Record Player Table
When we moved here two years ago we brought all of our records with us, but left behind the record player itself. Since then we've tried to fill that gap in our home, but lacking any space to put our collection and a record player we kept putting it off. Wanting to do some real woodworking, for the first time since high school, a record player table was an obvious first project for me.
If I said that this project took 5 months to complete it wouldn't be the full story; really it took a few hours, every other weekend, over 5 months. It was still by no means a quick or easy job. The size of my workspace is very limited, so I only have space to store and work with hand tools. All boards were cut to size with a hand saw, chiseling all joints was done with a chisel and mallet, and sanding was done with good old elbow grease.
And because I hate to do anything the normal easy way, I also opted for a design which didn't require any screws, nails, or brackets. If I'm going to spend a bunch of time building something, I would like to be assured of a long-lasting result. I had to create real joints the old fashioned way, wood and glue only.
Initial rough sketch and calculations of supplies required.
The project started with me drawing up a rough plan based on how big our space is, how big the record player we planned on buying would be, and how big records are in general. Pretty much all measurements pictured ended up being changed as the project went on, either deliberately or on-the-fly due to mistakes I made. I have learned that woodworking is 50% error correction.
Skirt boards. The tenons were cut with a saw, not chisel, which resulted in a less precise joint.
There is a local hobby store which specializes in woodworking projects. They sell different sized boards pre-planed and pre-ripped, so I only ever had to cut to length. This saved me a ton of effort and time, with the trade-off that they mostly carry european fir, limiting me to that as my choice of material. In the future I'd like to find a source for some kind of hardwood, but for a first hand-tool-only project a soft-wood like fir was probably a fine choice anyway.
Legs with mortises and tapers.
Everything up to this point was fairly familiar to me. I have a lot of practice with the handsaw from previous smaller home improvement projects, and designing, measuring, and marking the wood itself was easy enough. But the mortises in the legs required a chisel, and there was no way around it.
Chiseling the mortises ended up being less difficult than I expected. The chisel is even more forgiving than the saw, since it only takes off little pieces at a time and doesn't tend to run away like a saw does. Chiseling is also not as time consuming as I feared. All 20 mortises were knocked out in about two afternoons, and the fit with the tenons is just about perfect.
My workspace: a patio sofa and upturned waste basket.
I've included this picture to emphasize that it doesn't actually take much to do real woodworking, as long as you're willing to be a bit flexible. For all cuts pictured above my "workbench" consisted of a patio sofa (sans cushions) to which I would clamp the boards, and a plastic Ikea waste basket that was the right height to sit on. Would I have worked better with a real workbench? Of course. But I didn't have one, and the inconvenience wasn't worth being stymied by.
Partially constructed for measuring purposes.
At this point the legs and skirts were all cut, and only the tabletop and shelf were left to do. The tabletop was easy enough to measure and cut, since its exact dimensions don't _really_ matter, but the shelf took some more attention.
The shelf has a square cut out of each corner into which a leg fits, and it was these corners that made the shelf a challenge. The challenge was increased even more by the legs having a slight twist to them once all assembled. This twist is a consequence of the tenons being imprecisely cut using a saw rather than a chisel (oops). I had to be very careful here to assemble the legs and skirts, clamp them up, and translate the legs into marks on the shelf board. I then marked out which legs went with which skirts, so that in the final assembly the legs would twist in the exact same (more or less) way. Fortunately I was able to pull this off, and everything does fit together nearly perfectly, but this ordeal was a real lesson in not being lazy with the tenons.
Partially glued.
When I embarked on this project I had told my dad, who is also an amateur woodworker (though really he should be a professional one), that I had gone out to buy some clamps. He immediately responded, not knowing how many I bought, that I should go back and buy some more. "You'll always wish you had more clamps."
At this step I wished I had more clamps. I had to do the gluing of the pieces in two steps: first the legs to the longer skirts, and then all the rest. After some preliminary tests I discovered my glue dries _really_ fast, and so I opted to glue the shorter skirts to the bottom shelf as part of the first step as well. By doing as much as possible in the first step I could reduce how long it would take to assemble in the second step, lessening the risk of the glue drying out during assembly.
Fully glued and clamped. Note the old christmas wrapping paper being used to keep glue off the floor.
My preparation was rewarded, and in the second gluing I was able to apply glue and assemble without issue.
Marking the position of the dowels which attach the tabletop to the legs.
Gluing the dowels in. About half of the dowel is exposed here, to give an idea of the depth they go.
Having glued the legs, skirts, and bottom shelf all together I then glued the tabletop on top. Doing this had more to do with filling gaps than with structural integrity. All exposed wood surface will be sealed with a finish to keep air and moisture out, but it's not possible to add finish in between two pieces which are touching. Glue must be used during assembly instead.
But even with glue there really wasn't anything holding my tabletop onto the rest of the piece. If someone were to bump the table hard there would be a real danger of the top separating from the rest. To combat this I drilled (using a power drill, sorry!) holes through the top into the legs, and glued in some wooden dowels. This should help keep the tabletop attached in the face of a shear force (someone bumping it), but won't do much for a vertical force (someone lifting from the tabletop or upper skirts). This will just have to be countered by the table being owned by someone who knows to lift it by the legs, and not the tabletop or upper skirt.
Glued, sanded, and finished!
Once fully glued I could say that the first 90% of the project was done, and it was time to start the second 90%: sanding and finishing!
I knew sanding would be a pain in the ass, but I underestimated how much. I should have done a rough sanding before assembly, as getting into all the little nooks and crannies of an assembled piece is such a hassle that it's really worth avoiding as much as possible.
After the initial rough sanding I did 3 passes of a fine sanding followed by a coat of linseed oil. I chose linseed oil primarily because it seems to pretty popular in this area, based on the stock at the hardware store. I figure if it's the most popular thing here then it's probably the most effective against the local climate. Linseed oil is also (mostly) all natural and fairly easy to work with, so it was a good choice for a first project. In high school we used danish oil for all our projects, but I liked this oil much more; there's no solvent involved, it's just oil, and it fills the room with the smell of flax. The downside of linseed oil is that it takes longer for each coat to dry (about 72 hours), but since I was working on this over weekends I wasn't bothered.
My dad advised me that I should probably do 5 coats, if not more. If I'm honest I was just sick of sanding, and after 3 coats it has a texture and color I like. As far as durability, I can always do another few passes ten years down the line (I won't, lol) once this coat starts to fade.
Fully operational.
After a bit of waiting for customs to clear the record player, we're finally in business! I still want to manage the cables a bit better, but the size and shape are perfect.
What's next to come out of the workshop? There's some home decorating we want to do, not all of it involving woodworking. A small shelf here, a fixed door screen there, a wall decoration of some sort somewhere else. The next real woodworking project I undertake will likely be a roman workbench [0], which can be left on the terrace and double as a sitting bench or plant shelf when not actively being used as a woodworking bench. That will be my first real foray into hand-planing, a daunting but exciting thought.
Until then we'll be jamming out and hitting up the used record stores.
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