Table Top And Drawer

I like spring in Iowa.   It is a time when I can crank open the garage doors and grab my trusty old orbital sander and smooth out boards.    I know that in the past I have been writing about how one of my most drudging tasks in the shop is the time that is spent on sanding wood.    But I have been working on change.   The new me puts on an apron, ear protection, eye protection, and a dust mask and fires up the electrical sander as if it were a chainsaw and works away as though I were getting $20.00 an hour to make boards smooth.    After about an hour of sanding, my hand and arm are numb from the vibration of the sander,  the neighbor's dog is buried deep in his dog house from the droning noise put out from the sanding machine and the other neighbor's pickup which is parked in his driveway looks like it is coated with a little white dusting of snow.  Any little children that ride their bikes by our house look at me dressed in my sanding outfit and vow to never ride down our street again.  

   
Okay!!!  Okay!!!  I lied.   I can not change my feelings on sanding wood.       I love to saw.   I love to measure and calculate .  I love to glue.    I love to clamp.    If I won the lottery, the first thing I would do would be to purchase a drum sander.    One so big that I would only have to place the board in the machine and it would come out all polished up.  (Yep.   If I won the lottery I'd just buy smooth boards. )

    One of my neighbors had me come over to their place and look at a small kitchen table that they had found laying behind a machine shed on an abandon farm place.    It was in pretty rough shape.   The top was split apart and some spots were a little rotten.    It had one drawer that was a wreck.    It must of had three or four coats of paint over the whole piece which was chipped and scratched up a lot.    The plus side was that with all that paint, the legs and the frame seemed to be in good shape.  

   She was planning on stripping all the paint off of the legs and frame, but was wondering if I could make up a new top out of oak.  She wanted to stain and finish the new top herself but the rest of the table she would paint a solid dark color.  Plus if I could make up a new drawer also.   Since the drawer was going to be painted it could be made out of any scrap that I had on hand.   It just had to be sized to fit the hole in the frame.

   It was kind of fun doing this project.    It is always fun when all the pieces come together the way they are suppose too.    I had a lot of this maple left over from a tree that we had dropped over a year ago so that is what I used for this drawer.



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   One can never have enough clamps around.

     I rounded over the edges of the table top and that is a picture of it to the right.   It is 42 inches long and 26 inches wide.

     
     I delivered her top and drawer.   She was still in the process of scraping paint, but doing a nice job.    It will be interesting so see how it all comes together.     She has a hobby of restoring old doll houses and it is her goal once this table is finished to display one of her bigger restored doll houses on it.

      The drawer did fit well into the hole that was existing in the frame.

 

   She was pretty happy with the results anyway.   I hope that someday when she gets everything completed she will let me slip over and take a picture or two to post on some future blog.

   Next week - a lawn game comes to town.