George Vondriska

Fundamentals of Furniture Making Session 5: The Top

George Vondriska
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Solid wood tops must be allowed to seasonally expand and contract. This can be accomplished by incorporating table top fasteners in your project; a must to prevent splitting later. Learn about correctly installing these versatile fasteners. A great tip for making a thick top appear lighter is undercutting the edge. A shop-made jig provides what you need to make this cut on the table saw.

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Our table has a pretty wide top on it. And the top is made completely out of solid wood. One of the implications of that is that wood moves seasonally from the driest times, typically in winter, to the really humid times of summer. And we have to allow it to do that expansion and contraction. If you try to just freeze it in place, the wood is eventually gonna crack or it can expand so aggressively, it'll blow out the joints on your project.

So the way we're gonna allow our top to expand and contract is with what are called tabletop fasteners. And what's gonna happen is that these fasteners will end up in a kerf, a groove that will cut into our rails. Once these are screwed to the bottom of the tabletop, as the top expands and contracts, these will be able to slide and they'll allow that seasonal movement. Pretty easy to do, pretty easy to set up for these. But we do wanna make sure that we've got a couple things right at the table saw.

First, saw is unplugged, height of the blade needs to be a little less than half the thickness of our material. About 3/8 of an inch. Really critical is the fence location. With these fasteners, what I'm gonna do is hold the fastener against the face of the fence, bring the fence over until the flange of the fastener, this part, is inside the saw blade like that. So right there, that face is what I'm lookin' at, and it's just inside that tooth.

Before we do anything, we'll do a test cut in the scrap, make sure the tension on that fastener is right. So I'm gonna plug the saw in and then we'll be ready to make our first test cut. Now we can check two things here. How does our depth of cut look here? That looks just fine.

Our other check is slip the fastener into that kerf, into that groove. And what I'm looking for is when I have some down pressure on this, I want my fastener to be touching here on the back but there should be a gap right there. Let me have a look. Yeah, this looks very good. So what'll happen when we put a screw on this, screw it to the tabletop.

It's gonna pull that down, holding the top in place, so it can't rattle around but still allowing the top to expand and contract, and move back and forth like this. That's set just right. Now pay attention to your pieces. Back at the dry assembly step, I said I had marked T for top which was telling me the top of the piece was also indicating the inside face. Inside face down, T for top against the fence.

Here's a really important thing. We're only doing four rails. You only put tabletop fasteners in the rails that are perpendicular to the grain of the top. So eventually, our top is gonna end up crossing our rails like this. We want that to be able to expand and contract.

So we only do that kerf in the end rails. If we put tabletop fasteners in the rails going the other way, that would actually inhibit the movement which is exactly what we don't want. So it's only our short rails that are gonna come to this operation. That takes care of that step. It's gonna do a great job of allowing for those seasonal changes.

We're gonna do a step here that makes the top look a little bit more delicate, similar to what I mentioned about tapering legs to make them look lighter. What I'm gonna do on the table saw is bevel the bottom side of the top to make the top look thinner. And it gives the appearance of the whole project being lighter-looking. It's a very nice touch. But if you don't wanna do it or if you wanna consider not doing it, this is your opportunity to look at the project and say, well, okay, if I taper the legs but if I don't bevel the top, this is what I'm gonna have when I'm done.

And if you're okay with that, I'm okay with that. An alternative to the work I'm about to do on the table saw, would be to simply use a chamfering bit. We could with this, take a bevel off of here. That would lighten up the look a little bit, not as dramatically as what we're about to do on the table saw, but it would give you some of that look. A great option here would be to take pieces of scrap, do different edge treatments to 'em, set 'em on the base.

See which one you like or do what we're about to do here on the table saw. So what we're about to do is, big picture. We're gonna feed this board on edge, past the table saw blade in order to cut an angle on it. We're gonna do the little two long cuts like this, and we're gonna do the two end cuts, which is why I've got this piece of melamine sittin' here. So let's talk through this slide.

It's very simple stuff, but you gotta have it. Here's what we've got. This component, this component here on my vertical piece is 16 inches wide, 24 inches long. Want it to be wide enough that we've got good stability here, long enough to provide support. The horizontal piece, 16 inches wide, 14 inches long.

This length isn't real critical, but I wanna have a little bit of material cantilevered over the fence for me to hold on to. The vertical piece here has to be slightly taller than your rip fence. It's about a quarter inch higher than my fence. So when this all gets put together, fasten the horizontal piece first to the vertical, using this as a spacer to control that distance, then bring that assembly to your table saw. And holding the space or the vertical piece in place, run screws through the top.

That way you're sandwiched right against your fence, so that this is a good fit up against your rip fence. This will give you a lot of support, a lot to hold on to. And this is what really we have to do in order to make this cut work. With the saw unplugged, what I'm gonna do is angle my blade 25 degrees. Now I have a left-tilting table saw.

So I'm going 25 degrees this way. Operation is gonna be exactly the same if you have a right tilt. It's just the blade's gonna tilt the other way, and you'll bring your rip fence over here. Bring my depth of cut up. We're gonna do the vertical cuts first.

As a general rule, you wanna do end grain cuts before long grain cuts, so that if we have some chipping at the end of the cut, the long grain cut is gonna take it away. Our set-up, in addition to the 25 degree angle is to set 3/8 of an inch between the face of the fence, and where the blade enters the table. I'm gonna bring that back. And when we make this cut, the top of the table has to go against the sled 'cause we wanna take this relief, this angle off the bottom. Now another thing I've done is I've taken the guard off.

In my case, the guard would hit the material here and actually prevent me from making the cut. But I do have the riving knife in place so that I've still got the safety that's gonna come from having my riving knife. Now, what I'm doing is looking past the face of my material to make sure I have enough blade sticking out, so that I know the blade is gonna complete the cut. One more check here to make sure everything looks okay. As long as I can see blade coming past the face of the piece, we know we're okay.

I am going to plug the saw in and we'll be ready to make our first cut here. I think you can see, for these cuts, it's all about the sled holding that piece in a vertical position for us. Second verse, same as the first. Now we've gotta do a reset because for our long grain cuts, we don't need to have the sled which means our fence position is no longer accurate. When I do this, I'm gonna gauge my fence position off of my work, like this.

Step, first step, unplug the saw 'cause I'm gonna get down here and mess with the blade. Then I'll come back and show you how we're gonna use the existing cut to get the second cut ready. All right. So what I'm looking for is, as the blade spins by, as I spin that by hand, move the fence over, and there's a distinct corner there. I want the blade to enter my material right at that corner, just like that.

Now we need one more thing for stability and that's a feather board. This feather board is magnetic. So when I turn this, that turns the magnets on. That'll hold it in place. We definitely need this to prevent this bottom end from kicking out.

You don't wanna have it pressing up against the blade. We wanna have it preceding the blade like this. So material against the fence, feather board in place. Gonna get one magnet turned on. There we go.

Then do the second magnet. And then we'll see what we have for tension there. It's kind of a case where I could use one more pair of hands to make everything right. Let's see how that feels. A little more.

With feather boards, I want 'em to do their thing. I want 'em to hold the material for me, but I don't wanna have 'em so tight that it's making it difficult for me to push past the feather board. This feels great right here. Just a little bit of flex in those fingers. Next thing I can plug the saw back in and we're ready for these long grain cuts we have to do on the edges.

Now remember how our top looked before. Let's go back to our table with our freshly cut top and see what we're gaining here. There's our top with that bevel taken off of it. So what it does is it has your eye then looking at this thin edge. Basically, we've still got a 3/4-inch top but your eye sees that 3/8-inch edge which makes the top look more delicate, makes the whole project look lighter.

A couple things here, on blade selection, I'm using a thin kerf 40-tooth alternate top bevel blade. Thin kerf because we are takin' quite a bit of, quite a bit of a cut here. We're cutting through a pretty thick portion of the material. So with thin kerf, it's gonna make it easier to feed. 40-tooth alternate top bevel, leaves us with a pretty good surface finish on that cut.

Still gonna take some sanding to clean up. But that 40-tooth ATB is gonna leave it pretty nice. Really good suggestion would be, do some practice cuts with smaller scale piece first, to make sure you have a feel for this process, then graduate onto your tabletop, especially at the step where we are going from the vertical component that uses the sled, to the horizontal cut that doesn't use the sled. Having a test piece to make sure that this fence is in exactly the right spot for that secondary cut. It's gonna be a really, really good idea.

I like this a lot. Really does a nice job of lightening that up. Once you try it a couple times, you'll be comfortable using that sled and comfortable adding details like this to your tops too.

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