Fundamentals of Furniture Making Session 8: Sand and Assemble

One of the things that's a really nice touch on this project and a lot of furniture projects is, taking these sharp corners off with an 1/8 inch round over bit. So first, to have a look at the cutter. It's a tiny little guy. 1/8 inch indicating the radius of the round over that we're working on there. And what this will do is ease the edges for a couple of reasons. One is when you handle the piece of furniture with your hand, it's gonna have those sharp edges off there. So it's not likely to dig into your skin. The other thing is from a functionality perspective. When this table is standing up in your house and we come along with a vacuum or your dust mopping the floor and you bang into it, if it's a sharp corner, it's gonna be pretty obvious to see dings that happen down here by the floor. If we've already eased the corner, we're less likely to see those dings because we don't have a real sharp corner. We're not gonna get a big contrast between a divot and the sharp corner. So, this is just a very nice touch optional step. You don't have to do it, but I do think it's a nice touch. Now, here's what gets routed. All four of the legs, all four corners. Including down here on the taper. We wanna take those corners and ease them. You don't have to worry about doing the very top end. You don't have to worry about routing the foot. We'll talk about this when we get to the sanding step which is next. We do wanna ease those corners but, we'll do it with hand sanding. So all of the lawn corners, all the way down this way. On your short rails, wanna do a round over on the bottom corners. You don't have to worry about the top edge cause that's gonna be masked by the lower shelf anyway. On the top rails, don't have to do any routing here. We've already put the bit on this edge, this corner. This is gonna be covered by the top. This is an inside corner. We don't have to worry about that. On your top, we're gonna go all the way around with this taking the 1/8 inch off the top corner. And of course on the bottom we've already done the bevel to shape that. Final piece on your shelf, we definitely wanna do the top corner and I would recommend we do the top and the bottom. It looks really nice when we've done both top and bottom corners with the 1/8 inch round over including the inside corners that we created to notch around the legs. So that's the task ahead of you. I'm gonna go after the rest of the routing I have to do here. Then, we're gonna spend a little time talking about sanding. Now, before I go back to my routing to talk about this black thing, this is a router mat. You can get router mats at Woodworking Specialty stores. It does a great job of holding the material in place so that I don't have to have a clamp on it while I'm routing it which if I did I'd have to move the clamp route, move the clamp route. So, it gives me unobstructed ability to route all the way around this piece. Very handy to have really, really nice. Alright, I gotta get rolling on my routing. We're getting to a point where it's all about the details. Time to do some sanding. Not a lot of instruction here but I do wanna give you some pointers. First, I'm gonna start with 120 grit abrasive and a random orbit sander to work on the sauna edges, the bevel that we created earlier. That'll knock that down pretty quickly. The other thing that we wanna pay attention to is the fact that we do have roadmaps going on a lot of our pieces. So, when I sand the face that has the mortises on it, you gotta pay attention here. This is mortis number one. This is mortis number two. And in about a second-- my number goes away. So I've got to keep mental track that I'm sanding this face. I'm taking those marks off. As soon as I'm done with my sanding, I've got to go back and put that mark back on, so I know which rail is gonna fit into that. Which tenon is gonna go into that mortis. Now on these long edges where I've got these round overs that we produced earlier, I don't want to try to work on that with a random orbit sander. That's gonna mess it up. That's a great spot to do some hand sanding. So just using a pad with the same abrasive in it. To start 120 grit abrasive, I'll work on those outside corners, get off any burns that might've been left by the router work. And the other thing we haven't looked at yet are the tapers down here at the bottom of the legs. That's pretty narrow surface especially when we get down toward the foot. So my concern is that big six-inch sander like this, if I set it down there, it's gonna be prone to rocking back and forth. You're gonna make your life a lot easier if you gang your parts up. So instead of doing one leg, I'm gonna do two. You can see what quick work it's making on that surface. And it's gonna give us more stability so that we don't end up with a rounded surface. I wanna do that work and this work before I do this work. Hand sanding the round overs as last. And I mentioned earlier that we do wanna ease the foot down here. Great job for hand sanding and it come down and work on the outside corner here and then just kiss across these outside corners so that we don't leave any sharp corners down here on the feet. Generally, I sand my projects up to 150 to 180 grit. Working on this cherry, I'm gonna take it up to 180. Wanna sand all the individual components before we start assembling. so much easier to sand them now than it is after everything is glued together. So I gotta a lot of sanding work ahead of me here. Let me get after it so that we can get after the assembling next. We're ready to assemble once all your sanding is done. Gotta do this in subsections. It's the easiest way to do it. If you try to do the whole table, all the rails, all the mortise and tenon at one time, it's just too many parts to work with. I think the easiest thing to do is to do the two long rails first. Then once that glue is dry, bring the short sections, the short sides together. Now, getting glue into a mortis tenon can be a little bit dicey. What we wanna end up with is glue that's painted up the walls of the mortis. Because that's where we have connectivity with the walls, with the sides of the tenon. So give you a couple of approaches here. First, make sure all the dust is out of the mortis. Make sure you're following your roadmap. There's a number 10 and there's a number 10 here on my tenon. What I'm gonna do is put some glue into the mortis. Then, brushes like this. This is a glue brush but, what it really is, is an acid brush, a flux brush. People use them when they're soldering I'm gonna use that to pull the glue that I squirted in there, back up the walls of the mortis. Now this is what I don't like about this. See how those bristles are kinda going stray on me. And they're leaving a little bit of glue on the outside here where I don't want it. And we wanna have enough glue in there that the walls are well painted with glue. And before I assemble, I'm gonna do the same thing to the other one. Now let me show you something else on the other mortis. Knock the dust out On this one, number 11, same start. I'm gonna squirt the glue in there. And then instead of a brush, I'm gonna use a Popsicle stick and push the glue back and forth. Now, what I like about this is because I don't have the bristles on the brush because it's not a brush, I don't have that problem where they're going a stray out here on the outside of the mortis. So, you gonna try 'em both. Q-tips also aren't too bad. If you do this, if you apply the glue with the Q-tip, move it around inside the mortis with the Q-tip, I do find you have to replace the Q-tips pretty frequently because the ends just get messed up. Now, it'd be really good to put these together the right way which is outside of rail to outside of leg. Same thing on this end. I'm gonna do a little tapping to even them up. Wanna have a clamp pad in here so that we don't have metal against our material. So I'm gonna do that and then come back to the other end to position the end by sliding it in. Alright. Now we can start to close it. And one of the things I'm looking for as I do this is, for the beam of the clamp underneath here to be approximately centered across the width of the rail. Oh that's doing a nice job at closing that joint. Make sure they remain flush. Now looks great. Alright. I'm gonna do the same thing to the other long rail. I'm gonna get that in clamps. Realistically, we need to leave that sit probably 30 to 45 minutes those pairs before we come back and start working from the other direction to get the other sub-assembly put together. Big scheme of things. Maybe what you wanna do is sand your leg and rails first. Then while the glue is drying on these, we could now be sanding the top and the shelf. Gives you something to do in the shop. I'm gonna get my other rail set and get those things going so that we can come back and do the other assembly a little bit later. More of the same on our table assembly. What I did is, I let the glue dry and the long rails. Now I'm using the Popsicle stick to get glue inside the mortises. Watch my roadmap of numbers. Make sure we have flushes ready there. Now, one thing I did on these lower layouts is... I'll show you in a second. I put my layout line for the rail location down here, below the mortise. So it's very subtle. Tiniest, tiniest line. And the reason I did that, is that I wanna have a line there that I can put the rail on. I don't want the line to show when all of this is done. So, by having it below the rail, it's gonna be gone on the bottom of the project where we really can't see it. And when I insert my rail, grab the right one here. What I'm gonna do is put the components in such that it just covers the line like that. So, instead of going to the line like we might sometimes do in woodworking like that, then I can see the line there, I wanna cover it just a little bit like that. So I have an insurance policy there. Insurance policy one, I have the line below the mortis where I probably can't see it anyway. And I put the rail over it to help mask it. Okay. Now, we really have two options here. We either bring this the next part or we bring the next part to this. So, one of the things that I always worry about is if I put glue inside these mortises and then I flip this upside down under the other part, while I'm getting this stuff aligned, glue might start dripping on me and that's gonna make a big mess. So my preference is to leave this component horizontal on the table and bring that to it. Now, glues have what's called an open time and sometimes people call it a takt time. So, what that means is how much time do I have before parts are gonna start to grab and I can't manipulate them anymore. And different glues have different open or assembly or takt times. So, part of the reason that we're doing this in subsections is so that we don't have to worry about that too much. However, that being said, you sure don't wanna get this far and then take a phone call or something. My kids have called me a number of times and I've had to say, I'm right in the middle of glue and stuff. I'm gonna have to call you back. What can happen is that the parts start to grab and then it's gonna be very difficult to manipulate 'em. And it might get to where you're compromising the strength of the joint because you're trying to slide parts around after the glue has started to tack up. So, work quickly. Maybe get another pair of hands especially when you get to this stage where we've got so many parts that have to come together. Okay. Now, when we do our final clamping, we wanna make sure that we're putting the table together flat. So there's two ways you can do this. If you have a nice flat work bench, setting it up like this on the bench is gonna be fine. What I'm looking for is the frame being on a flat surface so that when we start clamping it together, we're not clamping some kind of a twist into it. If you're not confident in your bench or the bench isn't big enough, put it down on the floor and do the clamping on the floor. Remember on the long rails, I said, I wanna have the clamp beam approximately centered on the rail. I'm doing the same thing here. Check your rails. That one climbed just a little bit on me. That takes care of this part of the assembly. Now we'll let this dry for a little bit and then fasten the top. Fasten the shelf. You wanna get all that stuff taken care of before we do any finishing to make sure everything is gonna work okay. So, next step we'll just watch glue dry for a little bit here. I've taken off the clamps. Now let me back up the truck just for a second. Cause somebody might ask about what about the need to square things as we put it together. Here's how that works out. If you've cut your parts, to identical sizes these two rails are identical in length. These four rails are identical. And then you put them to the correct registration points, which is these rails are even with the top of the legs, the lower rails are right on the layout lines that we talked about when the rails went in. Then, as you put this together it's gonna self square. You're gonna be fine. Now when we get to this stage, which is where we wanna start installing our top and our lower shelf, we might find that there's some flex in the system here. And we're gonna move things around a little bit in order to, especially down here to get the legs aligned with the shelf. But, when it comes to the gluing step, if your seam, if your joint is closed between the rail and the leg, you're fine. You really don't need to put a square on there as you're putting it together. Now, this is kinda cool cause we're gonna get to see what the table is gonna look like. Gonna do the lower shelf first. Now there's no finish on this stuff. That's intentional just in case something is messed up and doesn't work. So I'm gonna go ahead and get the hardware on. We're gonna make sure everything is just right. Then, everything's gotta come back apart. We'll talk about that when we get there. What I wanna do, is get the lower shelf even with the outside of the legs. Now, when we notched for working around the legs, we made those notches a smidgen too big by cutting on the not waste side of the line. So we want to center-- the table or the shelf between the legs. So that there's a little bit of a gap on each side. That way the top will be able to expand and contract even with the outside of the legs. And then same thing on the other end. So right here, I'm having to tap my legs in just a little bit to get everything flush where I want it. And then easiest thing to do at this stage is to flip it over. I have already seen the tabletop fasteners, the screw that goes with the tabletop fastener. We have to pre drill for these guys. We're gonna use what's called a self centering drill bit. So the way this works is it's got a nose on it. That nose is gonna go right into the hole. It's already in the tail top fastener. There's a drill bit coming out in the center so that when I push, I can do this hand-held like this. Here we go. The bit is automatically centered on that hole and there's a stop on this, I like this. The best so that I can't accidentally drill through my 3/4 inch stack. Notice that the tabletop fastener is not right up against the leg. Otherwise, if this top wanted to expand out, the metal component would start to hit the wood. And that would limit that. You can see right at the end of the screw going in, it pulls that fastener down and puts a little bit of tension on it, to exactly what we want. Okay. The lower shelf went in great. Next step, is maybe even easier which is just to center the top, fasten the top. Make sure, like I said that everything is working the way it's supposed to. Now we can do this a couple of ways. One would be we could measure and check the distance from the outside of the rail to the outside of the top. Or you can use the bevel that we cut earlier as a visual indicator to make sure that the frame of the table is equidistant within that bevel inside that bevel all the way around. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing a visual check here. That looks good in every direction. And then we're gonna do the exact same thing with the tabletop fastener. So let me get the top on. And then we'll flip this over and have a look at our finished table. What do you think? The table's looking good now. But this stage for me, I've got some hand sanding detailing I still need to do on this to get everything ready for finish. But, what we're gonna do is take the top off, take the shelf back off. That's gonna make the finishing go better and be much easier to do. This step however, tells us everything's assembled correctly, all the parts are working together the way they should and the table is in great shape to wrap up.