I'd thickness the spline material and match the grooves to the spline thickness so it's a snug fit. This means you will have to piece together the spline piece by piece. The grain of your splines should be cross grain, the grain should run perpendicular to the long pieces' grain. Quartersawn is your best bet for this kind of project. Wood can warp enough to be annoying in one day. Do the flattening, cut the spline, glue up and clamp on the same day. This will help greatly on producing a flat glue up. Cut all the grooves with the flattened face down. Flatten the top either with a hand plane or a planer. The trick is to flatten and thickness your stock BEFORE you cut the grooves for the spline. My question is, has anyone used this technique and what kind of success or failure was it? I will be using pocket hole screws to help secure the maple/walnut edges since two of those edges will be gluing edge grain to end grain.īlind splines will allow you to glue up the pieces while leaving the ends unaffected. Some people removed the screws after the glue dried so they could reuse them, some people left them in. I’d like to try to avoid as much of that as possible with the new table top although I know it won’t come out perfect and will require sanding.Īs an alternative to cauls, I’ve seen some videos where, after the boards are clamped, they use face clamps to align the boards and pocket hole screws to secure it until the glue dries. I’ve had relatively good success with this although on larger panels, along some of the joints, the boards would be a bit higher on one side of the joint and lower on the other which required sanding to even them out. Anyway, in the past I’ve used cauls to keep the boards flat while the glue dries. Hard to believe I actually have enough clamps for a project. I have never glued up a panel this large although I do have enough clamps to handle it. The inside part of the table will be constructed by edge gluing 6 boards 5 ½” X 33”. I will be replacing it with a walnut and maple top similar to the second picture, which I found on the internet. The edges are supported by a frame of some kind of composite. The first picture shows the existing top which is 39” X 39”. I am going to build a replacement top for a coffee table.
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