Sellers Home Dining Table

In this episode, we take you from the final joinery–and fitting the components into the whole piece–to gluing up, finishing with a water-borne finish and then delivery from garage to dining room in Sellers’ Home.

There is almost nothing ordinary or conventional about the work in this episode. Yet, all the way through it smacks of an innovative tradition.

The underside of the table aprons requires shaping techniques for the scalloped cuts that then lead to sawing, chopping pocket holes for turn buttons, and creating the turn buttons themselves.

In this episode, we sharpen planes and spokeshaves to get the crispness we need when we are shaping the legs of the table. Lots of techniques to learn from using the hand tools, but also what’s important throughout is reading the grain to take advantage of every cut you make.

It’s not too often you get to follow a whole tabletop this size being trued up with planes only, and Paul used a variety of planes to do this. These are methods Paul has developed alongside the use of his poor-man’s scrub planes in a converted #4 smoothing plane and #78 rebate plane for scrub-plane work.

The next stage is to prepare the tabletop boards by edge jointing with the bench plane and, Paul walks you through elements that will make the passage easier for you. Paul kept in the awkward bits to show how he dealt with them.

With the aprons foursquare and cut to length, the layout for tenon joinery follows traditional patterns that have never changed in centuries, so we follow these patterns every time because they work so well.

This episode opens up the whole system Paul uses for planing the stock foursquare. We quickly go into the layout of the joinery and then chop out the first haunched mortise.

The much-misunderstood area of any project after you have visited the timber yard and selected your wood is the preparation it takes to change rough-sawn wood into finely dimensioned material ready for the layout, laminating, and so on.

Choosing wood from the supplier has a system to it and following on from that comes your wood preparation. In this episode, we take a good look at things.