Finished

This is a dining table I built for my Dad. I started with some rough cut walnut boards. Since my jointer is only 6” wide and can’t handle 8ft boards, I did most of the jointing the old fashioned way: with winding sticks.

In short, use two known-straight sticks to slowly work twist out of the board and manually plane down high spots. Eventually this got the boards straight enough that I could run them through my thickness planer to get them the rest of the way (or close enough to force into alignment)

There were a few voids I cleaned out then filled with black exoxy too. After that I put in some biscuits to help with forcing boards into alignment during the glue up.

And out came a really heavy (nearly 2” thick, almost 4’ x 8’) single piece.

From there I cut the edges straight / parallel (using my track saw) and sanded the top down. It took a number of passes filling in tiny voids with superglue to get it looking perfect.

Before starting the finishing process, the last touch I added was an undercut on each edge of the table

And with some minor sanding of the bevel, the top was just about ready for finish!

Then on to the base. Most of the base came prefabricated from etsy, though I still had to make a stretcher to run the length of the table and join everything together. Again I started with rough cut walnut:

I wanted to do a sort of mortise/tenon joint on the each end, so I left the overall stretcher too thick and slowly shaved the end down until it fit perfectly

With that it just needed some finish and I could put it together:

To get the tenon to stay in and the base to be rigid, I made sure it was pretty close to the exact right size for the opening and made a shim I could wedge in to make it super rigid / strong (even without the top attached).

After quite a few coats of water based polyurethane, the top was also now finished.

I drove this up, so before putting it in my truck I wrapped it pretty good with moving blankets.

And I think it turned out pretty well!