Mesquite Side Table
While visiting my daughter in Texas, I decided that I needed to find some mesquite to take home for a future project. This turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. While we usually think of mesquite for barbecues, it can grow into fairly large trees. The wood is very dark, hard, and dense. It's beautiful for furniture -- if you can find it. While I found it at the local Rockler, they were asking $25 a board foot; way to rich for me, although the boards were 8 foot long and 8 inches wide. I found someone on craigslist who had undried furniture quality wood for only $5 a board foot, but it was 8 hours away (Texas is huge!). Finally I found someone locally who had a few boards. While they weren't great and way too expensive, I bought two natural edge pieces. My plan was to use one for my son-in-law, who lived in Texas and the other for my son's traditional Christmas project (to me) who was living in New Mexico.
Since Matt had helped my buy some nice curly maple a couple of Christmas' earlier, I thought it would be nice to incorporate that into the project. I had to buy some additional thick stock for legs, but the two sources worked together nicely.
The twist to this project was that I wasn't going to let Matt leave me to finish the project by myself. He was going to have finish it before he left because it was my Christmas gift to him. The project was relatively straightforward, but the top had a slight bow to it. Since I didn't want to reduce the thickness on the planer and joiner, Matt learned how to go old-school with a hand plane to flatten the crown and remove a little from ends on the bottom side. The other gotcha was the board was very irregular and actually leaves a portion of the frame displayed when the top is on. Floating the top (suspending it using hidden supports between the frame members) gives it a look that works even where you can see the frame. Floating also allowed us to keep a little bit of the bow without looking odd, once again allowing the wood to be thicker than it would have been with traditional flattening and thicknessing.
Matt discovered that 1) even a straight-forward table still takes a lot of time; especially when you have other things you want to do, and 2) going old school with a hand plane really is a workout. Yes, we did finish it before he had to leave.
Since Matt had helped my buy some nice curly maple a couple of Christmas' earlier, I thought it would be nice to incorporate that into the project. I had to buy some additional thick stock for legs, but the two sources worked together nicely.
The twist to this project was that I wasn't going to let Matt leave me to finish the project by myself. He was going to have finish it before he left because it was my Christmas gift to him. The project was relatively straightforward, but the top had a slight bow to it. Since I didn't want to reduce the thickness on the planer and joiner, Matt learned how to go old-school with a hand plane to flatten the crown and remove a little from ends on the bottom side. The other gotcha was the board was very irregular and actually leaves a portion of the frame displayed when the top is on. Floating the top (suspending it using hidden supports between the frame members) gives it a look that works even where you can see the frame. Floating also allowed us to keep a little bit of the bow without looking odd, once again allowing the wood to be thicker than it would have been with traditional flattening and thicknessing.
Matt discovered that 1) even a straight-forward table still takes a lot of time; especially when you have other things you want to do, and 2) going old school with a hand plane really is a workout. Yes, we did finish it before he had to leave.