Joining sheet goods for confrence table

[Jason Thaxton]

Im having a heck of a time joining oak sequence cut 3/4 mdf. I have tried biscuts and a spline but I cant get them to line up perfectly across a four foot joint. Im building a 13 foot long confrence table for a customer and he wants it to look seemless. Problem is the veneer is so thin that if it is off just couple thousandths when I try and correct I sand or scrape through to get the joints flush. Anyone have any recomendations. I am putting on a laquer finish if I cant get it 100% perfect could I build the finish up to hide the imperfection in the joint. The stock I am using looks like when the sanded it they dug in a few places and its making it real tuff to match up. I want to use a combination of biscuts and countertop joint connectors to clamp the peices in place. anyone have any ideas?

[Keith Outten]

Jason,

We've done some plywod joining in our shop in the past, a very large cabinet job we did for the Yorktown School Division. We used a router and cut splines to join shelving and it worked well but was tedious work. Each pair had to be preped perfectly and we were lucky enough to find plywood that had a thicker top veneer so a little bit of sanding was possible. The seems were acceptable for shelves but not for a table top since it was impossible to color match birch plywood across such a long joint from the material we had to work with.

[Bill Arnold]

Jason,

From your description, you must be using mdf with the veneer already attached. I'm not sure what to suggest other than what you've been trying. When I've run into issues with biscuits, it has usually been traced to my not holding the plate jointer dead-on; any slight variation in elevation or angle can create an alignment problem.

Looking at the project from a different perspective, I would have joined mdf or plywood and sanded it smoothe first, then applied the veneer. Seems like it would be much simpler to handle it this way.

Regards,

[Bob Lang]

If you can run a cleat under the joint, that might let you pull high spots down with a screw and let you get a shim under any low spots.

Hope this helps, that's one of those things that sounds easy but isn't. I wouldn't hold out much hope in correcting the problem with the finish.

Bob Lang