Custom Matching Tables

I did this for a coworker. Actually she helped. Quite a bit. This was her idea and her design so she went with me to the hardwood dealer near me and picked out the wood. While my brain thinks about contrast when I'm doing butcher block she wanted minimal contrast.

This was a few years ago but if I remember right she only picked Maple, Poplar and Hickory. I remember the hickory because that's the piece that chattered going across the jointer which, in combination with me holding it stupidly wrong not using the push block, took a third of my right thumb off. Maybe less than a third but the Xray guy said it took about 1/4" of bone with it.

Just as a side bar, after screaming a few curse words, mostly starting with F, while waiting for the pain to kick in the bleeding was intense soaking through a few shop rags. Finally going in the house to rinse it off and get a good look at it my dominant thought was not wanting to spend my whole evening in an ER getting stitches. By the way, the pain never came.

Once I rinsed it off I could see there was nothing to suture which made me happy. No ER trip tonight if I can just stop the bleeding. I've been an ER nurse for 20+ years so self management is both a blessing and some say a curse. As the one or more arteries I severed continued to spurt I remembered that I had stop clot or whatever it's called in the house. Just to qualify this, the spurts were small, it's just a thumb. By this time I was pretty happy feeling virtually zero pain and knowing I wasn't wasting the next 3 hours driving to the ER to hear my coworkers laugh at me.

As we say in the ER, "all bleeding stops eventually" but I thought it better to use the stop clot than wait till I ran out of blood so I dumped the packet of powder on the end of my thumb. Well let me tell you, I have experienced pain in my life but NOTHING that compared to that. Imagine holding a propane torch to your finger for about 3 minutes non stop. The take away there was to throw the rest of that stop clot in the trash and do some research. It turns out that there are pain free options of that product that cost a fair bit more but the ad and reviews state "No Burning". Worth every penny. I ordered the more expensive stuff but haven't needed it since.

I did finally go to the ER I work at but not until 3 days later to get some antibiotics just in case. The PA made me get the Xray then freaked out that the bone was involved and babbled about Osteo something or another. He wanted to run a dose of IV antibiotics and seemed somewhat displeased when I said no, just a scrip for some pills please. Needles terrify me.

Back to the table project. I bought a circle jig to use with a router to create the nested end tables. I did not have a jig saw at the time and don't have a bandsaw even to this day. The router thing worked out great though once I figured out the jig.

Two or three coats of Epoxy on all 3 tables and some hairpin legs from Amazon later and here they are. Click on them to enlarge.