sharpening table v0

A friend of mine had shown me his sharpening table a while back and I was pretty jealous. I have been storing my stones underneath the workbench top, which isn't too bad - but it means to sharpen I have to pull them out, vacuum them off, and then put it all away when I was done.

It would be much nicer to just take the blades to a station and sharpen there. I knew I wanted a hand grinder to mount on it as well, so it would need to be a decently sized table. Restoring the grinder is going to be a separate project. I’ll need to stock up on WD-40.

I hadn't made a table-like thing before, and the shop owner informed me that the saw bench did not count.

Rather than going and getting new stock I decided to use a couple boards from the workbench stash. I will probably regret this later, when I have to go transport more 8 foot boards.

As with most projects, I started with a physical layout, and then dimensioning.

There's always more planing than you might expect! I used gifted thick 3x3 legs that had been in the shop for about a decade, and some 2x4 for the top.

Cutting down the tenons and drilling out the mortises did not go particularly well. My technique here is still very bad, and out of the four legs I would only say one of the joints (the "C" leg) was moderately passable.

I also ran into a lot of problems with blowing out the short grain because I didn't leave enough buffer to the edge of the table top. I patched some of this, but mostly it just looks terrible.

My philosphy on shop furniture is that I explicitly don't care how bad it looks as long as it functions. I practice some things with scrap, but mostly I'm fine learning as I go. Things failing can also be instructive; defective or crap joints will certainly be educational.

For the mortises, I tried two techniques - mortise chisel and Forstner bit. Neither looked great. The "C" leg I felt had some success with the Forstner bit, but I also got a new 1.25" chisel and a much heavier mallet and those made keeping straight lines on cleanup a breeze. That joint is actually tight and I could have left it without glue.

I had meant to do mortise and tenons for the stretchers, but I ended up just screwing them in and quickly making and laying some shelves on them.

Quite a few things went wrong with this build, but it's a table and it's heavy and it's unlikely to fall apart on me. The legs aren't square to each other, or exactly the same size, but it's actually mostly level.

I reckon I understand what I was doing wrong with cutting the mortises now, but it basically comes down to rushing. The Big Chisel will certainly help with clean lines, but not being patient is still my biggest problem.

The next version of this table would likely re-use the legs, so I'd have to make the table top taller, or a drawer sort of thing. Some day.