[Bernie_72]

This is a slideshow of a trestle table I built for a friend last fall. I actually joined the forum when I was trying to figure out how to deal with all the insect and other damage to this old wood. I finished the table back in October.

The lumber for this table is all reclaimed barn wood that I picked up last spring. After talking to a few people and doing a bit of research I believe the wood is black locust. It was used quite a bit for fence posts and occasionally for building barns in Wisconsin.

This build was a challenge mainly because of the old reclaimed wood. Removing the nails and dealing with insect and other age related damage took a lot of time, a lot of epoxy and CA glue and more hours of sanding than I care to remember.

I didn’t use any screws or other metal fasteners in this table, it was all connected with mortise & tenons (dominos), dowels and glue. I think I ended up using 144 tenons in this build.

 

[needshave]

Very Nice Bernie, I love the gain of the wood. In Ohio, black locust was also used for fence posts.

What was the used for table top end caps? Was that also locust? Again, very nice work.

 

[yomanbill]

That is some beautiful work. The way you did the breadboard ends is interesting. I don't think I saw oblong holes in the tenons. How did you allow for seasonal wood movement?

 

[Bernie_72]

Very Nice Bernie, I love the gain of the wood. In Ohio, black locust was also used for fence posts.

What was the used for table top end caps? Was that also locust? Again, very nice work.

That was black locust as well on the bread board ends, but it was a piece that I didn't have to take as much off during the jointing and planing operations so it stayed darker. All of the wood I worked with looked that dark after a couple of passes on the jointer. With the long 8' boards that I used for the table top I ended up taking around 3/8" off by the time I got them straightened out. The table top boards went from just over 2" thick to about 1.6" thick by the time milling was done. I ended up emptying my 20 gallon dust collector drum 5 times while cleaning up the boards for this table.

The jointing & planing work really lightened up the coloring on the boards. I ended up using dark tung oil to darken the boards a bit but unfortunately I lost that nice aged look on most boards.

 

[Bernie_72]

That is some beautiful work. The way you did the breadboard ends is interesting. I don't think I saw oblong holes in the tenons. How did you allow for seasonal wood movement?

I found the breadboard domino method on someone's youtube site. I don't remember who it was. I did end up using a file to extend the dowel hole in all the dominos apart from the center one. I think the picture I included in the slideshow showed the file but it must have been from before I finished widening out the dowel holes.

I used an online wood shrinkage calculator to figure out the potential movement of black locust in my area and then made each dowel hole a little wider in the dominos as I moved towards the outside of the table. I used the biggest dominos I had (14mm) and I made all the dowels by hand from extra black locust strips. I planned the dowel size based on the width of the 14mm dominos and the movement space needed to the farthest boards from the center.