Resisting Temptation, and How Flat Is Flat?

I’m nearly finished except for the finishing.

What I mean is, I’ve nearly completed the woodworking portion of the Shaker Trestle Desk, and I’m almost ready to begin putting the finish on it. I think I’ll paint the support a nice dark green, and finish the top with a stain and a clear poly.

Last night I performed that ancient rite of passage into galoot-dom … the hand planing of a tabletop. I’d done quite a bit of surface planing before, but nothing is quite as satisfying as watching (and performing) the transformation of three common pine boards into a smooth, level tabletop. Considering the fact that I was using 4/4 pine from the local building supply center, the edge jointing and gluing resulted in a pretty level surface. The misalignment of the individual boards did not exceed 1/32 of an inch in the worst places.

I did all of the planing with a jack plane. My attempts to improve the surface with my old wooden coffin smoother were disappointing. The plane felt and acted like it’s bottom had gone convex since the last time I used it. I also tried a few strokes with an ancient No. 3, but it seemed only to want to gouge and catch. ( Looks like I have some tuning up of planes to do before my next project.) So, after rounding the edges with a block plane, I removed the few remaining plane marks on the top with a good helping of hand sanding. I’ll sand again with a couple higher grits tonight, then it’s out of the cold garage and into the warm kitchen for a little finishing.

There were a couple of times during this project when I really thought about rolling out a power tool. Like when I needed to drill a couple of ½ inch draw-bore holes for the pegs in the leg joinery. I seriously considered using the drill press because I didn’t want to mess up the framework that far into the project. In the end, I carefully used a brace and bit. Then there was the temptation to use my bandsaw to form the large leg tenons. But I used a backsaw with a bench hook, and cleaned them up with a shoulder plane. Easy.

This project feels like it’s taking a long time. But then, I’m only working on it a couple hours a day, a couple days a week. I don’t think the choice to use only hand tools had much impact on the time. I know from experience that setting up a power tool and running several test cuts can really chew up valuable shop time. Sometimes I think “designing on the fly” is what actually takes up the majority of my time. Now that the design and construction details are complete, I’m sure building a second one would take less than half the time of the first.