Oak Dining Table p.1

Small picture shows the OLD table which was a bit 1980's in style, had lippings which had shrunk and cracked the all-over veneer. The cellulose lacquer was embrittled and chipping. I discovered the top was veneered chipboard. Yuk

Main picture is the NEW table which is more Shaker in design. This style is very in-vogue in 2006 so it is both traditional and modern, and goes equally with the faux-Tudor sideboard. Materials solid American White Oak legs and rails with 18mm MDF top veneered in American White Oak and solid oak lippings. Finish is the more forgiving Danish Oil over dark stains.

It is difficult to buy a table at 2ft 5inch by 4ft 10inches, so i decided to build a new table of the same size with veneered MDF top, an oak subframe of four legs, and four traditional rails with mortise and tenon joints. Lippings were biscuit jointed to the edges with breadboard style ends rather than mitres which are notoriously difficult for an amateur to get to meet exactly. The dark "Tudor oak" FINISH would be the most difficult to copy. I used Liberon concentrated brown dye in meths, followed by Liberon spirit stain in tudor oak, and Rustin's Danish oil loaded with Windsor and Newton oil pigments.
A simple drawing can be downloaded by right-clicking here and "Save Target As" a PDF file on your computer. If you have not already, you will need a pdf reader.
The twelve pieces of American White Oak were left to dry out and settle in the house for a month before build started. They were turned daily to expose new faces. Total cost of the oak, planed all round to nominal sizes, from local UK supplier was £200. Eeek! I usually scrounge stuff from broken furniture in skips and tips. Veneered MDF for the top was another £78, cut and delivered. The guys in my local Travis Perkins were very helpful.
I hate marking out mortises. I prefer when making haunched mortises to rout the haunch slot by careful setting of the router table, and use this as the mortise guide for drilling and chiselling (I have no dedicated mortise machine) The mortise is set 10 mm in from the outer edge by using a 10mm drill to set the router table fence. (Take care not to damage the cutter). Mortise size will be 1/2", so I use a CMT 1/2" cutter to rout a slot 5mm deep in one pass. The setup is not powerful or deep enough to rout the actual mortise which is 55mm deep
Start and finish point pencil marks are drawn on the router table in order to get a 72mm long haunch slot. The cutter is first marked on the table as two lines, and these marks are used to as reference to mark the start and finish points.
As cut must be right-to-left, the other haunch slot must be cut by lowering the work onto the cutter whilst moving it slightly side to side. (This cutter has no centre cutter). The work is lowered so that it never goes beyond the RH pencil mark. It must also be kept tight to the fence. Then the major cut is still right-to-left, but starting at the blind end of the slot. Care must be taken not to severely injure your right hand when the cutter appears at the free end. I could say that 'guards have been removed for photographic purposes' like Norm says, but that would be a porkie-pie.
The required length of mortise is marked in the slot. In this case a line is squared across, 12mm from the open end. The drill table fence is set so that a half-inch forstner bit sits in the routed slot. Forstner bits are accurate but slo-o-o-ow. If I had a deeper drill press I would have used a spiral or auger bit, but I haven's, so I didn't. 1/2" goes nicely into 60mm with the holes just overlapping a millimetre - nice for forstner bits to cope with, and minimal chiselling sfterwards. These 60mm square legs are heavy so they are clamped for each hole, boring but safe.