Dining Table, Finale

It is finally time to complete the table!

I completed the legs and the top, and now it is time to finish them both.  I wanted to do my best to make the 2 types of oak (red and white) appear to be similar.  There is no better way to do this than to make the finish very dark. 

My friend Josh, over at boundaries in time has done a very nice finish on his dining table that consisted of: Dye, Shellac, Stain, Topcoat. I decided to do the same, but where he thinned out his dye and I will not thin to get a darker color. I went with:

-General Finishes Medium Brown Water Based Dye stain

-Zinnser clear Shellac

-General Finishes Brown Mahogany Wood Stain

-50/25/25 Mineral Spirits + Gloss Polyurethane + Satin Polyurethane (I didn’t have any semi-gloss)

I don’t have any ‘during’ pictures, as I was too mad with how it was turning out. At one point, just after finishing the dye step, I was about to resand the entire top because you could see every brush mark and overlap. but as I added layers, everything evened out and looked better and better.  At the end, it was by far the best finishing job I had done.

Here is the before: 

And here is how it looked after all was said and done.

Assembled!

Dining Table, Part IV

Now that the top is more or less ready for finish, I need to make the legs. Since this is a trestle table, it only needs 2 legs, which is nice because they are 9 inches wide!

The legs are made up of 3 parts: the bottom, the riser and the top. The bottom is what I worked on first, and is the most visible part of the leg. So when picking the boards, I used the best looking boards for the bottoms.

And the tops are rather invisible, so they were relegated to the off color red oak with all the knots that you see in the picture (middle).

I used mortise and tenon joinery for the legs as they need to resist any lateral movement of the table as well as holding up well under the bending that is placed on them in the trestle style table.

I laid out the mortises first, using a knife to make very straight and clear lines

And then I removed the bulk of the material with the drill press

It took a bit of effort, but I cleaned up the mortises by hand to get 2 matching rectangular holes.

Dining Table, Part III

Back onto the dining room table!  As a reminder, we are starting with 2 pallets that I got for free from my work, which appeared to be hardwood.

And the plan is to make a dining room table with a trestle base that has a rustic feel and accentuates the nail holes and knots of the wood.

We started with the most exciting part of the project, planing the boards that will become the top of the table.  We were unsure if they were all the same species or if they were going to be flat enough to not create a horribly warped tabletop.

All in all, there were 3 Red Oak and 2 White Oak boards.  We moved them around, flipped them over and swapped their orientation many, many times to get the best looking boards in the best looking order.