One of the shortcuts was my having to resaw the boards to get
more out of them. They were 3/4" and I needed them to be .5" thick. Here I am
trying to resaw these boards on my 12" Delta band saw
. This was a painful operation as it tripped my breakers several times despite
going quite slow. Didn't realize this machine was so underpowered. Someday I'll
get the 18" Laguna and my frustrations will be over :-). This also necessitated
my building this resaw fence here
.
Another shortcut I had to take was gluing up the top
from three separate boards, which I wasn't happy about. Here is a
picture of the unfinished top
. You can see the haphazard widths I had to deal with. Not ideal. Yet a
third shortcut I had to take due to not enough stock was the gluing up
of the sides from half figured maple and half regular maple. The regular
maple is on the inside.
To thickness all of this stock and remove the resaw
machine marks required the purchase of a planer for $100 off of Craig's
List. I built a mobile base for it which you can see here
.
I finished it with some Trans Tint dye followed with a
coat of tung oil followed by a couple coats of poly. You can see the
finished project below.