This morning I basically finished construction on the water table, all that I needed to do was build and attach the bottom shelf, but there was a lot more to that part than anything so far here is what I needed to do.
- Crosscut the slats for the shelf
- Pre-drill and countersunk the slats to receive the screws
- Dry fit slats to frame
- Added a round over to the slats
- Glued & Screwed the slats
- Attach the whole shelf assembly to the table
- Construction Phase complete
CROSSCUTTING TIME
First I needed take all my 1x3 and cut them to size on my miter saw station, using a stop block on the chop saw to cut all 16 pieces to final size, below you can see a picture of my miter saw.
COUNTERSINK TIME
So now that I have all my slats cut I wanted to bury the screws beneath the surface of the wood, I was adding 4 screws per slat so that was a lot of holes to drill so I brought all the slats over to the drill press and using my home made drill press table I set up another stop block and prepared the countersinking bit for a lot of repetitive cuts.
DRY-FIT SLATS
I needed to determine what the spacing was for each slat so I lay out all the slats and experimented with the best spacing and I arrived at using a 3/4" space between each of the slats, you will end up with a slight larger space on the second-last slat from the end maybe 7/8" but I was OK with that.
ROUTER TIME
I was very excited for this step because I recently purchased a new Router from Bosch and I had only installed it in my router table last night so today was the first time I used it, and it didn't disappoint. Anyway I installed a round-over bit in the router as I was using it to apply a profile around 3 edges of each slat and it came out great, took any sharp edges and turned them into soft rounded edges, a necessity for anything that you make for children.
SECURING THE SLATS
So now that all the slats were milled it was ready to secure them to the frame, I used Titebond wood glue and 1 1/4" exterior screws to secure the slats in position. I used a 3/4" thick piece of wood as a spacer and just glued and screwed each piece until the shelf was finished. After the slats were installed I sanded the shelf with 220 grit sand paper in my orbital sander.
ATTACHING THE SHELF
Now that the bottom shelf is complete I needed to attach it to the legs, because the bottom shelf fits inside the legs and screwed, I needed to devise a method of resting the bottom shelf assembly in place to screw into the screws. So to achieve this I cut spacers to act as ledges for the shelf to rest on temporarily and screw them home.
Below are the pictures depicting the method I used, pictures are always vetter at describing something than words so here you are, please remember that the table is upside down in these pictures.
CONSTRUCTION & BUILD COMPLETE
Adding the bottom shelf completed the build phase of this project and it looks great, I still need to sand the whole unit down to 220 grit sandpaper, I was going to paint the unit but because it is pressure treated it doesnt take kindly to paint as the wood is still very moist and probably will remain that way for some weeks/months.
Below are some of the pictures of the unit completely assembled and it looks great
NEXT
- Sand the entire unit smooth
- I will add the round over detail to the front of the top frame, thinking about adding the round over to the edges of the legs on the non tapered sides