Projects

Mission Dining Table and Chairs

In the early spring of 1998, my wife decided that it was time to buy a new dining table and chairs.  By this time, I had accumulated a few hand tools and had done a little bit of woodworking. In the back of my mind, I told myself that I could build them, provided she didn't want any fancy design. We went shopping. She looked at several candidates and gravitated toward a couple of Mission-style sets. They were in the $5,000 to $7,000 price range and, when I got down under the tables, were made of what appeared to be very thin veneers on some type of termite barf. I proclaimed that I could make a better product, and AT HALF THE COST!, including the occasional tool I might need;-) After some negotiating (she considered it hounding), she finally relented.

I did my homework, reading everything I could find about the style, and I eventually ordered a book. It includes plans for both side and arm chairs, but no rectangular dining tables. I took some design hints from a manufactured leg assembly available from Van Dyke's Restorers and drew up rough plans for my table base. I bought about 100 board feet of red oak at a local Southern Maryland sawmill (now out of business), took it to the base woodworking hobby shop at Patuxent River Naval Air Station and ran it through their big surface planer. It then went home, stacked and stickered in the garage/shop. The sawmill didn't have anything greater than 4/4, so I also bought an old rough hewn oak barn beam he had (~4" X 12" X 12') . Let me tell you, it was a chore lugging that beam the 50 miles to the hobby shop in my little S-10 pickup. I finally managed to get it up on their big radial arm saw table and cut it into three 4' long sections before the manager saw me. He wasn't about to let me run it through any more of his machinery, so it went home still rough – just in shorter pieces.

My first task was to cut the beam down into rough legs. Since neither my old Craftsman table saw nor my benchtop bandsaw would handle lumber this size, I decided to cut them with a handsaw. I didn't have a rip saw, but figured my Grand Dad's old Disston D8 crosscut would do fine. I didn't have a suitable means of supporting the beam sections while sawing, so I took a month-long detour to build a sawing bench.

Well, the crosscut saw was slow, but I eventually had 5 leg blanks cut (one spare in case I screwed up).

I then started the task of planing them down to finished size and squaring them up.

Scrub, jointer, and homemade scraper planes, along with winding sticks and a small 4" engineer's square eventually led to success.

Next came the stretchers, slats, and lower shelf, and then I assembled the base. Sorry, no pics of the base by itself ;-(

Between the base and chairs, we're talking a LOT of mortise and tenon joints. I broke down and bought a benchtop dedicated mortiser.  SWMBO was already questioning when the table would be done, and I hadn't even started on the top yet, which I expected would be the hardest part. The tolerances on the chisels weren't anything to write home about, but after fettling with them a bit, I managed to get it working pretty well. That oak is tough wood! Slow going and frequent touches of beeswax to the hot bit kept things from squeaking and squealing.

I had talked with fellow Galoot Rob Arthur about what I was embarking on, and how I wasn't sure how I would glue up all of the boards (wound up being 9 boards) for the tabletop. Rob gave me a copy of plans for some panel clamps from a woodworking mag, so I spent the next three months making the clamps. That meant another trip to the sawmill for 8/4 poplar, to the hobby shop to prep it, and countless trips to all of the big home improvement warehouse-type outlets in the area for hardware, plus a mail order to MSC for the knobs.

With the panel clamps ready, I cut the boards to rough length for the top and started in jointing them with my Florida flea market $35 Type 11 #7. I got the first two boards light-tight and called it a night. The next night, I did the other side of the second board and the third board. When I dropped them on the base to see how they looked, I found that the previous night's work no longer met up along their entire length. I fixed that, and started on the fourth board. Next night #s 1 and 2 again didn't match, nor did #s 2 and 3. That's when I decided to prep and glue one joint per night. Here's what the first two boards looked like in the clamps.

And here is the last board being glued to the top. I used one of the newer urethane glues (moisten one side of the joint) and that's waxed paper between the glue joint and the clamps to keep from gluing the clamps to the table. To make it easier on my back, I dropped a sheet of plywood on the base and used it as an assembly table. I also laminated a ~3" wide strip to the underside of the tabletop edges and ends, to make the top look thicker. At 79" X 39", a 3/4" tabletop looked out of place

After trimming the top to final size and smoothing it, I figured it was time to move on to the next step – finishing. I wanted to do it in the traditional manner, so I searched around and finally found a chemical supply house that would sell me industrial strength ammonia (~27%, as opposed to the ~5% available at the corner market). I also ordered a good organic vapor respirator from MSC.

To fume something this big, I built a box frame 4' X 4' X 8' and covered it with plastic sheeting. I double taped all of the seams but the fumes still got out. I wound up having to leave the garage door up about 6" with a small fan at the floor pulling in fresh air. I fumed the entire table for about two weeks. When it came out, it was a dull, chocolate brown color. Here's a shot of the fumed top with an un-fumed board so you can see the effects of fuming.

Next I slapped on a coat of boiled linseed oil and it looked like this.

All that was left was to shellac the thing, and put a good finish on the top. I put 4 or 5 coats of Paddylac super blonde on everything and 3 coats of McKloskey's Heirloom Tabletop Varnish on the top (both sides). I rubbed it out with synthetic steel wool and Murphy's Oil Soap.

A coat of paste wax, and with the help of a neighbor, the top and base were carried upstairs to the dining room (separately) and assembled with home made locust table clips. By then it was August, 1999. Only 15 months or so after I started! The finished table looks like this.

I was then ready to tackle the chairs.  The plans in the book called for 2" X 2" X 24" front legs and required a 2" X 4" X 40" blank to cut the dogleg back legs from.  I laminated up blanks from two boards, using just about every clamp I own.  I was able to get two rear legs from each of these blanks.  The plan was for 4 side chairs and 2 arm chairs, which is what I built.  With about 30 mortise and tenon joints per chair, the mortiser got a real workout!  Here's a shot of the assembled side chairs, with arm chair components also in view.

Here's a shot of a finished side chair. The chairs are all fumed, with BLO and 5 coats of Paddylac applied, then rubbed out with 3M's white synthetic steel wool and a coat of paste wax.

And here's a shot of the arm chairs nearing completion.

 The seats are ½" luan ply, covered with 2" of upholstery foam and 1" of synthetic padding, topped with black "Naugahyde". I had thought about using leather, but decided on vinyl because of the ease in cleaning it. With the experience gained in building the table, the chairs only took about 12 months to complete, including a 3 month break due to a herniated disk.

Ouch!!