Yesterday I completed the last of the milling for the dining room table. I started out the day with a big hunk of 10/4 mahogany and ended it with seven 24″ long 2″x2″ square clubs. They will become the tabletop supports and the feet. My design uses six of these. The extra one is for set-up and testing.
The unmilled chunk of 10/4 mahogany. It’s 54″x12″. “10/4″ is pronounced “ten quarter” or “ten quarters,” which means this piece of stock is two-and-a-half inches thick.
Checks, or cracks in one end of the board, a result of the wood drying unevenly. I cut off everything below that red line. I may be able to use a little of it later.
After cutting off the checked end, I chopped what was left in half. I ran each half over the jointer a couple of times to make a clean edge for the saw fence. Since the face of the boards hadn’t been planed, I still didn’t have a 90 degree angle to work with, but a board with a clean edge is easier to pass through the saw. These are the two-and-a-half inch slices.
I used the joiner to take out any bow or twist or whatever on one plain sawn side of each blank, and then used it again to make a good 90 degree angle and another flat side. My first plan was to use the planer to take off the rest of the material opposite the flat, square sides, but the planer chipped and gouged the stock. I returned to the band saw and passed each board through twice to wind up with perfectly square pieces.
I left an eighth of an inch on the stock when I cut it on the band saw to leave room for cleanup on the drum sander. After half-a-dozen passes or so, these are the finished pieces. All that’s left before I’m ready for assembly is trimming these bars to length, cutting a six inch notch or dado in the middle of each (to fit snugly over the base I made previously), and tapering the ends.
Won’t be long now.