The next few months were mostly spent wrapped up in work, and traveling. Eventually I got back to planing and gluing.
I added some holes to my temporary workbench, created some simple dogs and went to town.
They started out pretty bad:
After attempting to square each board I’d glue it up. The first two…
I used a piece of cardboard to spread the glue nice and even. Seemed to work pretty good.
Then more planing…
I eventually glued up enough until I made it to the board where I wanted my dog holes. I took a break from planing & dove into some chiseling. Once my dog hole board was done that got glued up. Unfortunately I needed one more clamp so I hacked this together:
A little sad but it did the job. Needless to say I ran out and bought a few more pipe clamps.
Finally, the top was all glued up. The planning definitely helped square the faces and keep the top relatively straight with out too many gaps. Well, too many gaps for what I’m considering acceptable.
The biggest issue is, as you can see, the horribly different sized widths. I mostly focused on getting square faces for the gluing and less on fixing the width issues. That’s tomorrow Mike’s problem.
A word on my clamps…
I decided to use pipe clamps rather than the far more expensive F clamps you can get at HomeDepot. These where key and worked great. I decided on 36″ silver galvanized pipe with 3/4″ Jorgensen Pipe Clamp Fixtures. There’s some debate about black pipe vs. galvanized. I decided on galvanized based on some recommendations, the fact I didn’t want everything black, and it was cheaper. The only issue I’ve noticed is they gouge where the clamp rests. It doesn’t seem to be a real problem but it does make the springs fairly difficult to disengage when you loosen the clamp.
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