About ten days ago I went to my workshop and looked at the pile of currently unused pieces of wood and tried to find a way to make the laptop table our newly re-arranged front room needed. I found...
About ten days ago I went to my workshop and looked at the pile of scrap currently unused pieces of wood and tried to find a way to make the laptop table our newly re-arranged front room needed. I found some pieces of birch plywood, some MDF offcuts and a lovely, if a little wonky, piece of air-dried sycamore.
I went away and thought for a bit. I've done quite a lot of carpentry (aka, "building big stuff with wood") and I do a lot of wooden jewellery stuff. What I haven't done really any of is joinery (fine woodworking like cabinetry and furniture), but I've always been interested. This is probably in part due to spending quite a lot of time watching the excellent Matt Estlea on youtube, or "sexy wood guy" as my wife calls him.
OK then. I'll have a go. Angled joints, cutting things with chisels, millimetre tolerances, all that jazz. Might as well jump all the way in, eh? I could have made a more traditional table but an angled design suits the use case much, much better. So I cut a notch in the sycamore to fit the ply into, very carefully, but not quite carefully enough. I slightly overcut it, so there's a tiny brass shim in there now, on the underside. Then I spent a long, LONG time trying to get the other end of the sycamore at both the correct angle and dead flat - I do not own a plane, because a sharp plane would have done that job in seconds. I got close with sandpaper, but only close. There's an amount of gap-filling glue on that joint, the rest of the work is done by a 120x6mm screw going up at an angle through the base - countersinking that angled screw was a challenge that I'm very glad was on an unseen part! There was a big gnarly knot at the top of the sycamore so I scraped that out and filled it with some crushed malachite and CA glue (I made a lot of crushed-stone inlaid wooden rings with this technique)
One coat of paint and a rubdown with some beeswax later and the table is done. It's not perfect, the base and the top don't line up quite, vertically - but the top is level and it feels solid enough to trust putting my laptop on, so I'll take two out of three on this one. Next one will be better.
It looks pretty nice! Is it pleasant to use? I don't know much about wordworking but I've been following the youtube channel of Frank Howarth for...many years now. If you haven't seen his stuff...
It looks pretty nice! Is it pleasant to use?
I don't know much about wordworking but I've been following the youtube channel of Frank Howarth for...many years now. If you haven't seen his stuff before, I'd recommend checking it out. (If you look at the playlists, he has it sorted into different categories fairly well.)
Posting this comment from my new table in it's intended location for the first time. It's working pretty well. Stable and it's where I wanted it to be. It fits around the furniture and doesn't...
Posting this comment from my new table in it's intended location for the first time. It's working pretty well. Stable and it's where I wanted it to be. It fits around the furniture and doesn't look out of place in the room. I may add a cable guide so the power cable can be semi-permanently affixed.
I hadn't heard of Frank Howarth before but the thumbnail of his workshop building video had me interested right away. I'd love to have the time/space/money to do something like that.
The workshop building videos are the best ones! I'm jealous of his setup even though I have no use for any of the equipment. If I recall correctly he was an architect and is doing wordworking in...
The workshop building videos are the best ones! I'm jealous of his setup even though I have no use for any of the equipment. If I recall correctly he was an architect and is doing wordworking in his "retirement," but he must've had an awfully successful architecture career
He mentions in that video that he spent nearly $100k on the workshop. That sort of money would buy half my house, or about 50 of my (considerably smaller) workshops.
He mentions in that video that he spent nearly $100k on the workshop. That sort of money would buy half my house, or about 50 of my (considerably smaller) workshops.
Far too late to worry about my back, it's already ruined. :) It's not for working at, I have a table with a more suitable chair for that kind of thing. This table is a place I can park my laptop...
Far too late to worry about my back, it's already ruined. :)
It's not for working at, I have a table with a more suitable chair for that kind of thing. This table is a place I can park my laptop of an evening but keep it easily available, or let me reach over and start playback of something on the TV, look something up or send a quick message, that sort of thing.
There seems to be a common trend on image hosting for the masses: start fast and to the point, become hugely popular, add a bunch of useless crap and get slow and unpractical as a result.
There seems to be a common trend on image hosting for the masses: start fast and to the point, become hugely popular, add a bunch of useless crap and get slow and unpractical as a result.
About ten days ago I went to my workshop and looked at the pile of
scrapcurrently unused pieces of wood and tried to find a way to make the laptop table our newly re-arranged front room needed. I found some pieces of birch plywood, some MDF offcuts and a lovely, if a little wonky, piece of air-dried sycamore.I went away and thought for a bit. I've done quite a lot of carpentry (aka, "building big stuff with wood") and I do a lot of wooden jewellery stuff. What I haven't done really any of is joinery (fine woodworking like cabinetry and furniture), but I've always been interested. This is probably in part due to spending quite a lot of time watching the excellent Matt Estlea on youtube, or "sexy wood guy" as my wife calls him.
OK then. I'll have a go. Angled joints, cutting things with chisels, millimetre tolerances, all that jazz. Might as well jump all the way in, eh? I could have made a more traditional table but an angled design suits the use case much, much better. So I cut a notch in the sycamore to fit the ply into, very carefully, but not quite carefully enough. I slightly overcut it, so there's a tiny brass shim in there now, on the underside. Then I spent a long, LONG time trying to get the other end of the sycamore at both the correct angle and dead flat - I do not own a plane, because a sharp plane would have done that job in seconds. I got close with sandpaper, but only close. There's an amount of gap-filling glue on that joint, the rest of the work is done by a 120x6mm screw going up at an angle through the base - countersinking that angled screw was a challenge that I'm very glad was on an unseen part! There was a big gnarly knot at the top of the sycamore so I scraped that out and filled it with some crushed malachite and CA glue (I made a lot of crushed-stone inlaid wooden rings with this technique)
One coat of paint and a rubdown with some beeswax later and the table is done. It's not perfect, the base and the top don't line up quite, vertically - but the top is level and it feels solid enough to trust putting my laptop on, so I'll take two out of three on this one. Next one will be better.
It looks pretty nice! Is it pleasant to use?
I don't know much about wordworking but I've been following the youtube channel of Frank Howarth for...many years now. If you haven't seen his stuff before, I'd recommend checking it out. (If you look at the playlists, he has it sorted into different categories fairly well.)
Posting this comment from my new table in it's intended location for the first time. It's working pretty well. Stable and it's where I wanted it to be. It fits around the furniture and doesn't look out of place in the room. I may add a cable guide so the power cable can be semi-permanently affixed.
I hadn't heard of Frank Howarth before but the thumbnail of his workshop building video had me interested right away. I'd love to have the time/space/money to do something like that.
The workshop building videos are the best ones! I'm jealous of his setup even though I have no use for any of the equipment. If I recall correctly he was an architect and is doing wordworking in his "retirement," but he must've had an awfully successful architecture career
He mentions in that video that he spent nearly $100k on the workshop. That sort of money would buy half my house, or about 50 of my (considerably smaller) workshops.
Aren't you going to destroy your back though?
Far too late to worry about my back, it's already ruined. :)
It's not for working at, I have a table with a more suitable chair for that kind of thing. This table is a place I can park my laptop of an evening but keep it easily available, or let me reach over and start playback of something on the TV, look something up or send a quick message, that sort of thing.
That is a very nice table, kudos.
The website it is on is not so nice.
Thanks. And yeah, imgur is a bit crap. But it is easy and fast. I don't really know a better free image host otherwise I'd use that.
There seems to be a common trend on image hosting for the masses: start fast and to the point, become hugely popular, add a bunch of useless crap and get slow and unpractical as a result.
While I do find it annoying that imgur wants to be a social media platform, you can still link directly to images which cuts out all that crap.
On mobile, direct links require the full webpage to be loaded.