The Bespoke Woodworker

I decided I wanted a permanent solid fence for the table, with adjustable stop blocks.  I decided to to put on a laminate surface there too, since I still had plenty.

I doubled up some more 3/4″ MDF, for the fence, and the base, as well as some support blocks to keep that fence a perfect 90 degrees to the table, and to resist any flexing.

First I glued on some more laminate, and doubled up the MDF.

I then prepared the back section and the support blocks.   I’ve actually pre-drilled the holes for the T-track hold downs.

I got in the groove, and as usual, forgot to take enough photos.    Once I had the pieces all dried out, I routed out another T-track channel in the face of the fence to control the stop blocks.    Just a 5/16th straight bit followed by a T-Track bit.     Then I glued and clamped up the 2 pieces together.  Once I had good adhesion, I took the fence to the drill press table, and fitted it, then I traced out just enough room so that the drill press lever can swing down and tap the fence, which I outlined on the fence.

Some quick work with the bandsaw and the oscillating spindle sander, and I gave my drill press lever free reign!

At this point, the table is already quite usable, but I’m going to create a few stop blocks so that I can make nice repeatable cuts.

Ran out of star knobs for the T bolts, so its off to Rockler for me.

Fin!

First, I grabbed my block plane and smoothing plane, and cleaned up my recent banding addition.  It came out quite good looking.

With a recent post to Woodnet pointing out you can get fairly cheap T-Track from McMaster-Carr, and myself in possession of a new Freud LU90M blade, I decided to completely overdo the top with T-track for fence and hold down positions.   Whee!

First up, dado up some grooves.

I also decided I wanted my intersections to be nice and neat.  No fiddling and moving holdowns.  I wanted to go right around corners, so I spent some time mitering nice neat junctions.

And finally, trimmed the ends and filed it smooth to the edges.

And finally, bolted back in place, with a holdown for show.

That’ll do it for today.  The fence can wait for tomorrow.

I must warn you, this post gives you a good view into my skewed mind sometimes when it comes to the off the cuff way I approach the design aspects of projects.   I bolted down the new table, and then offset it slightly from where I wanted the final position to be.   I’m using a round ZCI, so that I can just turn it slightly, without replacing the whole insert.  The idea was completely stolen from a nice fellow on Woodnet whose name I cannot currently remember.  I loaded up a circle cutter, picked a fairly random size (bad move #1) and drilled it out a full 3/4″ so that I won’t hurt the table too much if I overdrill or forget to set the depth stop in the future.

This gave me a nice clean hole.

Of course, now I realized I’ve got to figure out a way to make a nice perfect circular insert.  In retrospect, If I had made a round template to start, I could have cut both the ZCIs and the hole in the table quite simply.   So I had to work backwards and make a template based on an existing hole…

So, I started with a quick hardboard template, so I don’t have to muscle the table around the shop.  One hand router and a flush cut template bit later…

Then, to actually USE the template, I needed to add double collar size of the template system to the size of the template, which the rabbeting bit provided quite handily.  (Original template double stick taped to template #2)

With this, I was able to cut out a couple of sample ZCIs quite easily.  I wanted them to rotate with only finger pressure, so I did sand the edges down a bit on the first one.

The plain MDF edge of the table wasn’t very pretty though.  I decided to use some scrap sapele to band the table.  A few mitre cuts later, I clamped it in place.  I think this may be the first time I’ve ever actually hit a nice tight mitre fit on the first try.   I glued it in place and called it a night.

One weakness I discovered during my Roubo build was the ability to set up nice clean repeat drilling on my drill press, and the difficulty with workholding.  I nearly stopped halfway through to build a drill press table, but decided I just didn’t have the room to stop, so I made do with a lot of bits of scrap wood clamped all over the table and to each other.

Now that I’ve put the bench into the field, I decided to scratch this particular itch next.   I grabbed a piece of spare 3/4″ MDF, some laminate, and went to work, with no particular plan in mind.  I started by guestimating I wanted a table roughly 24×18″ or so, given the space in my shop where the drill press is, thats about as big as I can get without interfering with neighboring tools.  Any larger probably can’t be properly stabilized by the drill press’s stock cast iron table anyway.   I wanted to give the table sufficient strength, so I decided to laminate up two pieces.

First though, I wanted to ensure I had a good way to both hold it down, and adjust it later if necessary.  The stock CI drill press table has some X shaped channels, so I made 2 parallel channels that overlapped them roughly in the middle, giving me 4 solid contact points.

I routed out 2 parallel grooves 5/16″,  and followed with my T-Track hold down bit.  4 T bolts, and washers and nuts, and this clamps down solidly.  The drill press moves before the table does.

I used some spare white laminate from previous projects. (boy, one of those 4×8 sheets lasts you for years!)  Out comes the vacuum press and I called it a night.