HerrinG Bone Work Table
My first table! I had been doing some woodworking at Otherlab, but, I was tired of staying at work until almost midnight every night. Then I had a brain wave. Late night wood working sessions would be so much more palatable if I could do them from the comfort of my own home! I had a (minuscule, shared) garage. I could make this work. I told my Dad about this plan and he sent me the gift he received for 35 years at his company; a compound miter saw! Thanks for enabling me, Dad! Hopefully, I've paid you back sufficiently in the form of homemade gifts. Anyways, I tried to use the miter saw while it was sitting on the garage floor, but it was rather sketchy. Power tools are meant to be used at waist height, while standing. And so it was settled, my first project completed in my garage would be a work bench!
Required Resources: 10 hours, $200 ($70 in wood, $130 in Pipe fittings)
Size: 30" x 60" x 36" Tall
Materials: Softwood Common Board, Pipe Mounting Flanges, Pipe Tees, Steel Pipe.
Finish: Limited sanding, Minwax rub on polyurethane.
Tools: Miter Saw, Circular Saw, Orbital Sander, Cordless Drill
New Techniques:
Herring Bone Pattern: I had seen a tutorial on how to make a herring bone coffee table somewhere on the internet and thought it would be fun to replicate it. I bought a bunch of common board pine, 4 different colored stains (in retrospect this color pallet is hideous), some particle board as a backing substrate and pipe fitting for the legs. To do the top I cut the backing board to size and then laid out the stained pine in an interleaved herring bone pattern. I applied glue to the back of each pine board and then nailed it to the particle board (I didn't have enough clamps). I then flush trimmed the pine boards with a circular saw and tacked on some thin pine lumber to trim the table top.
Casters: Given the small size of my workshop (1/3 of a 1 car garage) this table had to be mobile. I bought pipe fittings for the legs and then found some casters with threaded studs. With some drilling and tinkering with socket wrenches, I fitted the casters to the table and haven't had to adjust them since.
Lessons Learned:
Didn't "Nail" It: I guess, technically I did "nail it". It just may have been a little overkill. The nails I used were chosen to be the same length as the thickness of the particle board substrate and the pine board combined. I didn't, however, account for the fact that I was going to over drive he nails (hammer the nail head down below the plane of the the table top) pushing the nail out the bottom side. I only learned that I had done this after I finished the gluing/nailing step and went to pick the table up off the ground. Probably should have gotten a Tetanus booster after that one. Anyways, I spent an hour trying to blunt the nail tips with a hammer, but I wasn't able to Nerf the sharp protrusions completely.
