Terrible two table top tale.

[David F. Eisan]

Back in 2001 I made an ash coffee table for a friend and his wife,

called me recently to tell me one of their three cats had knocked over an open bottle of nail polish remover and there was some damage to the top,

nail polish remover had totally removed the oil based poly finish down to the wood.

I decided to run the top through my drum sander to remove all the old finish and then to refinish the top. I made this table before I had a drum sander. There was some pretty bad grain reversal in the top and I had to scrape away a lot of tearout,

ended up sanding off a lot of material to get all the finish off. So much in fact, that I sanded out the 1/16" walnut inlay,

to cut new grooves for new (and deeper) inlay,

inlay,

top all sanded, lets just break the edge with a 1/8" roundover. Grab Makita Laminate trimmer, looks like the right bit and right height, fire it up and start rounding over,

wrong roundover bit, totally wrong height, beads everywhere. Smash laminate trimmer on floor, take chainsaw to top and start over.

Nah, I didn't break anything. I wasn't really happy with how things were going all along, every step just didn't seem to go right and even if I hadn't used the wrong router bit, I would not have been happy with the finished project, it was just too thin now for the rest of the table.

Off to the basement to grab a little ash,

are nice 8/4 boards that I got for about $0.50 a BF at auction a while ago.

Here are the rough boards for the top,

reason I did the inlay in the old top in the first place was to hide a big knot hole in the centre of the board that only fell out after final planing. I told Scott I had ruined the top and since I was making a new one I asked him if he wanted the inlay. He did. To make it less work, I just glued up the top with walnut strips rather than the extra work of inlay (which was just a cover up last time),

ran the top through the sander and they cut it to length with my crosscut sled,

is the top all sanded and rounded over with the correct roundover bit,

is a pic of the new top beside the old top,

new top is *no where* as dark as it looks in the photo.

Installing the new top,

table,

20/20 hind sight, I should have just made a new top off the bat. I am a better woodworker now then when I made the first top and I had/have tons of ash on hand. Oh well.

David.

[Lee Michaels]

After that blow by blow account David, I feel tired!

Good story though. The walnut looks good in the ash. As for your bad roundover bit experience, you should have tried that on some scrap first!

The table looks good too.

Thanks for sharing.

[Doug Miller]

[Buddy Matlosz]

Should have just made a doily out of the damn cat and covered up the damage.

B.

[Owen Lawrence]

I really appreciate you showing us each step, including how you handled mistakes. It's inspiring. Thanks!

- Owen -