The deconstruction process continues.
During this process, I've discovered some interesting irregularities. The corner pieces where the perimeter braces meet the legs of the table have two different types of joints.
The corner in the picture to the left has a hybrid joint. The brace coming from the top of the picture meets the leg with a typical mortise and tendon joint. The brace from the left of the picture, however, is not jointed, but instead attached with a bolt.
The corner in this picture shows both braces with the mortise and tendon joint.
I'm not quite sure why some are jointed, and others are bolted. Weird.
The mortise and tendon joint is one of the strongest and oldest joints
in woodworking. Now there are jigs that will cut super precise mortises
and tendons for you, but I wonder if Calvin carved these by hand. If so,
I'm super impressed. And I also understand if he got tired of carving
all these joins by the end and just decided to spend the extra money on
hardware and bolt a few together.
 |
| Diagonal brace removed. |
 |
| Recalcitrant bolts are no match for my hacksaw. |
 |
| These nails were the most difficult to remove. I utilized ninja tactics to get them out, but still managed to put a hole in my thumb. |
 |
| The upper half of this board has been stripped twice. |
I started the stain removal process. I'm working with a stripping jell, instead of the less viscous form, which helps to keep things a little cleaner. After the first strip, much of the stain still remained. I could see the wood gain again, but many of the softer sections of wood retained much of the stain and remained much darker than I would like. I started on a second round of stripping and was able to remove a little more. Unfortunately, the top planks are the easiest pieces to strip, so these pieces of wood will probably end up being the lightest sections.
 |
| Hey! There is wood underneath all that stain. |
 |
| Stripped twice on the left, versus once on the right. |
