Day Nine-thirty-four: tables for two

A new month brings new projects.

In the studio the artist has been making do for many years with a couple of ho-hum work tables. They're fine, they get the job done, but they're nothing special and certainly don't help complete a room that is in the process of a facelift. (see here and here for a refresher) What to do, what to do? How about make a couple new ones to order? We thought we'd give it a try.

First we had to figure out the exact dimensions, which turned out to be 19.5 x 46.5 and 30 x 46.5. This would let the artist array them alongside the sewing table for a nice 46.5-inch square. Then we needed to decide on a style. After some searching around and looking at pictures, we decided to use this plan as our base and make a couple modifications. Then we needed a little lumber from The Depot. The 2x4s will be the legs, the 1x2s on the right are for the inner shell, the 1x6s are a decorative cover over the 1x2s, and the 1x10s on the bottom left will be the tops.

Then we had to fire up the saws to get everything down to size. For the top that meant ripping the boards lengthwise so that each of the two tops (19.5 and 30 inches) would be three equal sized boards wide.

With everything cut to size we could bring the pieces inside to do the staining and sealing to get the right color to go with the dark sewing table. This is Round One:

Here are all the side panels and tops in their natural state.

Here's everything with an initial coat. A couple more of stain and then sealer and we were in business.

With this going on we worked in parallel out in the garage to make the inner frame out of the 1x2s. This process consisted of a lot of cutting, clamping, and precision drilling because we wanted to use dowel rods and glue to hold everything together. Here's our setup with a drilling guide that works like a poor man's drill press.

Here's the result.

We also experimented with using the other style of corner clamp and freehand drilling.

For all the extra bits of dowel rods we used the dremel to saw them off flush like so.

Here's the frame for the smaller of the two tables all glued, doweled, and clamped.

Lather, rinse, repeat and we had both frames ready to attach the other parts (or we had two short ladders for a treehouse?).

Step one was to clamp the side in the right place before drilling for the dowel rods. We opted to use dowels in a part of the table that won't be seen because...well, we didn't have enough 1.25-inch screws and weren't up for a trip to The Depot.

Here's where things stand now, with the two sides on. Next we need to attach the two short pieces on the ends, then the legs, and then the three boards for the top (which we will screw up from the bottom through those five cross pieces in the frame). And then we have to go though all the same steps for the bigger table.

Here's a rough approximation (unglued) of what the table will look like from the bottom.