The Old Dinning Room Table

   Lately I have been in the process of moving my shop work area (once again).   For those of you that are not familiar with my shop setup, it is like this:   There is a stairway between our garage and our basement.   Some of my wood working tools (especially the ones that are heavy or create a lot of dust) are kept in the garage.   Most of those are mobile as they have to share space with our vehicles.   (We tend to drive around town a lot with dusty looking automobiles.)   At the bottom of the stairway is the first room that goes into our basement.   That is also part of my shop area.   (That space is shared with the cat's litter box!!!!   Sad face. Sad face.)   Actually this set up works quite well although I find myself going up and down those stairs several times when working on a shop project.   (It just about wears me out, but I keep my energy level built up by supplementing my muscles with a couple chocolate candy bars and a handful of peanuts when needed.)     In the Spring I move  towards working in the garage area a little more.   Now that it is Fall, I am slowing moving towards the warmth of my basement shop.   Someday when "Dag's Workshop" becomes rich and famous, I plan to build a designated stand-alone shop that is all on one level.   (Dream on.  Yep - in a normal business plan that would be called long-range planning.   Note to self:   No litter box allowed.)

     I have to confess that I have had this week's project for some time (as you can tell by the dust on the side of the table)  and finally got around to taking a look at it.   This is an older dinning room table that was dropped off for me to look at to see if I could somehow stiffen up the legs.   The legs were mounted to the table top by the use of lag screws and over time the table developed a little play in those areas where the lag screws were used.

    The table mountings looked just fine.   I completely removed the lag screws.   I then drilled a hole all the way through the legs in the same spot where the lag screws had attached.    I had to make sure that those holes still lined up with the slots that were already in the table top.

    Next I used a Forstner bit to widen the backside of the hole in the leg so when I inserted a carriage bolt, the head would be flush with the wood.   The picture to the right shows the four stages of that process with the final step being the leg mounted into the table.   The bolt setup is backwards from the way the lag screw setup was used, but this way you can tighten up those burrs on the carriage bolts and that leg is not going to wobble.

   I couldn't help myself.   I wanted to play with the idea of trying to restore the table top.   I got out some steel wool and rubbed the table top down trying to work out some of the blemishes, water marks, and magic marker dings.    I was a little hesitant about going to far for fear of my end result being more damaging than where I started out.   The picture above shows the process about half way.    The left side is after the initial sanding and the right half is after applying some stain.

    I put a couple coats of poly varnish on the top.    It looks nice and doesn't wiggle.     It still has a few of its original dings and flaws, but hopefully it will be ready to hold a big turkey for Thanksgiving this year.

Fall 2013 in the back yard.   Can you find the wife's cat in the picture above?    The things one does when he is home alone with the cat all day long.