Build a Tiled Table Part 1: Rail and Leg Assembly

Here's a great project that I know you're gonna wanna make. It's a tiled table. So there's an 18 by 18 inch floor tile inset into this oak frame. What a great idea. It's a Perma coaster. You can't ruin that tile 'cause they're so darn tough. So this project, the legs, and the rails are held together with biscuit joinery. There's some biscuits in this mitered frame on the top. We're gonna talk about the right glues. The best way to put all these joints together, get everything on this table going, so that you can make one in your shop. You're gonna love having this project in your house when it's all done. Here are the material requirements for the table project. We're using an 18 by 18 inch flooring tile in order to make the inset for the tile table. So working backwards from that I've got some dimensions for you. Couple of things, I want this table to sit next to a sofa. It's not a coffee table. It's a sofa table. So finished, it should be 24 inches tall. So your legs should be 23 and a quarter inches tall. Then we're gonna put a three quarter inch top on that. That'll give us 24 overall. They're one and a half by one and a half. I'm working with red oak. You can work with whatever material you like. For the rails, that will eventually connect our legs together, I've got pieces, three quarter, by two and a half, by 18. Now you'll see, as we work through this and the way it all comes together, that 18 inch dimension on the rails, combined with the size of the legs, is gonna provide a little bit of overhang on our top. It's gonna look great. So trust me on this so far, as far as dimensions go. Now here's what we need to do. If I leave the legs, looking like this, I think they look just a little bit heavy. If you like how that looks, your legs are done. If you wanna go one step further to lighten the look just a little bit, we can put a little taper down here on the bottom. Now the way that this works, is that I'm gonna come up the leg from the bottom, three inches. Square that off. This particular type of square is called a saddle square. Then down here in order to create the foot, I'm gonna come in a half inch from each side. So, I'm doing this layout with an adjustable square so I can set that for a half. And that way, when I come in half and half, it's very consistent and I'm not just measuring and marking possibly leading to inaccuracies. Then, using a straight edge, connect the dots. And the easiest way to produce these cuts is to take this part to a bandsaw. We're gonna cut these spaces off. So then using your layout square, we're gonna come back to this face, which has now been cut at an angle. Mark our half inch marks, strike a line up to that three inch layout line. And then we're gonna cut again 'cause we want this taper to appear on all four faces the way this leg does which is already complete. So next, we're just going to run over to the bandsaw and quickly work through these cuts. In working with my legs, not my legs, but my table legs, one of the things I found is this little flake down here. I've seen this in oak fairly often, and it's not a deal breaker 'cause we do have the technology. We can fix that. So what I'm gonna do is you cyanoacrylate. I'm gonna use CA glue, and I'm gonna get a little bit of glue into that spot. Now, I'm not gonna try to pour the glue in there 'cause I'd probably make a mess. So I'm gonna put some glue on another surface and then burp my bottle. Make sure the tip stays clear. And then a drop of glue on the tip of this Popsicle stick. And I sand in the Popsicle stick down to a really pointy point. And then use that to work it in there. Now, the beauty of CA is that it dries so quickly that I'm not gonna have a lot of downtime waiting for this to dry and repair, add any excess like I'm leaving here on the surface is gonna sand off very readily. So now I'm gonna take the other end. And I don't wanna put my finger in there 'cause I don't want to glue my finger to the leg. And I'm just gonna hold that closed, and in a minute or so that glue will be cured. And then we'll be ready to move on with our project. It's looking pretty good so far on my repair here. Let's do a little sanding. I've got a little bit more glue residue to take off but you can see what a great job that did. Putting that oak flake back together. A little more sanding to do on that side too. So I'm gonna take care of that sanding and next, we're ready to look at joinery for this project. Number 10 biscuits are gonna be the joinery device that we're going to use to hold the legs in the rail together. Now got a little bit of a cool trick to show you here. When the legs and the rails assemble, I wanna create an offset or what in woodworking like to call a reveal between the face of the rail and the face of the leg. I want that to be an eighth inch step. It looks nicer. It's a real nice detail. It looks better than trying to flush them up like this. I wanna make that reveal very consistent from corner to corner and I wanna make it easy cause I'm lazy. So here's what I'm gonna do. I've got my biscuit joiner set for a number 10 biscuit. And I've got the fence set to correctly locate the biscuit in this direction on the leg. So accommodating that eighth inch reveal that I'm after. Then I wanna be centered on my three-quarter inch rail. So that means it's gonna be a half inch to the center of the slot. So I'm gonna clamp this to the bench. And we'll get one slot cut. Now here's the gee whiz part. Don't change the setting on the fence. We're going to thinner stock. But the way I'm gonna make that happen is with a spacer. So I clamped my work down, put on the spacer. Guess how thick that spacer is? One eighth inch. It's acrylic plexiglass. So I can see through it. There's my layout line, which is the center of the width. So it's inch and a quarter to that layout line. That goes on there. Make sure I gave myself enough room. Yup. So what's cool about that, is that put them together and what do we get? There's our biscuit. There's our rail. And there's our offset that came from using that little piece of plexiglass. It's automatic, that every offset is gonna be the same as long as we always use the same piece of plexiglass. Much easier than moving the fence up and down from cut to cut. I'm gonna get the rest of my biscuit slots cut. I'm gonna do one more thing. I'm gonna add screw pockets to the inside faces because that's gonna give me a way to fasten the top later, and we'll be ready to assemble this baby. Always be sure you do a dry fit before you apply glue and everything looks okay. So, we're ready to start putting our project together. Now you might notice the table looks funny cause it's upside down. Often when you assemble a table, this is the easiest way to do it as upside down on a table. And then when we're done here, we'll stand it back up. Yellow glue is the answer to hold the biscuits in their slots. Remember that the way biscuits work. When we put them in initially, there'll be just a little bit sloppy. But then the moisture from the glue goes into the biscuit. The biscuit swells and tightens up the fit. And that's part of what gives us good joints from biscuits. Now I'm gonna put a little glue on the biscuit. Then corner by corner, or to repeat that process all the way around the table here. Now for tables like this, it's hard to beat a band clamp for putting them together. So it's just a big web strap, goes around the frame of the table. So I'm doing some just big tightening on it. Now I'm winding up the reel on the clamp. And then I like to get the web about centered on my rails. Then we can do a final tightening. Looking good. Now we do need to make a final check whenever you're doing a table. And it's a good thing we're checking it. 'Cause we want to make sure the rails are flush with the legs. That squeeze out that I've got on the outside of some of these joints, I'm gonna let that dry till it's rubbery. Take a sharp chisel, slice it right off. Instead of trynna smear it around with a damp rag right now. That takes care of our leg and rail assembly.