Braces, Top, Wedges, & Finishing – Knock Down Trestle Table Pt. 2

(upbeat music) – [Marc] Now let's work
on the inner braces. These are totally optional,
but with two young kids who spend as much time on the table as they do at the table, I want this thing to be
as sturdy as possible. With the inner cleat clamped flush with the outside cleat, I can
bring in the support stock and cut it to length. Now keep in mind, I'm using
dominoes for this connection.

Our plans assume that
you don't have a domino and you can simply cut traditional mortars and tenon joints using
techniques that were already shown in this video. With the special
attachment for the domino, it makes quick work of
mortising the anchoring on these really small pieces, something I wouldn't even
try to do with a router. That's why we recommend
traditional integral mortis and tenon joints, or
two dowels as an alternative. Here, I've got the two inner cleats clamped together with a
small strip as a stop. I'll simply plunge both
mortises by lining up the center lines. (piano and guitar music) Now I'll mark the mortise
locations on the rail. The inner cleats get a
taper just like our legs and outer cleats. They also receive screw
holds, a nice round over, and some sanding. Now we can glue the
supports to the cleats. You don't really even need
clamping pressure here, just make sure the
support is perpendicular and the shoulder is
tight against the cleat and let the glue dry.

The rail gets a nice
curve on the bottom edge, so we'll use a thin cutoff to draw it. Clamp two blocks onto the
rail near the shoulders. Set them in from the
edge about the thickness of the bending strip. Now play with the space so that the strip is flush at the outside corner. Place a mark one inch up
at the center of the rail and bend the strip to that exact point. Now we can simply draw in the curve. I'll work back to my line with the oscillating spindle sander.

The final finessing is
done with a flexible sanding strip, which is nothing more than a thin piece of plywood
with sandpaper on one face. Now the rail gets the finishing treatment. Now it's time for those wedges. I'm starting with an eight inch long piece that will taper from 5/8ths
of an inch on one end to 3/8ths on the other. Looks they're a little bit too wide. That's better. They should slide in easily. Now tap both ends in
until the joint is secure. How far you trim them back
is completely up to you. I want mine to be shorter than the width of the legs with a staggered arrangement. I'll give the wedges
some soft, rounded ends using a round over bit. It really doesn't take much pressure for the wedges to do their job. Man, that looks cool. So now, let's move on to the tabletop. Now really, a tabletop is
just a giant panel glue-on consisting of multiple boards, so you're going to want to flatten them and make sure that
everything goes together nice and clean, but normally the jointing process on
long boards like this actually consumes a ton of thickness, so it's really important
that you find flat boards to begin with, and that
means you won't have to joint them as much and you won't
lose any more of the thickness than you absolutely have to.

So since I have five quarter stock here, my goal is to end up with at least an inch in final thickness, and
I should have no problem getting there because
like I said, step one is picking out flat boards,
and I did a pretty good job at that. So when you're at the lumber
dealer, take your time. I know they kind of give you funny looks when you do that, but try to
take your time to pick out decent flat boards and
you'll save yourself a whole lot of headaches when
you get back to the shop. I'm not being too picky
about the arrangement, here. I'll just try to cut away
as much sap wood as possible while arranging the grain
in a way that looks good to my eye. The boards are cut a few
inches over size than length. At my current depth setting,
each board takes about three to four passes to get one flat face, which still leaves me well
over an inch in thickness.

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Now some of my edges
are really out of shape, so what's the best way to joint them? I like to go with the smiley curve. By focusing pressure at the
center, we can start to produce a flat reference area
that eventually leads to a nice, straight edge. Now we can plane the boards down. At this point, I honestly
don't care what the actual thickness is, I'll just plane the boards until they all have a clean face. If that ends up above or
below an inch, that's okay. And mine came in at just over an inch. At the table saw, I'll cut the boards down to remove any flaws.

Once trimmed up, the total width should be a little bit over
the target of 38 inches, leaving me some room to joint
the table saw and edges. The jointer is set for
the lightest cut possible at this point. Once again, I'll be using
dominoes for alignment, but it's a total optional step. Biscuits, dowels, or splines
would work great here, too. You can also use nothing at all and use some long calls
to keep the glue up flat. Back in Arizona, there would be no way I could pull off this
glue up all in one shot without using a long-set glue like epoxy, but in Denver, it's a little cooler and there's a little bit
more humidity right now, so if I work quickly,
I can use regular old type on one. As you can see, I'm not
worried about getting glue into the mortises.

Some will end up in there
anyway, but I'll insert the dominoes dry. I really don't need their strength. I'm just using them to
keep the boards aligned and flat across the 38-inch width. In the interest of time,
I'm only coating one edge of each joint. If I'm generous with the glue coverage, it should work out just fine. I find the parallel clamps
can make a panel bow if you don't apply at least a few in the opposite orientation, so I add a couple extra to
the panel just for balance.

After the glue dries, mark
out the overall 68-by-38 dimensions for reference. Next, mark in one inch at each end, then use some scrap stock
or one of my favorite tools, a drawing bow, to draw
on the desired curve. The curves are cut using the jigsaw with a good, sharp blade. Stay just a bit outside of your line just in case there's some
tear out or blade wandering. The long sides are also
given a curve that comes in one inch at each corner. I'll use a strip of scrap
by clamping it in the center flush with the edge, then
clamping the outside sections in by one inch. (acoustic guitar music) To refine the edge, there
are a number of things that you can do. I like to use a rasp first to work back to my pencil line. Be sure to use the rasp perfectly vertical so that you don't induce a taper. From there, I switch to a sander. Again, keeping the tool
vertical is essential.

The sander does do a good job of not only smoothing the edge, but
making sure that there are no high or low spots. Once the curves are good to go, we can sand the panel itself to remove any glue residue from the glue up. Now it's time to add a nice round over. I'm using a tabletop round over bit, which has a nice elongated profile. And I'm actually putting this profile on the underside of the top. This should give the
piece a lighter appearance and adds a detail that I
personally find very appealing. (acoustic guitar music) Now I can give the tabletop
a thorough sanding, starting with 120 grit and
working my way up to 220. You might notice that
I always seem to have pencil marks on the surface. I use those to gauge when
I'm done with the sanding on any particular grit. I sand the profile by hand and make sure you sand with the grain when working on the ends. Now we can clip the table over and add a small round
over to the top perimeter, just enough to break the sharpness.

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And now we sand. Before the finishing starts, I'll lay down a blanket under the tabletop to help prevent getting
any dings or scratches on the surface. So at this point, I've gone
over the entire project with a little bit of 220-grit sandpaper, just to make sure that
everything is absolutely perfect, and now we're ready to apply the finish. Nothing crazy here, just
Min Wax wipe-on poly, Satin Formulation.

I don't really like super high gloss. I think satin looks a little bit better. About three to four coats
is what we're going to put on the base. For the type, I might
put an extra coat or two because that's really the
thing that's going to get the most abuse. I've got two kids, they're very young and we've got a long time
to live with this table, so they're probably going
to beat the crap out of it.

A little more protection would be good. The cool thing about the base is, everything comes apart, so
none of this is glued together. These things are so much easier to finish if we can actually finish them flat as opposed to surfaces like
this meeting at right angles. That makes things a little bit trickier and the finish quality is
going to be a little bit better too, so all right. I'm going to get a secondary container, pour this out, and we'll
start wiping on that finish. The first coat will absorb readily, so you don't need to be too
careful about how you apply it.

Just soak the surface with a brush or rag. (upbeat music) After the piece is well coated, go back and wipe off the
excess with the clean rag or paper towel. (upbeat music) The top is a little tricker
since we can only work one face at a time. You could put it up on painter's pyramids, but with a top this heavy,
it's likely to dent the wood, so I'll start with the bottoms first. I really want to build
the coats quickly here, so I'll brush on the finish, but I won't wipe off the excess. After about six to eight
hours, the bottom is dry enough to flip it over and apply
a coat to the other face. All parts of the project receive two coats with no sanding in-between.

Once the second coat is
dry, it's time to sand. The base parts are sanded
by hand with 320-grit paper. By the way, you see all that white dust? That's exactly what you want. If your sand paper is
gumming up and you're getting little finish balls instead of dust, the finish just isn't cured enough. The top is a lot more fun to sand. I can use a 400-grit sanding pad on my Random Orbit Sander to make
the job a whole lot easier. All this dust is bad for the finish, so I'll vacuum up what I
can with a brush attachment on the shop vac.

Using a shop towel soaked
in mineral spirits, I'll give the parts a quick
wipe down to make sure all the dust residue is gone. From here on out, all
coats will be wiped on using a bundle of paper shop towels. Cotton cloth works better,
but this is all I have at the moment. A quick tip to help save you finish is to put some mineral
spirits on the bundle to pre-soak it. Otherwise, it will end up
soaking up a bunch of finish that will never see the
wood and essentially, it gets wasted. Now it's a simple matter
of wiping on a consistent and even finish. Each pass should overlap
the one before it by half. Continue to add finish
to the bundle as needed in order to maintain a wet edge. After the top is completely coated, I'll go back around and coat the edges while also making sure that
we don't have any drips that migrated to the other face.

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Of course, the top will take a lot longer than the rest of the project because I can only coat
one side at a time. The base parts, however,
can be completely coated in one shot. How many coats you do from
here is totally up to you, but the process is the same every time. Personally, I like four to five coats. After the final coat cures, I like to finish the finish
by buffing the surface with mineral oil and mineral spirits. The oil acts as a lubricant
while the 400-grit sanding pad gives the surface an even matte appearance and a smoothness that's unmatched. Of course, the sander
works great on the top, but the rest of the parts
have to be done by hand. And then clean off the
oil with another rag soaked in mineral spirits. After the surface dries,
I can buff off the haze with a dry rag and our finish is complete. Now for the final assembly of the base.

(acoustic guitar music) Thanks to a suggestion
to someone on Instagram or maybe Facebook, I can't remember, I decided not to glue
in a center supports. They can still do their
job without the glue, and now we have the
added bonus of being able to flat pack this entire table. To attach the top to the base, I use Wood Whisperer Thread Taps. All we need to do is
transfer the whole locations to the underside or the top, drill each hole about
5/8th of an inch deep, then cut the threads with the tap. And by the way, if you didn't hear, we do now have thread taps available for pre-order in metric. (silly music) And now we can install the bolts. (guitar and piano music) All right, so here it is. When not in use, we will probably push it until the feet contact the bench, which actually gives us
tons of space over here, which is really, really nice. But the real test is
what it's like to get in on that side because I
know that's what Nicole is going to be worried about.

All right, here we go. Yeah, baby! Really nice leg clearance. There's nothing to hit my knees on, didn't have to move the table out, but I still have the
table just a little bit over the front edge of the bench which, usually with the kids, that's where we want it. Mateo typically sits over here and we have to pull it back
far enough so he doesn't kind of slip through
and fall off the bench. If we wanted to, you
could still pull it back a little bit further, but you don't really need to. I think there is pretty good. And right there, we still have easy access in and out, which is pretty sweet.

So I would say this was a success and the only thing left to do
is get it dirty and use it! (upbeat music) (family chatters) (upbeat music).

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