Solid Oak Dining Table | 66

What's up guys, I'm Zach, and welcome back to Workshop Edits. In today's project, I want to take you through how I built this modern farmhouse table and matching bench. Now, the entire table is built out of white oak, and it has a Rubio Monocoat finish in walnut. Let's go ahead and get started. All right, it is a beautiful day to be in the shop, about 55 degrees, which is actually pretty cold for Southern California. I've got all the material I need, so that's 5 quarter white oak, which is going to make up the different components of the tabletop, the bench top, and the stretchers. I also have some 12 quarter white oak, which is incredibly heavy. That's going to make up the table legs, the bench legs. So what I'm going to do is first spend some time just looking at all of the 5 quarter pieces, decide which ones are going to be the table and bench top, and mark those out. And then we're just going to go through the process of jointing, and planing, and breaking things down at the miter saw, and just getting all these pieces to their rough dimensions so that we can get to assembling this thing. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get started. Hey guys, it's Zach from the future. I wanted to just quickly talk about the series of cuts that you just saw me doing, because you'll notice that I'm not using a riving knife. So shortly before this project, I purchased this new table saw blade, which is from Freud. It is a combination blade, and is a thin kerfing blade. So what I didn't know was that when you're using a thin kerfing blade, you have to adjust your riving knife. What I noticed was that because I hadn't adjusted it, I was getting a lot of binding with some of the bigger pieces of wood, and it's not that I needed a thin kerfing blade, which I actually went out and purchased, then realized I didn't need it. It's just that the riving knife itself needs to be adjusted. So the way that it's supposed to be adjusted is that this riving knife, if you're making cuts with the fence to the right of you, and you're pushing the wood through, the left side of the riving knife needs to be exactly coplanar with the outside of the blade. Then on the right side, so the side that is facing the fence, that just needs to be slightly on the inside of the blade. All right, back to the build. All right, so it's been about two and a half hours, I just finished breaking down all the material. Nothing is cut to its final length, but everything is jointed, planed, all to the same thickness, and has straight edges, so it's ready to begin assembly. So we have tabletop, benchtop, stretchers, and then all of the leg pieces, which you saw me milling from that 12 quarter white oak, which was pretty much not only the heaviest thing I've ever used, but it completely maxed out the capacity on the table saw. What I'm going to do is first lay out this tabletop, get it going, glued up and assembled. I'm going to use biscuits to keep everything lined up, and I'm going to do the same thing with the benchtop. Then we're going to start by cutting all of these various components to their final lengths and get the initial leg pieces assembled like I did on my previous farmhouse build. Okay, so we have the tabletop and the benchtop fully glued up and assembled. You saw I used biscuits there, and I like to just stand on top of my glue-up when I'm doing it. It helps me just keep things flat as I tighten things, so nothing bows. That's my personal anecdotal tip. You don't have to use that. Now what I want to do is turn our attention to the legs for the table and for the bench. So what we're going to do is cut everything to length over at the table saw using the table saw sled and stop block just to make sure each of the legs are the exact same. Then we're just going to do an initial assembly of them with glue. Tomorrow we're going to come back and reinforce everything with screws and use some dowels to hide those, and then cut our stretchers to final length and kind of bring everything together before we get into the final finishing of things. So let's go ahead and do that. All right, we're on to day two of this project, so everything has been sitting overnight. So we're going to start by popping everything out of the clamps. We're going to work on bringing the legs of the benches and the table together. Then we're going to turn our attention to doing a bunch of finishing work on the top of the table. All right, so the bases of the table and the bench are now assembled. I've got the table behind me, you can see, popped out of the clamps. I've got it flipped upside down. What I'm going to do is some kind of general cleanup on to get rid of excess glue, do just a little bit of sanding. Then this is really flat. This is actually one of the flattest glue-ups I've ever had. But what I want to do is, because it's hardwood, I'm going to add some C-channel, some steel C-channel to the bottom of it. So I'm going to route out just a little groove that goes all the way across, cut that C-channel to length, and then pop it in there with some screws. And by doing that, that's just going to prevent any flex over time with the changing of weathers or being in a different environment. It's cold right now. I assembled it when it's cold. If it gets a lot warmer and there's wood expansion, I want this thing just to stay as flat as possible. So we're going to go ahead and do that. Okay, that's a lot of sanding. So I've taken both the benchtop and the tabletop from 80 grit belt sander, 120 and 180 grit on the orbital sander, and 220 grit with some hand sanding. I also cut to final length both of them, and then I added a chamfer on the top and bottom of each. I think it just ends up looking really nice. It's nice on your arms as you sit at the table, and it's good for, you know, so you don't bump your knees or your arms when you're eating. So what I'm going to do now is turn my attention to the base of the table and the legs. So what I'm going to do is reinforce all of the joints with some hidden screws and then plug them with dowels. Then we're going to sand everything down. Again, I'll probably just start with 120 and then do 220 hand sanding, and then these pieces are going to be ready for finish. So let's do it. All right, so everything has been sanded to 220. All the dowels that are hiding the screws have been flushed up. Next thing I want to do is move on to finishing. So for this project, I'm using Rubio Monocoat in Walnut. This is above and beyond my favorite finish. It goes on super easily. You only have to do one coat, hence the monocoat part of the product. It looks great. It leaves a really clean, smooth finish to the touch. It's really protective. I love using it on furniture, and yeah, I recommend it if you haven't used it before. I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail on how to apply this finish. If you are interested in using it, I'll put a link to a video from The Wood Whisperer who does a great explanation for how to put it on. I'm going to start by doing the two tops, so that would be the top of the table and the top of the bench, and then I'm going to move on to doing the base. All right, so we just finished the table top and the bench top. It takes seven days for this finish to cure using the accelerant, so factor that into your projects, do some finishing, set it aside, and move on to the next part of it if you can. Before we get to finishing the base for this, what I want to do is drill out the holes for the hardware. So we're going to be using screws and threaded inserts to bring everything together. So in order for those screws to work properly, we're going to drill out some large recessed holes in the underside of each of these, just using like an inch Forstner bit. We're going to drill those, then drill pilot holes, then finish the piece, and when it's done, we will be able to then go back, mark out the same holes on the underside of both the bench and the table top, drill in and insert those threaded inserts, and then bring everything together, and we're going to be finished. All right, that is going to wrap it up for this build. I am super happy with how this table came out. I think the white oak with the walnut Rubio monocoat just has a really cool, unique look to it. If you guys enjoyed the video, just let me know by hitting that like button. Would love it if you would subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys next time on whatever it is that I'm building. Bye.