Jointing long boards with the tablesaw

I'm making a dining room table which should fit at least 8 people. This is a lot of table, and this very long stock must be jointed somehow. In a way, I'm glad that I encounter this snag while I'm working on the stretcher part of the table because jointing for edge gluing will be taking this seemingly impossible task to a whole new height.

Method 1 - Roller stand to extend the jointer's in/outfeed. 
This simply doesn't work: there seems to be no way to align the roller stand suitably. The more I joint, the more stock I lose near the ends of the board. I've got a 6" jointer, and must joint a 7' board.

Method 2 - Handplane!
With my largest handplane a No.5, I do not feel confident that I can remove curvatures over longer length than the length of the place (which is shorter because of the angle of attack). In hinsight, I guess that I could make a planing guide with a straightedge... mmm, I already have moved-on.

Method 3 - Tablesaw!
Here is the idea: I screw a straight piece of sheet good to my board (luckily I have some waste where this can be done). This melamine extends beyond the far edge to be jointed so that it is the only point of contact with the tablesaw fence. I then set the fence to take light passes until the jointed edge is completely straight. Once I've got one good edge, I can use this edge to mill The other side.

After action report
I tried method #3 and got decent results. The 4" melanine guide was bending a bit (maybe 1/32" in the middle), so a third screw in the midpoint would have made it more stable. This was good enough for my current piece because I was cutting down to smaller parts and re-jointing. However, this is not going to be good enough to joint for edge gluing the components of my table top. 

Craftex CT146 - A preliminary review

There is not a lot of information on the CRAFTEX brand of tools. This is so because it is exclusively sold at Busy Bee, which is Canadian. In the US, the same would be sold under Grizzly (I think). Most of my stationary tools are Craftex tools. The main reasons is that it is nearly impossible to get any other brand in Halifax, NS, Canada. Nonetheless, everything Craftex that I own is working great for what I need them for. 

Is that sawdust on the tabletop?

Setup
I followed the assembly instructions in the manual. I had to take the saw from the upstairs garage where it was delivered to the downstairs shop. At 284lbs, this was a head scratcher. However, the heaviest piece in the box must have been no more than 100lbs. Two people could easily get this down a flight of stairs. Getting the table from an upside-down position on to its feet required 3 people, and could have used a 4th one.

Plan 3-4 hours to get the table ready to go, but the process was simple. I really like how each screw/nuts'washers were organized in a large punchable package with labels for each item. Surprisingly, the amount of machine grease was small and I didn't ended up smelling like petroleum products for days like I did when I assembled a bandsaw, a jointer and a drill press in one go.

Operation
The biggest shock for me is the fence: it seems to reliably set itself to the square of the blade AND the distance scale is very precise. The fence got my mark with something like 1/64" from manual setup, and a 3" thick board of hard maple got cut with less drift than a sharp pencil line. What's more, the cut was very clean and hardly blade marks were left to smooth after this demanding cut. Feeding too fast made the blade stop without noises or vibrations. This is night and day with the performance that I got from my jobsite RIDGID tablesaw. The tabletop is very flat and wide enough to allow 36" ripcuts. The engine jerks a bit when turned on, but I think that I'll convert it to 220V soon to smooth out the initial peak.

I provided the disclaimer that this is a preliminary review. I have it running now for only one day. I'll follow up later when I have clocked a lot more time on the machine.

Back at it!

After weeks of moving, taking down the tools and subsequently setting them up again, I began working on hardwood again tonight. I'm making a Hayrake Table, which design from from an editor of the Fine Woodworking magazine.  The modification to the basic design is that the structure is made of hard maple while the table top is still made of quatersawn white oak. This will be more consistent with the China Cabinet and chairs that are going to be in the dining room. Another reason why this is so is because I couldn't source anything but 4/4 stock of oak in this cut style, and thus it would have made it very tedious to prepare the legs and stretchers (it calls for 8/4 and even some 12/4 stock).

I spend the best of 1-2 hours with my daughter doing the initial milling of the legs (with 12/4 stock), which was a good work-out for my new roller stand and a good test for the ducts going to the dust-collector. Everything seems to be working as expected. Life is good.

Tomorrow, I'm finally getting a 10" contractor saw from busybee.  The only tool not yet delivered is the DW618K 2HP router that will be the workhorse for a router table. When will this router table be made? Good question, but it is good to know that the most critical component will be in the shop.

The forced hiatus keeps on going.

Still no tablesaw... but I got around all this with a pair of handsaw and a rethink of my workflow to involve the bandsaw and jointer. What is really getting in the way of woodworking now is that we have decided to get our tiny house on the market. So, instead of cutting mortices by hand, I ferry stuff into storage. The upside is that getting a workshop 2-3 bigger than I have now is a hard requirement for the new house.

So I tell myself as I walk by the pack of pimento burl veneer, hoping to get to it soon enough.

Tablesaw woes

I haven't posted in a bit, and this is mostly because the switch on my tablesaw unexpectedly died while I was in the middle of a highly productive streak. Worst than that, I took a day off to get some headway on my TV stand, and the tablesaw failed about 40 minutes into that "day off". I thus spent the rest of the days either cleaning up the thing, or taking it to the service centre to test RIDGID's warranty.  Two weeks later, still no tablesaw in the shop as the RIDGID service centre is not a RIDGID dealer, doesn't keep an inventory of parts and has little to no interest in having me as a client. Grr.

The upside is that I decided to venture into hand tools in the meanwhile. I was quite hesitant to start with a new system now that I had established a works with the tablesaw. However, I bought two small joinery saw from Lee Valley (20 tpi RIP and 16tpi CROSSCUT). To my surprise, I seem to be able to get almost the same level of precision by hand than using my machine (almost). What is left outstanding now is how I will handle long rip cuts with my simple stanley general purpose saw. However, I think that the teeth pattern with this saw is more rip than cross cut.... I suspect that I better cut generous and finish the cuts on the jointer...

More to come. With winter drawing to an end, I'm afraid that my perfect dry fit 40 pieces skeleton will start to swell. I better get the cabinet part assembled before this happens.

A table for the tablesaw II

There is nothing like the doggiest day of summer to get for building something. As the apparent temperature raised to 40 Celsius, I went from this:

Enough for both the table and the workbench

To this (sketches here):

Not much to look at, but now I can safely
use the tablesaw for small cuts.

This is not going to be making it to the reader's gallery on finewoodworking.com, but it is strong enough to be used as a step latter if I choose to. I still need to fit a shelf on the lower part, and probably a set of wheels to make it easier to push around when I setup/teardown.

Lesson learned: spruce in the 2X4 stock isn't very good and it makes it unmotivating to do a good job with it. But hey, it sure beats the sad quality of end-joined spruce in the 2X3 stock.  But when push comes to shove, I'd rather spend time and money on other things than this piece of utility furniture. Mmm, oh yes, I don't know how I feel about MDF either (which is what I used for the horizontal surfaces), but it's cheap and does the job.