Oak Panels

It's been awhile since I've had time to post and, in fact, the work in this post happened more than a month ago, but I'm still gonna tell you about it.

Since the coffee table I am building is frame and panel, I needed to work on the panel part. Adam generously donated about 15 Oak kneelers which needed to have all their nails, screws, and staples removed. Then I spent several hours with some Mineral spirits scraping off most of the remaining adhesive and foam padding which had made them so comfortable to kneel upon. Only then could I send them through the drum sander to (finally) expose the wood I'd be working with. Below you can see before and after sanding.

The wavy line across the lower boards is from gaps in the sanding belt (I used a worn belt so that if the adhesive and foam gunked it up, a fresh belt wouldn't get ruined) but the strange figuring in the wood is because all of the boards are quartersawn (picture a cyclindrical tree-trunk with boards cut out along radii). Here are all the boards after they've been sanded, cut to size, and cleaned up a bit. You can see how many nails and staples I had to remove...

Next, I glued the edges of some of these boards together to make flat panels. Here is two of the large panels in clamps:

There are four boards at top glued and then three boards below glued. Between them is a strip of scrap wood so that I can clamp them all at once without accidentally gluing both panels together. The next step is to sand all the glue off the faces of these and cut them to the sizes they'll need to be to fit in the frames (of the frame and panel construction).

I also took the time to finally cut down the Cherry slab into the approximate sizes they'll need to be so I could start to get a better idea of how everything will go together. I spent a long time with the board (and a tracing of it) trying to find the best sections for my purpose. Here is what they look like now:

  

That's more or less what the tabletop will look like.

Still much work to do....