I attended the Waters & Acland 1 Week Make a Table (Focus on Joinery) short course in the Lake District in September. This was an amazing course with a knowledgeable tutor and great students.
As the name of the course suggests this was focusing on the joinery. There are mortise and tenon, bridle, halving joints. There is mix of machinery and hand tool work going into the various joints.
There are two sets of leg components both with three legs, one mortise and tenon, one halving joint, two bridle joints, and four domino joints. These pictures show the initial stages of the build up to the dry fit of all the components.
Next will be the glue up and working the table top.
The next part was the glue up. We paired up for this as an extra pair of hands comes in very useful for holding clamping blocks to prevent marking the wood.
The glue up was done in two stages, the first stage was to glue the two legs and cross pieces. The following day we cleaned up the glued part using a block plane. I was amazed at how therapeutic using the plane was and just how thin the shaving were. Once cleaned up the remaining leg components were glued together using what looks like a tangle of clamps.
Next we started working on the table top. We sanded the edges before applying a chamfer all the way round, the cleaned up the chamfered edge with the block plane and sanding. The top was then sanded on both faces with a random orbital sander. Focus then turned back to the fully glued legs, the tenon was trimmed using a flush cut saw, cleaned up using the block plane and then all the of the leg faces were sanded.
With the week coming quickly to an end legs were positioned on the underside of the table top, holes marked, drilled and screwed. With only a couple of hours left on the Friday I chose to bring my table home untreated. Over the next week I applied five coats of Liberon Danish oil and the table is finally finished.
It was a great experience making the table at Waters and Acland the other week, I'd highly recommend their courses to anyone interested in making fine furniture or just improving their wood working skills.
https://www.watersandacland.co.uk/product/1-week-make-a-table-joinery-masterclass/
