Outdoor coffee table, or bench 🤷🏻‍♂️

[SimonStevensCanes]

The coffee table that I refurbished for my mother finally got delivered after 18 months of covid delays, so we are without a place to put our cold beer/prosecco whilst enjoying the garden.

I had seen a simple slatted bench design by The Wood Whisperer which I was confident fell comfortably within my abilities. You'll have to read to the end to judge that for yourself . I wanted to shorten the bench a little and I would be using Sapelle with loose tenon joinery, so I would also need to build a loose tenon jig.

My first job was to audit my Sapelle stock to see whether I would need to make a trip to the lumber yard.



By shortening the bench design to 12 slats instead of the 17 in the design, I could avoid the lumber yard. It has wiped out my stock, so a trip is inevitable I guess.

The rough sawn stock that I had been avoiding milling (due to not having a jointer) would be needed, and fortunately my FIL has passed down his trusty old Myford planer, which with only very minor tweaking (and learning!) I was able to get good enough surfaces out of. The blades need sharpening for sure, but "flat enough" was good enough in this case.



With the stock milled and rough cut, I moved on to building the loose tenon jig.

 

[SimonStevensCanes]

I won't cover the jig build here, but it was as straight forward as Tamar's build video suggests. Only hiccup was realising that I'd need some imperial threaded rod for the micro jig connectors .

Having cut slats and rails to final dimensions I batched out all the mortices.



A quick dry fit reassured me that I hadn't cocked anything up too bad.



I added a tiny round-over to the lengths of the slats and the outside edges of the rails. In hindsight I could have rounded over all edges and had a rebate detail where the slats join the rails. This would have made final shaping/sanding of the top after glue up a lot easier/cleaner, but I guess would have introduced somewhere that rain could sit and rot out the top, so probably for the best that I didn't even think of it at the time .



The round-over is subtle but really does soften things beautifully. With that glued up (and me oblivious to the mistake I made during glue up!), I set it aside and moved on to the base.


These sorts of glue ups are something I dread. It seems stupid to say "I'm not in the habit of checking for square", but I really do forget on occasion (with horrifying results). Fortunately I was able to remember this most important of steps and managed to achieve a nice square base.

One of the legs has a bit of wobble to it, but I guess that just fixes in my mind that this is a coffee table, not a bench . I'm not sure what caused this, I was fannying around for longer than I'd like getting everything square, so maybe that combined with being a bit mean with the Titebond 3 .



With the top layer in place, I'm super happy with how it looks at this point. It looks deceptively close to being done at this point. Just trim the top and sand right?

I cracked on with cleaning up the top. Unfortunately my glue up here hadn't been as perfect as it might have as I had placed the bottom side down whilst glueing up, meaning the slats and rails were perfectly flush on the wrong damn side . My first real go with card scrapers turned out really well and I managed to get everything flushed up quickly.

Here's where the design kicked my ass. As I outlined above, I couldn't round-over the gaps between slats before glue up, so I had to do these by hand. 12 slats = 13 gaps * 2 ends * 2 sides = 52 hand filed rounders. Fortunately it was a fair bit quicker than I expected, and I knocked them all out in about 4 hours and I could finally sand.

 

[SimonStevensCanes]

Day one of sanding (yes there was a day two, no I didn't enjoy it) revealed more over eagerness in gluing up the top. I had failed to sand the sides of the slats, so now I had to manage by hand in a location I couldn't squeeze a sanding block into.



Lesson learned .

Day two of sanding was much more enjoyable as British summer returned to the North of England. I set up camp in the garden knowing that I would get to apply finish and bottled beer before the day was over.



I finished up sanding the top to 320 grit (I somehow don't have any 240 grit mesh discs ) and chamfered the leg bottoms to avoid tear out as it gets inevitably dragged around the deck.

Finally I applied a coat of teak oil, attached the top and she was ready for action .

 

[SimonStevensCanes]

I forgot to follow up on the mistake I'd made with gluing up the top. I clamped on 1 side only, opening up the joints between the slats and the rails on the bottom side ever so slightly (~0.5mm). Fortunately being the bottom side, the mistake is largely undiscoverable .

Another bullet dodged, was that the original design called for proper tenons and dimensions were inclusive of such. This oversight widened and lengthened the table by the length of a tenon. I had shortened the table, and had actually considered widening it, but without reconsidering the end slat and rail locations this resulted in being able to see 1 small corner (2mm x 2mm maybe) of each leg top through the slats, but otherwise worked out fine.