Coffee Table

I recently registered for a woodworking class at a local adult community school located at a high school in south Florida. I had some minimal experience from taking a mini course at CMU but forgot pretty much everything. Nevertheless, Woodworking I was not offered at this time so I registered for Woodworking II. Most of the other students were fairly independent woodworkers and mainly registered for the course to have a woodworking space. As I didn’t know anything anymore, the very kind instructor recommended me to make a coffee table. This coffee table is based on Steve Ramsey’s “Sonoma Vineyard Coffee Table” guide from his Weekend Woodworker course.

Class 1:

Missed it bc not in town :(

Class 2:

Bought a bunch of wood from home depot. Got wood shaving all over inside of car. Note to self that a rav4 just barely manages to fir 8ft boards. Since the pine common boards looked like they were rotting, I paid extra for the pine select ones.

Note to self: 1in x 4in (or 1x4 colloquially), are not 4in wide. They are 3.5in wide. This is because some width was lost when the wood was planed.

Materials:

• 8 of 1in x 4in x 8ft pine select boards
• 1 of 2ft x 4ft x 1/2in plywood

After lugging the wood back, I relearned how to use the miter saw:

• set miter saw completly down. lock in place with pin
• press tape against saw to measure length.then lock the stop block in place
• crop 1/2 blade width off the end of the board
• cut a bunch of identical length pieces by measuring against stop block

Now I have 16 of 1in x 4in x 15.25in boards. I glue 4 of them together along faces to form 4 table legs. For wood glue, use a brush to spread glue evenly. Then clamp overnight. If use metal clamp, put a piece of wood between the clamp and the wood to prevent denting.

Class 3:

Got to use table saw once again. That thing is terrifying.

• spin wheel thing to set blade height to be around .25in above wood
• lock wheel in place
• set fence to be good distance from blade
• for this cut, we just want to shave off a tiny bit of the misaligned glued edges
• use featherboard to press board against fence to stop kickback!!! this thing is incredible and makes it so that my fingers are much further from blade
• turn on saw. once stop flashing, pull red stopper to begin spin
• position urself not right behind board in case it gets ejected backwards
• push board through with push stick. aim force downward, forward, and towards fence.
• make sure the table is long enought it doesnt fall off

Then I used miter saw to plane the other two small faces of board. Just cut tiny bit off.

Then to square it, I came back to table saw. I measured fence dist by using shorter length. Then rotate to start cutting.

Aftwards I rotates the saw to 45deg to cut the wood into a trapezoidal prism.

Then I used the other table saw that had a dado blade that cuts away larger volumes of wood. This was used to form the tenons of each leg. Since this was doing crosscuts (instead of rip cuts like before), I installed a miter guage which guided the wood. I like this as it keeps my fingers far from blade again.

Note that to tighten the miter guage, you have to use an allen key. I didn’t tigthen it enough and the miter guage sort of twisted on a cut and caused some of the metal of the miter guage to get cut off and propelled the shaving onto me. Funnily enough, it was good that this table saw was not saw stop compatible due to being old as it would have braked and ruined the blade.

Also, oops I cut some later pieces I shouldn’t of cut. It seems that preemptively cutting pieces before they are needed may not be a great idea as the required dimensions may be slightly different than the measurements in the guide due to inprecise cuts earlier on in the project.