Barnwood Table Top

[Ed Wilks]

I am a novice woodworker and I am building a table top out of old barnwood. I will plane the boards down to 1.5" thickness and joint the edges. There will be 6 boards to create, roughly, a 36" x 60" top.

So, my question is.... I was planning on just edge glueing the boards together. Do I need to use biscuits or dowels?

Any other advice?

Thanks very much.

[Steve Friedman]

My understanding is that the dowels or biscuits in that glue up are not needed for strength, but may be useful to keep the boards aligned. If you have another way to keep the boards aligned and flat, you don't need the dowels.

Steve

[Troy Turner]

Ed -

I just finished up a desk that was roughly 5' x 2'. A top that thick provides a lot of gluing surface. Trick is paitience. Once the edges are jointed, clamp two board up and flatten them out best you can. Once the glue dries, glue up another, and so on. This will cut down on final sanding time to make it nice and smooth.

Like Steve mentioned, dowels and biscuits are primarily for aligning the parts but do provide somewhat of a strength factor. I recommend a couple of pieces across the width to add to the strength.

How do you plan on attaching the top

[Bill White]

Workin' on thesame thing this weekend. Old walnut. I use biscuits for alignment, and the "Z" shaped table top fasteners. Look 'em up. They allow some movement after the top is in place.
Bill

[Ed Wilks]

I haven't completely designed the base yet. I'm trying to get the top done before the cold weather sets in. I'm planning on a trestle-type base made of some 3.5 x 6 mahogony left over from a trim job my brother did. I figured I might use the z-fasteners.

Thanks for the advice, guys! Patience is the key!

[Bill White]

Just a quick thought that I forgot to mention. I try to use an odd number of boards when possible. 5, 7, etc. Design will benefit.
Bill

[Ed Frie]

I haven't done it, but I always wondered about making a saw blade wide groove down each board and glue a full length spline into each joint out of some contrasting wood. Might make a strong joint. I don't exactly know what it would look like, but it might be fun to try some time.

[Neil Brooks]

My $0.02 would be ... if you have a biscuit joiner, no harm in using it.

If you don't have one ... your glue-up won't suffer. You just have to be a bit more careful to get your panels flat.

It's often good to do fairly wide glue-ups in sections ... no wider than the capacity of your planer, and then glue THOSE up, at the end. It can save you a bit of heartache/hand planing if there's some slip, during clamping.

Clamping cauls (http://www.newwoodworker.com/cauls.html) are another pretty cheap piece of insurance.....

[Aleks Hunter]

Plus, flip every other board so the end grain is curved up, curved down, curved up... etc.

[Paul Symchych]

I have used full length splines on occasion for long joints. Mainly quick and easy to make and for ease of alignment. IMO a dissimilar spline looks kind of funny as a rectangular 'plug' at the edge of a table. A full length spline from whatever wood you are using for the panels becomes virtually invisible.

In a similar vein I recently chose to glue up 4/4 maple to make 8/4 legs. On a whim I used the table saw to cut a half inch deep slot right along the glue lines and inlaid a walnut spline. Purely for decorative reasons. I did it on the two faces with glue lines and perhaps should have experimented with doing it on all four faces of each leg. Maybe next time. The thin walnut strip on maple legs gave the legs a kind of racing stripe look that worked out well.