I'd like to learn how to build tables. Like tables that people would pay for (possibly). My wife and I saw this table recently and it looks very straightforward. But I'm not sure how to go about building something that is square and sturdy. Help me learn!
Here's what I can tell you about building a table. I built a small storage bench for my mud room using the Krieg system. I was pretty impressed with it I think you could do a lot with their tools and hardware.
My wife and I also looked at a adding a farmhouse table to the house and found a local shop that builds them to order. This guy's work was simply incredible and he had all the work he could handle. He was sourcing large slabs of wood from somewhere and his designs range from rather rough edges 2 perfectly square edges. If you could find a niche, you could do OK with nice work.
Finally, I was in a shop recently that sold vintage and antique things and they had a whole section of tables made from repurposed materials. If you have access to old Mills and factories where you can source heavy duty carts and iron bits, you could put together some interesting tables to sell to that crowd
Youtube
There is an endless amount of very talented people building really cool things.
What tools do you have and what materials do you want to build it out of? What is the purpose of the table? Workbench? Kitchen table? Endtable?
I built this island for my kitchen awhile back. The frame is mild steel and the top is a 1 1/2" butcher block stained dark walnut and then coated with polyurethane.
A big part is the quality of the wood. Find a mill and have them plane it to size, that way a 2x10 is 2x10 not 1.5x9. If you look at custom made stuff, that's the biggest difference. I made this a few months ago.
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Steve_Jones said:A big part is the quality of the wood. Find a mill and have them plane it to size, that way a 2x10 is 2x10 not 1.5x9. If you look at custom made stuff, that's the biggest difference.
And it won't be banana or corkscrew shaped like the boards from big box stores.
Check local thrift stores periodically?
In reply to dyintorace (Forum Supporter) :
Building a table for the market requires either great skills or an extensive set of great equipment. Plus look at the prices. The furniture store bought those pieces at less then 1/2 of what they are selling them for. Plus probably on a buy back guarantee. In other words they don't sell it. It goes back.
First start with your wood. You can afford to buy wood at retail prices if this is a profit making idea. Go hunting for a place willing to sell you hardwood at wholesale prices. To get it at those prices you need to go to a sawmill and buy it rough and green, usually ungraded and in lots of 6-800 board feet. Expect at least 20% waste.
Are you still interested?
If you just want a table for yourself shop Craigslist and Facebook Big tables sell for low or free prices because very few people have the room
Schmidlap said:Steve_Jones said:A big part is the quality of the wood. Find a mill and have them plane it to size, that way a 2x10 is 2x10 not 1.5x9. If you look at custom made stuff, that's the biggest difference.
And it won't be banana or corkscrew shaped like the boards from big box stores.
You have a lot of faith in any wood not turning into propellers. Steel is real, man.
The two tricks with tables are making and attaching the legs sturdily enough that ithe table feels sturdy, and creating a surface that can change with humidity, but not turn into a canoe.
I just built a mantel, a coffee table, and some cabinets from some walnut. I cut the tree and took it to the mill. Just realize that it will take a long time to dry, it won't dry straight, and it takes a lot of time to work the wood into what you want. Fortunately, walnut is pretty forgiving and somewhat flexible. My 2.5" slab of walnut for the mantel was twisted by over an inch, but it complied easily with a couple screws when I installed it.
Being a theater tech director, I'm used to building things that LOOK like something wonderful, but they're actually shine-ola. I built this kitchen table with pine/plywood, then faced the top with 3/8" real bamboo flooring planks and got some oak edge veneer to finish it off. Looks like a bamboo table, but it cost me next to nothing. The Bamboo was a discontinued Home Depot clearance item and I got a box of X square feet for something like $15. The pine was scraps from the shop.
Kreg jig is nearly a must. This coffee table is assembled entirely with Kreg screws and wood glue and I could dance my 220-lb ass on it and it wouldn't break.
For something like the table you showed, you are not limited by the wood species on the bottom because it is painted. Just experimenting with woods is a good thing to do. For instance, using oak for the frame of that table would be strong, but it would also be heavy, and oak doesn't take paint well. Pine would be weak, and no matter how many coats of paint you put on it, the sap will bleed through at every knot. Poplar would be a good choice as it takes paint very well, it's a bit stronger than pine, and easy to work with. If I were attacking a project like the table you showed, I would assemble a framework using poplar 5/4 x 4" and run at least two center stringers along the long direction along with the two outside stringers. Close off the ends with the same. Use some of the poplar to make diagonal corner braces so the legs have some integrity. For the top you could do something like 1/2" ply and face it with something like flooring planks or just go straight to 3/4" boards of whatever you want.
A little secret I have found is that I prefer shine-ola sometimes. The walnut cabinets I built specifically to flank the fireplace and house my A/V stuff, but I had limited space to work with. For that reason, I'm using lauan side panels with a walnut veneer. That way, the sides are only occupying 1/8" instead of 3/4" of walnut. Sure, I could have planed down walnut, but then 80% of my lovely stock is now sawdust. Not only did I save more walnut for other projects (like the cabinet doors), I saved an inch or so on the width of the cabinets allowing them to fit in the space I had and still have enough room for the A/V receiver. Another reason I often like shine-ola is overall strength. The shelves in my walnut cabinets are plywood with veneer. Plywood is stronger, less likely to warp, and I could use less shelf thickness to support the span/weight of books and electronics. It's also going to be hidden with books... and electronics.... and a door with stained glass.
Cost is also a thing for me. I can put a veneer on edges of plywood and unless you really dig into it, no one will know the difference.
Do a google search for "triscuit platform." It will explain some of the physics about making strong, stiff, sturdy tops. It is basically a 1x or 5/4 frame with some form of plywood on top and bottom. The official term is "stressed-skin platform"
Here is a shot of something I did last year for a show. It is a 12' x 12' wall that folds down and becomes a ramp for 9 actors to walk on. It had to be strong, but it had to be easy to fold down by two people. I built a 1x4 framework and filled the voids with polyiso foam panels and used contact cement to glue lauan on the inner and outer faces. In order for anything to flex, the lauan on top has to linearly compress, and the lauan on the bottom would have to linearly stretch. Using those physics, I was able to make something light enough to use, but strong enough for 9 people to walk on. The foam's only job was to fill the voids so the actors' feet wouldn't break through the lauan.
You could do this with a table top leaving the corners exposed for attaching legs.
The set started as this closed cube. I put two "curbs" on the floor as you can see, but that was mostly to appease OSHA. I don't think they were needed.
Then the front wall folded down into a ramp.
Making something square is relatively simple. Let's say you build a frame with 1x and it looks like this:
Take a known-square sheet of something like ply or lauan and lay it on like this:
Then just pull the frame over to meet the square edge. Make the frame fit the panel.
Another way to do it (if you're not using known-square materials) is to just measure both diagonals. If they're equal distances, it's square.
Thanks to all for the replies so far! Super informative.
Steve - That table is stunning! It rivals the table we have in our dining room, which we paid a LOT for!
Curtis - Very informative information! I really appreciate the insights and will research the triscuit platform.
Steve_Jones said:A big part is the quality of the wood. Find a mill and have them plane it to size, that way a 2x10 is 2x10 not 1.5x9. If you look at custom made stuff, that's the biggest difference. I made this a few months ago.
There's a few posts in This thread
Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:Making something square is relatively simple. Let's say you build a frame with 1x and it looks like this:
Take a known-square sheet of something like ply or lauan and lay it on like this:
Then just pull the frame over to meet the square edge. Make the frame fit the panel.
Another way to do it (if you're not using known-square materials) is to just measure both diagonals. If they're equal distances, it's square.
In reply to dyintorace (Forum Supporter) :
If you are looking for a free source of hardwood. GMA pallets are made of hardwood. Typically oak or Ash
they can be found near any manufacturing place.
The new glues like Titebond 111 will allow you to stick wood together with strength as great or better than the wood fibers. ( in other words the wood will break before the glue does ).
Don't expect a glue to fasten a joint as well as a good dovetail joint or mortice and tenion. But they are wonderful supplements.
Kreg screws can make a fast edge connection. But always allow the wood to swell or shrink based on moisture. Wood swells and shrinks sideways and thickness but not length. OK a trivial amount Length wise.
Wood is stupid because you can't make it longer*. You can't just weld it back.
It also takes either immense patience or very expensive tools to get "professional" results.
I have neither so everthing I make out of wood tends to get painted. I can make something that looks 98% professional. But that last 2% is crazy hard. For my personal use 98% is fine. To sell, I think the requirements may be higher.
I would try to find someone who has a nice Hobbyist wood shop in your area. Befriend them and Mentor with them. You will learn skills, see what equipment is required, and may find out about deals on equipment.
That said tables generally have rails that intersect in a corner brace. The leg bolts to the corner brace to ensure that it is tight/straight. Here is a bar I built out of Oak. You can see the corner brace and bolts holding the leg on.
Kreg tools help and are absolutely the easy button I use them all the time, but If I'm buying furniture and particularly "handmade artistic furniture" at not Ashley Furniture prices I'm not interested if it has Kreg joints in it.
*obviously you can glue it together and seam it, but if your making a frame and you accidently make the angle at the end 88* instead of a perfect 90 your screwed. You get to remake that piece.
Woodworking is a skill, so don't expect your first attempts to be perfect.
I've seen some pros build a prototype out of cheap woods to get the dimensions, construction techniques and mistakes sorted out, then use good wood for the final piece.
Good clamps, planer, table saws, routers, joiner......start spending money.
All kidding aside I started by taking 2 courses of Fine Woodworking at our local junior college. It's nice to use the decent tools. With COVID who knows about classes right now.
Then spool up Norm and his New Yankee Workshop shows on YouTube and get an idea of what the pros do.
In reply to Datsun310Guy :
Norm is good to watch since he's basically building furniture from a cabinet maker's POV, rather than true fine woodworking. He does use all the tools, compared to some builders who use a minimum of power tools.
Datsun310Guy said:Good clamps, planer, table saws, routers, joiner......start spending money.
All kidding aside I started by taking 2 courses of Fine Woodworking at our local junior college. It's nice to use the decent tools. With COVID who knows about classes right now.
Then spool up Norm and his New Yankee Workshop shows on YouTube and get an idea of what the pros do.
Hmmm. We have a killer community college here in town. I'm going to see if they offer something similar. Like you said, it may be post-COVID however.
Since it was a night class and mostly adults my dad and my brothers joined me and one night my dad laughed excessively as we watched some nimrod smoke up and burn up a router bit. It was entertaining for sure.
I bought a planer from HF last winter. Thanks to 2020, I ended up building a number of tabletops and desks etc. and the planer makes the difference between buying cheap lumber and having to pay real money. That's the biggest thing for me. Pretty much everything else can be done with hand tools, but hand planing is difficult and slow.
There's a lot to learn and I'm a hack. But learning on rough cedar that's been planed down makes life much easier.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Purists and really skilled craftsmen bemoan the use of power equipment. But the truth is the right equipment can turn junk wood into things to be proud of.
Wood you have to pay $10.00 a board foot for ( 1 inch thick x 1 foot long x 1 foot wide or any combination thereof ) makes material costs insanely high. But if you buy it rough and green directly from a sawmill you skip an average of 12 middlemen. That means you'll buy that same board for less than a dollar.
There is no free lunch, you need good equipment to make that nice board. Plus your labor. But suddenly you can build a table of black Walnut cheaper than you can buy plywood. Or even sheetrock! Admittedly I bought my wood over 20 years ago. But I only paid 17 cents for a bd ft of Black walnut. I got Fiddleback Hard maple for 10 cents a bd ft. If you look today enough Fiddleback maple to make a violin ( about 2 bd ft ) will cost you over $255.00
When you buy wood that cheap you can afford to make mistakes. Toss it away and start over. Make those same mistakes using $4-500 worth of wood and you produce messy mistake ridden projects.
Agreed on the planer/raw wood part. I have an older Craftsman planer I bought at an auction sale for $60 and it makes things so much cheaper.
I have no idea what mill prices are these days. All I know is that I took a buttload of Maple and one Walnut to my mill. The Walnut was easy. I had him save me a 2.5" thick slab near the middle and the rest was all done in rough 5/4". The maple I had him turn into T&G flooring which was $3.75/sf. My total bill for the whole job was just north of $1000, and I got a LOT of finished product out of it. I took him three trailer loads full of raw trunks and came home with one very full trailer of finished product. The flooring was very labor intensive for him. It involves rough cutting, then kiln drying, then re-milling to correct warping, then planing, T&G, and a micro beveled edge. $3.75 is cheap for all that work. You can't buy most hardwoods from a big box store for that kind of money. I don't have my invoice in front of me, but the Walnut part of the job must have been dirt cheap. I remember expecting to pay $1100 for just the flooring, but the invoice was under $1200 IIRC.
I started sending the Walnut through the planer and it was just so satisfying to see it come alive. Watching it emerge from the other side became like Christmas morning.
There is something satisfying about doing it by hand. I do have a set of scraper cards and a hand plane which I did use on a couple things, but I'm not a purist like that. Why spend days and get sore muscles for a job that you can do better in 5 minutes by flipping a switch.
I love using a hand planer, but it's a finishing tool for me instead of the first step. I have one that is possibly a century old that I reconditioned a little while back.
I think the secret to doing "fine" woodwork is the access to the wood. Notice I put "fine" in quotes because what I do is certainly not actual fine woodwork. It's amateur stuff. I can't imagine what I would have paid for all my Walnut if I had to buy it by the board foot. I like to think mine was free, which it was, but a lot of infrastructure had to be in place for it to be "free." The Walnut was cut down by the DOT/taxpayers because it was beginning to become un-rooted and leaning toward the road. It was on my parents' farm and Dad has the tractors, equipment, trailers, etc to make loading it a breeze. So it was free... if you already own a $3000 trailer, a truck to tow it, a $35,000 tractor and the $3000 implements to go with it, the chains and binders, and get lucky enough that a desirable species of tree gets cut down by tax dollars, then it's free.
Back when I first started this I was in Los Angeles. I would scour CL for wood and there was plenty. No one really had wood burning fireplaces or wood stoves. At best, some people had backyard fire pits, but they were usually some stylish modern gas fire with those crunched up glass bits in it. If someone had a tree down, you could usually get paid to remove it. Then I would split it, plane it, and cut it to make things like cutting boards or wooden spoons. One of the problems in L.A. was the access to decent species. Most of the time it was Sycamore. Boring.
I think step 1 is getting familiar with wood species. They all have varying properties of density/weight, hardness, flexibility, tendency to split, etc. It's why baseball bats are made from Ash, Amish rocking chairs are made from Hickory, and boats are made from Mahogany. They all have their purpose. There are also wide variations among species of the same family of trees. Some species of Maple are soft enough that some wood carvers hand-shape it with a knife while other species of Maple are so hard that they're used as bowling alleys and gym floors.
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