After a quick tune-up the slot mortiser was thrown into production. I got carried away. an aircraft will be able to land on this table. Lots of dowels. But then, table tops do see lots of moisture over the years, so maybe aircraft carrier construction is not such a bad thing. Here's a couple planks getting stitched up for a dry fit. Before I got the mortiser, I was planning on using biscuits for the edge joints, but dowels provide more strength & a precise fit.
The scene of the crime - the nice thing about making tables is you have an assembly table for glue ups all ready to go. I glued up the planks in pairs, & flattened each pair with my jointer hand plane, top & bottom. Then started gluing up the pairs & re-flattening by hand until I had one big flat table top. About 9 days of hand planing! Nathan at Chapel Arts in East Van has a CNC machine for getting big wood flat, about 100/hr (he has the most awesome shop in a heritage building). Gluing up the whole table top, then flattening with the CNC machine & finishing with a smoother plane would be a more economical approach. I decided to do it by hand this time round because it's a good exercise to go through & was curious how flat I could get it by hand (pretty damn flat).
