Woodworking without pain - the home straight

Well I'm nearly there - just coming around the final bend and into the home straight. The table is now structurally complete and assembled (and usable!). All that remains to be done is to apply some protection against the weather. I bought a litre of 'Feast and Watson' outdoor furniture oil 'Hardwood' tinge and will apply a few coats of that sometime soon.

Anyway - here it is in all its glory.

A design requirement was that our heavy (Chinese manufactured) chairs should fit in between the legs at the end and underneath the rails when not in use.

The top is secured to the rails by 20 brass 12g x 60mm wood screws (7 for each end piece and 6 for the centre piece) which go in through the bottom of the rails through countersunk and pilot drilled holes into the top. There should be a little side-play in the rail part of each screw hole to allow for movement of the table top due to humidity.

I also cut a circular whole in the top to accommodate our 3-metre wide umbrella. This was achieved by using a hole-saw to cut a 3-inch hole down about 1 centimetre into the top (not the casual mixing of imperial and metric measurements). I then chiselled out the top 1-cm of the hole in order to use the resulting circular hole with the template guide on the router to cut the hole right down through the top. This worked well although I inadvertently let the template skip out of the hole and did a bit of a gouge out on one side. It isn't a big deal and will serve as a permanent reminder for me to be more careful in future. After cutting out the hole I used a roundover bit on both the top and bottom.


The picture above shows the three chairs and the cast-iron umbrella base in place ready for use. Note the faux rails protruding to the outside of each table leg to give the impression that the rails do, in fact, go right through the legs.

Because the top is made up from three pieces of yellow box benchtop, I decided that I would make a feature of the joints between them rather than butting them up tightly against each other. To do this I used the router to take off a 45degree arris along the adjacent edges of each of the three pieces and allow a gap of between 1 and 2mm to allow rainwater to drain through rather than ponding. It is also a little unusual in that the laminations run across the table rather than along the length as is more usual. Had I been more adventurous I might have gone for a diagonal arrangement to add interest.

Finally, although it is probably worth $1000+ due to the material value and the labour, I don't think it will be easy to steal (this is not a challenge). Fully assembled I can barely lift one side off the ground and it will undoubtedly become heavier when oiled.

All up it has taken me about 5 months of very part-time work with the occassional excursion (building a router table for example) along the way. That may seem like a long time to work on a project but our current dining-room table took me about 6 years to complete. That, however, is a whole other story.