Corner table from reclaimed fir

A friend gave me some old fir boards torn out of her attic. They were getting in the way where I stacked them in the shop, so I decided to mill them down before storing them. But once I started cutting, I got a little carried away and made a table top to go with the spindle I made in the last post.

The top is a 24" radius quarter round, with the leg centered roughly in the table top.

The curved front apron was made of several thin pieces of stock laminated around a curved fixture and glued.

The tripod base with the legs attached by dovetails. The front two legs are at right angles to each other and the rear leg is much shorter. One major mistake was the thin dovetail web between the front legs, that ended up being a weak point I struggled with later.

It was interesting to build a traditional-looking piece like this. Spindle-turned work always seems to lead in that direction, and in this case, it forced me review some basic skills. It was a good time for that review -- I made a couple of mistakes that could have been avoided if I was a bit more in practice. It was a pretty quick job, and a lot of fun. And it replaces a really ugly folding table in the corner of my living room.

Router lathe: making real parts

cutting flutes on a big spindle (5" dia, 22" long)

 First "real" parts -- the big bolt was fun, but just a test, and a bit of a joke. This is the first "real" part -- a base for a round table (I think). I turned the spindle by hand on the manual wood lathe, and modified the thread code to cut a series of flutes. It worked pretty well, in spite of a couple of errors in the code:

1. I intended to climb cut (feed with the cutter so the bit pulls with the direction of travel. Makes a cleaner cut across grain). This code runs the cutter against the direction of travel (conventional cut), which is more prone to splitting when cutting across the grain.

2. I rotate the part by one degree between the forward and reverse cut in order to make a slightly wider cut. But I didn't account for that when spinning between flutes, so each cut advances one degree around the spindle. I actually like the way it looks, so I didn't fix it, but it was a (happy) mistake.

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