My truck is in the shop so I haven’t been able to pick up any wood for the project, but in the meantime I’m making a bunch of updates to the shop to get ready. For the longest time I didn’t have dust collection running to my table saw (just the jointer and planer, which makes tons of woodchips, and basically require dust collection from day one). I got some more ducting and added a drop down this weekend. I wish I could have moved it farther forward, but I need to leave room for the garage door to open. I’ve also got a remote starter coming so that I can start/stop the dust collector from the table saw and not have to go across the room to flip a switch.

The Tool Chest is up on the wall so I have some room to start on the Game Table! I got my wood down from the rack and laid it out to check on grain and color matching. Considering I bought these timbers several years apart, I think the color match came out great (12” square for reference):

The second board from the right is 16” wide (!) and is the largest single board of Sapele I’ve ever seen. I’ve been holding onto it for years, thinking I could use as a whole piece, but my jointer is only 8” wide and it would be a nightmare to flatten by hand. So, it’s going into the game table. The nice thing about it being so wide is that I can get a ton of boards out of it and they’ll all have a perfect color/grain match.

This is about 75 board feet (each board is 1 3/4” thick) and these boards will make up the “frame” of the table, which is colored blue here:

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Since these are the majority of the visible surface of the table, it’s important to get the color and grain matching as much as possible. The top will all come out of the 16” board, and the sides will come from the board on the far right (which is an also-impressive 14” wide). The less visible bottom and back (you’ll see them when the player trays are open) will be a mix and match from two different boards, but the grain/color is still pretty close. You won’t be able to really see multiple sides at the same time so someone shouldn’t really notice if they’re not a perfect match. There’ll be plenty of offcuts that I can use for stuff like the tray sides, cupholders, etc.

I took some time to draw up where each piece will come from in these bigger boards:

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First I’ll cut them to rough size (1/2” wider and 6” longer than finished size) to make them more maneuverable for resawing (cutting the 1 3/4” thickness in half to get two boards of ~7/8” thickness). I’ll let them sit for a few days to make sure they adjust to the climate, and then get to jointing and planing. My worry when resawing is that it’ll remove internal stresses in the boards and they’ll warp so much that by the time I joint and plane them (because they’re so long) that they’ll end up thinner than 3/4” once I remove any cup. But, they’re so long that I can subtly bend them straight when attaching to the table, and there’ll be plenty of glue and screws to hold them there. Normally you wouldn’t do this if you can avoid it (ideally you don’t want to pre-stress your completed piece) but in this case there’s no way around it without buying double the amount of wood (starting with a 1 3/4” piece and planing it down to 3/4”).

This isn’t even all of the Sapele I’ll need: I need to make the table leaves (6 total, each 12” wide), and I’ll be sandwiching 3 boards for the 5” square legs. But I’ve got plenty to do before I get to those…

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At lunch today I transferred the cutlist I laid out in my notebook to the actual boards:

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The two letter initials denote where on the table each board goes: T-Top, F-Front, B-Back, S-Skirt:

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I won’t trust these lines to be perfect when I’m actually at the saw cutting them: chalk doesn’t make make for the most precise line. I also make these rough cuts 1/2” wider and 6” longer than the final dimension, to account for any wood movement after breaking down the big boards, and snipe on the planer (I usually deal with between 0” and 1/64” of snipe on the first and last 2” of a board, but I don’t want to risk throwing something else out of alignment by messing with the planer, so I just cut the boards a little long and then trim it off when I’m done).

I’ll take real measurements before each cut rather than rely on the chalk lines. But, laying out each like this shows what the grain will look like in the final board. At the far end of the second board from left you can see I laid out the board at an angle to keep the grain as straight as possible. I’m trying to keep the straightest grain on the top and front boards, as those will be the most visible on the table. In fact, after staring at this layout for a few minutes, I decided to swap the cuts on the first and fourth board: the first board has the straighter grain of the two, so I’m going to use that for the fronts. The skirt and back short sides (only visible when you open up the player trays) will move to the fourth board where the grain is a little more wavy.

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Last night I broke down the boards along my chalk lines and ended up with a much more manageable stack:

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And a bunch of cutoffs that are too narrow to do anything with, so I trimmed them down to fit in our yard waste bin (hopefully they get turned into something useful!):

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As a woodworker there’s an ingrained impulse to keep offcuts like this forever. I went through that phase early in my hobby and after not using really any of them over the course of several years of collecting, I finally broke the habit! I’ll keep around a couple of the larger ones just in case I need to test a cut or as backing for the drill, but the rest of them gotta go!

I also set up a temporary miter station to cut the boards to length, as they’re too long and heavy to maneuver onto the table saw:

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I’ve been dreading resawing these huge boards for three reasons:

1. Maneuvering a 90” long, 1 3/4” thick board through the bandsaw is not easy

2. Half of 1 3/4” is 7/8” inch, which is just 1/8” thicker than the finished size of the board (3/4”) and leaves little room for error (the bandsaw blade also creates a saw kerf that’s a little wider than 1/16” so that’s even less spare wood left over!)

3. Internal stresses in the board could lead to them warping quite a bit once they’re opened up

I found a resaw jig that should help with 1 and 2:

One side is a tall fence at 90°:

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and the other is just a big block that’s clamped to the table and makes sure the board has zero lateral movement when going through the blade:

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The front corner of the block is rounded off to make sure it feeds smoothly:

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I’ll do a few test cuts to be sure that the blade is cutting straight: bandsaws are famous for tending to drift left or right in the cut if the blade isn’t perfectly centered on the top wheel.

Number 3 is up to mother nature. I intend to run the boards over the jointer at least once to try and get them as flat as I can, but they are very long and ending up with only 1/8” deviation over almost 8 feet is nearly impossible. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the good thing about them being so long is that I can subtly bend them flat when assembling the table. It may end up that they’re so close to 3/4” off of the bandsaw that I only have enough left over to pass each face through the planer only once (taking off 1/32” each time) to at least get them smooth.

I’m going to run a couple of the offcuts from yesterday through first to try and get a gauge of how they’ll come out. Worst case scenario: I’ll resaw them off-center, enough to get a single 3/4” board from each (but with enough extra that I can really get them flat). I’ll end up with only 8 final boards instead of 16. But, then I can go to the hardwood store and pick up another batch to make up the other eight. It means my grain/color won’t match as well…but every project has some tradeoffs!

#wood #woodworking #gaming #boardgames #saw