a big Hefty base kind of doesn't matter and two wood has a mind all of its own it can still do things that you're not expecting so your panel can still cup alternating the growth rings is a fine practice it's just not the ace card that you can play that's going to prevent cupping every single time so I say just take your time and just find an arrangement that just looks great to you and the last step is to make sure that we glue this up exactly the way we want to that's by striking a great big X across this and make sure the point is on one of the boards and not on one of the joints and that way it makes it really easy to just realign these boards when it's go time now that I've got a plan in place for these boards I'm going to cross cut them a little bit just to make things a little more manageable but I leave it a little bit oversized and at the end I'm going to trim this up to exactly what I need okay I'm almost ready to glue this up all I want to do is check how this joint's coming out just checking some alignment issues and see if I've got any gaps foreign I can already see I do have alignment problems I know I'm gonna have to fix those or deal with those in a moment and then there's a gap in the joint like like that long right there and I can tell that it's this board so I'm just going to re-rip this Edge real quick [Music] that's going to look a lot better yeah that came right together so all we got to do now is deal with the alignment issues I want to point out something that might not be obvious here managing one joint at a time is just a lot less stress and it's just easier to do than four five six joints all in one shot this is partly because wood glue sets up pretty quickly if I was pressed for time I would glue the entire thing at once and I would choose a glue with an extended open time to just stack the odds in my favor but I prefer the stress-free route right that's why I'm gonna do two different panels I'm going to let those dry and I'll bring those together and glue those to make the final panel usually I just grab the festival Domino to handle this job it just cuts this little slot you pop in this little guy and then you get perfectly aligned boards and just a bomb proof joint it's got a lot of uses especially in furniture making but it's a little overkill for just making table tops so I wouldn't expect you to go out and just slam a dent in your Tesla stock or your college fund just for this job as an alternative you can hit up Amazon and buy a biscuit jointer for 50 maybe 70 bucks and it's not a bad way to go either one of these work for cutting a slot to help you align your boards when joining them together [Music] all right so let me just take you through this you just apply glue to one Edge it's all you really need but just make sure it's a nice thick coating and drizzle it down into the slots for your biscuits you can see here that I laid down a piece of plastic on my workbench it should go without saying but I like to do that to keep my workbench nice and tidy quick side note I like to use Titebond dark on these dark woods especially Walnut that's because it just Blends so nicely with the wood and frankly it kind of hides your mistakes a little bit so I recommend you use this on Dark Woods here you can see that I applied the glue just to one side of the joint that's what I mean the clamps are spaced out about 12 maybe 15 inches apart and then I like to start tightening them down doing the one in the middle first and then I work my way out now when I tighten it down I'm looking for a bead of blue just to squeeze out just a little bit that tells me I've got good clamping pressure and then I've got enough glue and I call it good [Music] once I get the other clamp snugged up I go to deal with the alignment on the very ends of the boards I pull out these wood bridges that I made they span the glue joint and I attach them with a clamp on the top and on the bottom and this pulls the misaligned boards together and it just works like a charm once that's done I take a couple more clamps and I attach those across the top of the panel that way I've got them alternating one on bottom one on top one on bottom one on top and one on bottom and it's just another technique to keep this panel good and flat and then I like to clean the glue a little bit before I call it quits it's way easier to do this now than to wait until it's hardened up all the way it's pretty straightforward from here I just do the exact same thing on the second panel [Music] before I go glue these two panels together I grab my hand plane and I knock down the remaining high spots and the glue joints I'm not going to go too crazy here I'm just trying to make sure that these panels sit good and flat in the clamps for the next step that just makes it a little bit easier on me as I glue them up [Music] I think right here demonstrates why it's so beneficial to glue up just one joint at a time you can see it's just easier to manage [Music] now we break this panel out of the clamps and I just grab a hand plane to smooth out the hardened epoxy spots that I did for filling in the knots and the cracks and all that cool stuff you'll do now flattening a solid wide tabletop does sound like some tough work doesn't it but using some biscuits or dominoes for alignment really going to help you out and then scraping up that glue before it hardens just gets you ahead of the game and then from there you don't really need anything fancy I'm just going to use a hardware store belt sander and an 80 grit belt I mean it's going to take some time it's going to take some patience but it'll do the job just fine and then I Mark a bunch of lines down the entire length of this and that's just there for me to help track my progress as I sand this thing good and smooth and I'll use a crayon or a marker to just Mark the high spots so I know where they're at all right so I'm just working my way across this panel by holding the belt sander at like a 45 degree angle or so and just making overlapping passes and then I check my work periodically with the straight edge just to see what needs my attention now I just need to trim this panel down to size and this can be a really puzzling thing if you're like me and you don't have a track saw and the panel is just way too big to cut down on your table saw now the trick here is to rough cut your length with a jigsaw and then come back with a straight edge in your router and just flush trim it smooth [Music] [Music] [Music] now on your quest to learn more about making solid wood table tops you're going to come across the technique of adding big Hefty steel c channel to the bottom side the concept is that it's just super rigid so if and when your panel wants to cup or twist or distort this is going to kind of hold it in place and potentially just keep the problems at a minimum since the base of my desk is a framework of legs aprons and cross members adding c channel is kind of Superfluous because the bass plays the same role it's still going to be able to float and expand and contract over time that's always important but I just don't need the c channel you'd want to use c channel those projects like great big slabs where you're just going to attach legs to either end and there's not really a framework in place to just keep things under control or something like the lid of a blanket chest those are good uses for C channels on my desktop project it's just not necessary this time around foreign [Music] there you go making a tabletop isn't hard at all you don't need a big planner you don't need a big jointer you really don't even need fancy tools to pull this off and between you and me if you need to break out a great big long level just to see the imperfections in your tabletop you're probably the only one who's ever going to notice anyway and this is a win all right so my name is Mark I'm from Woodworkers Source we sell hardwood lumber to people just like you we ship it right to your door if you want to so you can come visit us any one of our three stores in Arizona or visit our website woodworkersource.com we'd love to see you we'd love to help you out come visit us I'll see you in the next one thanks for watching appreciate it [Music]

Channel: Woodworkers Source

Views: 197,352

Keywords: woodworking, lumber

Id: C-dQJrL5SEQ

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023