[ Motor whirring ] [ Whirring stops ] ♪ Growing up in Wisconsin, I always admired the timber-frame construction of its iconic dairy barns.

Well, today on "The Woodsmith Shop," you'll get your chance to try your hand at your own timber-frame masterpiece building this trestle-style hall table.

That way, you can have a little bit of Americana right in your own home.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

♪ Additional funding provided by... ♪ Titebond wood glues -- the pro's advantage.

♪ And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

And by... ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You know, Chris, if there's one thing that I think a lot of people really like, it's the timber-frame construction style.

And I really like that we can bring that style into a project that you can build in your shop.

That's right.

Timber framing can seem daunting, large, everything at a large scale, but this is a compact table that still has great details and one that you can make in a long weekend.

We've got a leg assembly, an arch that ties the two legs together, details such as a pinned tenon and a top which spans it all.

It really adds a nice look into the house no matter where you put it.

Now, for the table that we built in the magazine, we built that out of cherry.

But like the theme this season, we're going to deviate from the plants a little bit, and I think we'll build ours out of alder.

It's a nice wood.

It works really easily, and it's becoming one of my favorites.

Absolutely.

There's a lot of great woods to try, and alder is one of them.

Now, if you would like a free set of plans to get yourself started, they're available on our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

So I think Phil's going to handle our first segment and start on the leg assemblies.

Part of the appeal of this project are the thick timber-frame-looking components of the pieces, and that means you're going to start with heavy, thick stock.

Now, if you can find pieces like that, great, but if you can't, it means you're going to need to do a little bit of glue-up.

And for that, you'll have to take some time to prepare your workpieces so that you can glue them together seamlessly.

What you're looking for here is to create flat, smooth surfaces, so once the glue and the clamps go on, you won't have any noticeable gaps.

There are two ways you can approach this, though.

The first is to start with a power jointer.

Here you'll take the piece, and you'll pass it across the cutter head.

As you're doing that, you want to keep firm pressure on the out-feed side of the tables.

That way, you can get a smooth, flat surface.

And just take as many passes as you need.

The second approach is to secure your workpiece here at the workbench, and then I'm going to use a hand plane to do the job.

I'll start by taking a metal ruler or a straightedge and holding it across the width of the workpiece in different places along its length.

I'm looking for any cupping across the width or any noticeable humps.

And in a similar fashion, I'm going to work down the length looking for any bowing along the length of the piece.

If you find any heavy cupping, then you'll work the hand plane diagonally across its width.

When you find that you can take a pass all the way across and take smooth, even shavings, then you'll turn and work in the direction of the grain to smooth out those cuts.

Then you can work all the way up to a really smooth surface.

Then you can plane your workpiece down to its final size.

Again, you'll want to take light cuts on each face.

So you'll send it through the planer, flip it over, lower the cutter head and then send it through again until you're ready to get the piece down to its final thickness and ready for glue-up.

Now it's time to grab the glue bottle and glue the two pieces together.

What you're looking for here is a thin, even layer of glue all the way down, so I'll apply the glue, and then I'll use a spreader with some notches trimmed in it just to even out the glue and spread it around.

Then I'll bring the two pieces together and apply the clamps.

Once the glue is dry, you can trim the pieces to their final size over at the table saw.

Now it's time to tackle some joinery.

I have with me the two feet and the two braces, and these are each going to get a pair of mortises cut into the mating surfaces where the legs are going to fit into place.

Now, making mortises like this, especially when they're this big, is done in two steps.

The first step is over at the drill press.

There, I'll use a Forstner bit, and I'll drill overlapping holes down the length of each of the mortises.

The second step takes place right here at the workbench, and here, I'm going to square up the ends and then trim the sides of the mortise.

And I like to tackle the ends first, so what I'll do is take a chisel, set it up against my end line.

Then I'm going to use a mallet and drive the chisel straight down.

When I get to the sides, I'm going to use a slightly different technique.

Here, I'm just going to be paring away with the grain, so I don't need to use as much brute force.

What I'll do is I'll set the chisel right on my layout line again, and then I'm just going to lean down and pare the sides using my body weight.

But once they're done, I can cut the feed and the braces to final shape over at the band saw.

♪ The legs for our project are actually even simpler than the braces and the feet are.

But one thing I do want to point out and one thing you'll see in the plans is that the feet and the braces are thicker than the legs are, and that's going to create a nice offset joint once everything's assembled.

So my job now is to cut a tenon on each end of the legs that will fit into the mortises that we just got done with.

Now, I'm going to do things a little bit differently here.

I've laid out the size of the mortise on each end of all of my legs, and then I'm going to cut the shoulders of the tenons using a handsaw just because I like using hand tools.

And then I'll cut the cheeks over at the band saw.

So, I'm going to start by using my thumb to align the blade with the shoulder line, and then working from an angle, I'm going to cut down both the top and this near side until I reach my layout line.

Now I'm going to finish the cut by going down this far side until I reach that line.

I'll make this cut on all four of the thick shoulders, and then I'll rotate the piece and do the same thing, but here, making a shallower cut on this end.

Once all these shoulder cuts are complete, then I can cut the tenon cheeks over at the band saw using a rip fence that'll create smooth surfaces and a really strong glue joint.

The only thing left to do before assembling all this is to cut a shallow notch on the inside edge of the legs.

I did this making multiple passes across a dado blade at the table saw, and that's going to hold a tenon on the end of a curved stretcher that Chris is going to take care of in just a little bit.

So with that out of the way, I can start applying glue to the tenons and then fit those into the brace.

Now, here's a pro tip -- You want to make sure that you keep the notches on the inside of the leg as you assemble everything and that you keep the correct end of the leg matching at each end of the piece.

I can fit that in.

Then I'm going to use a piece of hardboard here as a spacer when I bring these two pieces together.

And finally, I'll use a clamp to just draw everything and keep it tight while the glue dries.

Well, now it's time for us to make the arch which connects the two leg assemblies and helps support the top.

So to make the arch, I have a piece of alder 2 3/4 by 5 inches.

Now, in creating the arch, I would like to preserve the grain structure running across each face, so to do that, I'm going to begin by cutting my board directly in half.

There are four pieces that make up the arch, so by starting here, I'll begin by mitering the ends at 95 degrees.

Then I'm going to go to 110 and end at 45.

The four pieces that make up the arch will all be splined together, and by doing that, we'll have a strong structural arch, and the grain will follow itself all the way through.

The next step in creating our arch is to join the four pieces together, and we're going to do that by use of a spline.

To join with a spline, I now need to cut a groove on the end of each of the four pieces so they can come together.

To do that, I have a 1/2-inch dado stack in my saw.

It's set 3/4 inch high.

Well, here are the four segments that are going to make our arch.

You'll see we have the grooves that we previously cut using the dado head on the table saw, and this is one of the splines which will fit in the grooves and join these three joints.

Now, on the very ends of our arch, there's a tenon which fits in here which allows our arch to join up with the two leg assemblies.

This slot for that tenon is much too large for the table saw, so I did that using the band saw and a little bit of chisel work to get rid of the waste.

Now, to glue up these joints, I've applied cauls on either side, and that's going to allow me to use a clamp across my two cauls and tightly join each of these joints.

Otherwise, it'd be extremely difficult to clamp all this together.

I'm going to apply glue to the spline but also to the grooves which the spline is going to go into.

These are structural joints, so I want to make sure that everything is going to be very solid and well-glued.

And now here is the magic of using the cauls.

I can clamp the joint together on the top and on the bottom, as well.

So you see the process, and now I'm going to repeat it for our other two joints.

With the individual pieces of our arch glued up, now it's time to lay out the arc itself.

To do that, I'm going to use a trammel point, and I have it set at 19 1/2 for the lower curve of our arc.

With that done, I'm going to reset my trammel point to 21 3/4 inches.

With my arc set, it's time to head to the band saw.

Cutting a large arc has its challenges, mostly because a great deal of the workpiece is going to be hanging unsupported off the table, so it's important to take a good, steady stance and to make sure that the workpiece is fully supported all the way through the cut.

Also, take your time.

Be careful, because any mistakes here, well, you're going to have to sand them out later, so use a little patience.

Use a little care.

After band-sawing the arch out, I went ahead and sanded the underside and the top.

And to do that, I just used off cuts from our band-sawing to have perfectly shaped sanding blocks.

With that done, I have the arch, our tenon blanks, and the leg assemblies all dry assembled, and my job now is to scribe the fit of the inside of our arch to the tenon blank.

That wood will be band-sawed off.

Now, as long as I have everything dry assembled, I also want to scribe the outside of our leg assembly to our tenon blank, and the reason I'm doing that is it's going to help me accurately locate the mortise that holds the wedge that holds our assemblies together.

Well, I wrapped up the arch by gluing the tenons in place and then drilling out and squaring up the mortises for our pins, so next step, I'm going to go ahead and assemble everything together.

And now I'll place these pins in the mortises.

And there we go.

Leg assemblies, arch together, and we are ready to build a top.

So, we're at the point of our hall table where you can really add the icing on the cake, or in this case, the top on the table.

Now, you could build the top with one piece of stock, but it's pretty wide.

It's 15 inches, and it's going to have a tendency to cup over time.

So to counteract that, we're going to glue up three different pieces of stock to form the top.

Now, I've already cut these to the width, and I've left them a little long, and I'll show you why later, but now before we glue these up, we need to dress the edges, and that's how we get a good glue joint.

And you can do this with a jointer, but I'm going to use my jointer plane.

I'm going to take passes until I get a full width shaving all the way down the board, and I'm going to come back with a small square to verify that the edge is staying square to the face.

All right.

That looks pretty good, so let's make sure we have this in the right orientation.

And I think that's how I want that to glue-up, so let's mark that.

All right.

So now I'm going to pull out the clamps, and we'll get this glued-up.

♪ ♪ Now, because we're using alder, it tends to have a lot of knots in it.

You can see a couple big ones on here, but I like to say those are character marks.

They're not knots.

Once we're done with this, I'm going to come back, and I'm going to fill those with epoxy before we add a final finish.

That way, they're going to add some nice character, but they're not going to be distracting.

So, once the glue was dry on this top, I went and pulled the clamps off, and I cleaned it up with a little bit of sanding.

Now we can really trim it down to its final dimensions.

Now, I know I said I'd already ripped these down the width, but I have a little bit more trimming to do on one edge.

Then I'll switch out the blade and cut it to length.

So now that we have our top cut to size, we need to do a little bit of work.

Now, I said we are going to build this top using three sections of wood because it's more stable, and it's probably going to stay flat.

But we still want to give it a little help, and that help is going to come in the form of breadboard ends.

What these breadboard ends are going to do is they're going to fit over a tenon on the end of each end of the top, and that's going to allow the top to expand and contract, but it's going to continue to hold it flat over time.

And you can see I've already cut a groove in here, and that's easy to do over at the router table.

I simply set up a pair of stop blocks one on each end of the fence, and then I lowered the workpiece overtop of the running bit and made the cut in two or three passes, and that's where I'm at here.

So now we need to cut the matching tenon on the end of the top to accept that slot on the breadboard end.

Now, you could probably do this with the table saw with a dado blade, and this is a top that the size is probably pushing it.

I don't know that I'd want to run this through the table saw because it can get a little skew-y.

So instead, I'm going to use a small palm router with a straight bit.

The edge you got here is going to make this really easy.

I'm going to make a cut along one end, and then I'm going to come back and remove the waste because it's going to leave a little bit, and then I'll flip this over and cut the opposite side.

Then it's just a matter of repeating the process for the other end.

So, now that we have the tenon cut on the ends of our top, we're ready to go ahead and fit our breadboard ends.

Now, I've done a couple of things first.

First thing I did is I went ahead and took this tenon, and I nipped off the two ends.

That's because we have that small section of our breadboard end that doesn't have a groove cut into it.

So then that fits right over there, and you'll also see that I went ahead and drilled holes already in the breadboard end.

That's because the breadboard end is going to be attached to the tenon and the top with a series of three dowels.

And I just drilled those over at the drill press.

So now we can get this fit, so I'm going to slide this guy into place where I like the look of it, and then I'm going to use a drill, and I'm going to mark the locations.

Now, I'm not going to drill these holes into the tenon just yet.

You run the risk of skewing the drill, and then you're going to waller out that top hole, and your dowel's not going to fit nice.

But with the brad-point bit, I can reach in there and push down, and that's going to mark the tenon where I want to drill the holes.

Okay, and now we can go ahead and drill those.

Okay.

Now that those are in there, we're not quite ready to glue that in just yet, because, remember, the whole point in the breadboard end is to allow this top to expand and contract.

So if we use these three dowel holes and drive dowels through them, it's still going to limit the expansion and contraction.

So what we want to do is we want to grab a rasp, and we want to elongate these outside holes.

All right.

So now that those are elongated, that's going to allow our top to expand and contract, so we're ready to get this guy into place.

Now, just like we elongated those holes, we don't want to hold those ends down with glue, so we are just going to add glue to the center of this tenon, and we'll brush that out so it's on the top and bottom.

And now we can just slide that into place, and we'll line up our dowel holes, and we can go ahead and drive these dowels into place.

And we're going to add just a little bit of glue along the top edge of the dowel so it's just held to the top of the breadboard.

There we go.

Now it's a simple matter of repeating that process to get the other breadboard into place.

Once that glue is nice and dry, I'll sand these pegs flush.

Then it's time to come back, and we're going to bevel the bottom edge of the breadboard ends.

There we go, and like I said, the last thing to take care of on this top before it gets installed to the base is to cut these bevels.

Now, you could honestly cut these bevels at the table saw before you installed the breadboard ends, but to me, there's something just therapeutic about marking two lines and then planing down to them, so that's what I opted to do.

So at this point, this is ready to install to the table base, and that's simply done with a couple of screws.

I can't decide what I like more, spending time in my shop building a project, or when I finally see the finished project take its place in the home.

Well, on today's episode of "The Woodsmith Shop," we built this trestle-style hall table.

And whether you decide to go with a more refined or a more rustic look, you'll find that it's a great project.

If you want to build one for yourself, the plans are at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

Then after spending some time in your own workshop, we'll meet up right back here in the woodsmith shop.

♪ ♪ ♪ Phil: If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week, you'll receive an e-mail with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

Sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition, with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free "Woodsmith" book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD.

Or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

♪ Additional funding provided by... ♪ Titebond wood glues -- the pro's advantage.

♪ And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

And by... ♪