Spiral Table Update by Jeff Junak

Spiral Table Update
Part 2
By Jeff Junak
March 18, 2004

Spent most of the last couple of days cutting wedges, glueing up pieces and flattening. Take a look:

This pic shows cutting the wedges that are going to make up the top of the table. The bottom pieces are cut the same way.

Here are all the top pieces cut and roughly fitted. It took me quite a while to trim all the pieces to get them to fit.

I couldn't glue up the entire piece at once, since the shape was too irregular. I ended up glueing up 2 wedges into larger wedges and progressively building up the shape. I made a couple of quick and dirty jigs to help hold the wedges in shape while I was clamping.

Here is the glue up of the top, made from wedges that had been previously glued.

Here is a pic of the spiral in process of getting glued up. I don't feel confident to glue up more than 2 or 3 pieces at a time, so it is taking a while to come together.

I ran into some difficulties with the top and bottom in that they pieces were not exactly the same thickness, and even though I used biscuits for alignment, I couldn't get the pieces perfectly flat. They are too large to run through my planer, and I don't have a wide belt sander. I ended up using straight edges, a belt sander and lots of hand planing to get the top and botton pieces flat on both sides. I think I spent 6 or 7 hours on the flattening.

Hopefully I can finish the spiral glue up before the weekend. Its spring break next week and we are going away for a week.

Links:
The Plans