Well I've eventually got round to finishing this.
I took my friend Elaine to see my friend Andy and between us we found a nice piece of English oak with lots of character. Now "character" is lovely to see and a PITA to work with
I found two areas of the board which balanced nicely:
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Glued together and made nice and flat and round.
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Sadly the Flat didn't last very long, but we'll come to that later...
A table's stability comes from its centre of gravity compared to the limits of its footprint. I have a table like this in my lounge. The height is about the same, but it is a bit smaller in diameter and I regularly knock it over. The centre of gravity needs to be kept as low as practicable, so the top should be made as thin as possible. Well you need thickness in the middle for fixing, but the edges can be thinned out. I started by tring to use a raised panel cutter:
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but to be honest, it was more trouble than it was worth, so I turned to my spokeshave instead.
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i screwed a brace to the underside, but that didn't stop the outer edges from curling down
. I've re-flattened it as best I can, but I daren't go too far as there are screws not far under the surface. Heigh ho.
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I've been playing around with green screens and alpha channels. It's harder than it looks!
I expected to have to make the column from two pieces glued together, but Andy had a short board that was a generous thickness to finish at 55mm, so that was a bonus. I turned it to a cylinder with a shoulder for the bas and wrapped piece of paper around it to find the circumference:
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Then divided that circumference into three and transferred the positions back onto the column:
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The sockets are routed out in three steps - roughing out, dovetail socket, flat for the shoulder. It's really handy to have three routers set up for this, but you can do it with two - do all the roughing first, then set up for dovetail and flat. If you have only one router then there is an awful lot of cutter changing to do, because the socket and the flat have to be cut without moving the workpiece at all.
So the column is held in V-jaws and the socket roughed out with a straight cutter. This give the dovetail cutter less of a stressful cut. It might be a big cutter, but it still has a fairly small, and therefore vulnerable, neck. Finally, without moving the workpiece, the flat is routed. I thought I had photos of each stage, but apparently not. Sorry about that. But this is the end result:
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I then cut and shaped the three feet. Actually it was five of them in order to get three I was happy with. This characterful oak is full of interesting shakes, but when they are in the wrong place, they turn into firewood. The dovetail was formed on the router table, but I can't find any photos of that either. If this becomes a magazine article I can see I'm going to have some faking to do.
The column went back on the lathe to finish the shaping, then on to the bandsaw for a slot for a wedge.
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So when it's all glued together and given half a dozen coats of a rubbing varnish, it looks like this:
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I'm just finishing off a burr elm table for the same lady, so there should be some more pics in due course.
S