Bench Top B!

I've named the two benches 'A' and 'B'. While benchtop A is still in pieces, I just glued up benchtop B. Well, actually, I edge-glued the main body of the benchtop. The breadboard ends will come later.

Anyway, with the three pieces finally face-glued to thickness, I ran them each through the planer using my fancy-dancy new sled that I built to take the twist out.

With the warp gone, I ran them over the jointer to square up the edges.

Then I cut grooves for the biscuits. Biscuits are little flat football-shaped pieces of wood that help keep the wood aligned during glue-up. In the past, biscuits were used for strength also, but wood glues are so strong these days that they're not needed for that anymore. My sister-in-law Vicky doesn't even use biscuits in her glue-ups.

And, we're ready! Now apply some glue...

And clamp.

That's Laren in the background making a boomerang.

Tune in next time to see what the benchtop looks like in all it's glued glory!

Face gluing misadventures, or twist revisited

Most gluing in woodworking is "edge gluing," where you glue edges together to make something like a table top. I'll be doing plenty of edge gluing on this table, but first, I need to do a bunch of "face gluing," which is done to make thicker wood. Lynne's tabletop will be around 1.5" thick, so I need to face glue a bunch of 3/4" boards together.

After applying the glue to both faces, trying to keep them aligned while clamping is a pain because the two pieces tend to slide all over the place. So I had a brilliant idea of putting a screw through both boards on each end before clamping. Something like this:

I glued the boards up and after a couple hours took the clamps off to find a new, badly twisted board. Duh, if I fix the two ends, and if there's even the slighted amount of bow in one of the boards, then clamping will cause a lot of stress in the boards, leading to twist. Argh.

It's a little depressing that it took a couple of weeks for me to realize this. Thankfully I didn't glue any more boards in the meantime (I took some time to build a sled for my planer to simplify taking out twist, but more on that later). After considerable time and thought, I finally started gluing up boards again yesterday. I did two things differently. The first is that I clamped the boards to my flat table. Like this.

The second change is that, instead of screwing the boards together at both ends and then clamping, I screwed them together on one end, and then added clamps moving from one end to the other. Like so:

(And yes, that is every clamp I own.)

So, the result? A beautiful, flat, double-thick board. Woot!