A few weeks back, a video circulated on Facebook of a woodworker building a little table made from wood in his scrap bin. Someone very special to me loved thy way it looked, and asked that I make one for her. After some googling, I was able to find the the video below, and the associated blog post.
The table I’m going to build will be similar in design and construction, but a little smaller do to the physical constraints of it’s future home. My goal is to make a pattern as random as the original, but without the gaps that Mike had an issue with. While I’m confident it can be done, I know it’s going to be a very time consuming task, as It’s essentially building an end grain cutting board one block at a time. It’s also going to be a real challenge for me, as I have a very organized/structured thought process, and thus creating a random pattern like this is dificult.
I will need to purchase some wood though, as my current collection of scraps isn’t very colorful, and I don’t have any boards big enough to make the legs. I’m going to use black Walnut for the legs, but I haven’t decided if I want to use Cedar, or Jatoba to add some red to my color palette. I’ve pulled the following species form my scrap bin Hard Maple, Purpleheart, Sapele, Peruvian Walnut, Ash, Aspen, Sycamore, Panga Panga, & Sothern Yellow Pine.
It’s been over a month since I started this project, and I have to say it’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would. Milling up all the lumber took the better part of a week. Gluing the sides together took two days, mainly because I had to do several little glue ups to make the initial side pieces. To date, this project has been a never ending marathon of gluing a block in place, and either sizing the next block or making a new sub glue up. It makes it really hard to get into a rhythm, because I have to constantly stop and wait for glue to dry.
I spent the better part of 8 hours today in the shop working on it, so rather than babbling on, I’ll just share some photos of my progress.
I used a waxed plywood jig to glue-up and size the sides.
All four sides are done, and I’ve started to fill in the middle.
After probably 35 or 40 hours of work, the scrap wood side table is finally done, and Most importantly Jillian is very happy with it. Since I still have yet more presents to make, this post is going to be pretty short, but hopefully the photos make up for the lack of words.
The two photos below, show what the top looked like over the last two days of assembly. Counter to what I thought would happen, the pace of construction actually slowed the closer i got to being done. The main reason for the slow down, was because the clamps that held the last piece in place, prevented me from either fitting or gluing up the next piece, so I lost a lot of time waiting for glue to dry. The last dozen or so pieces had to be tapered by hand, because of the cumulative error of all the individual glue-ups. The last 2 or 3 pieces where so tight I had to drive them in with a mallet, and hope a joint didn’t blow out.
almost done
The last piece
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