2nd Lance work day- trestle tables

Trestle tables are like 3 legged saw horses with wood slabs on them like this example:

Check out the trestle table which was a sad little death bed for the last Valois duke of Burgundy.  Or this one or this one.  Sorry about the corpse theme.  I'm not sure what that's all about.  I can only blame Jovian for the last couple since he dug those up.  We settled on trestle tables for our camp since they're relatively easy to build, ubiquitous, and inexpensive.  Why got to all this trouble when you can get a collapsible folding table at Walmart?  For me it's for those little moments that happen every once in a great while when the sun has set, and the world is lit by fire and moonlight, where everything you touch and everything you can see is just about right.  When you don't have to block out the glare of a flashlight, or the ignore the plastic thud as your glass touches the table.  It might be bits of wood to most folks, but it's part of a time machine for me.  Thanks to our past works we have some good seating (I need to take more pictures of the great bench/boxes Jovian has been making for folks.)  Now we need tables.

My math teachers always bugged me for not showing my work.  Well, here it is.  They're just brief sketches and a little trigonometry to get the settle to be the right height with the legs a reasonable distance apart.  Our second lance work day was focused on building trestle tables for the camp.

  I did a few calculations (which historically would most likely have been done by proportions but using trig saved me some paper and time,) scrounged up some poplar, figured out how the joinery would work, and we were off to the races.  Here I'm about to bevel the feet so they sit square on the ground:

I made a little jig to allow the drill press to match the angle of the bevel on the feet, and did a bunch of cuts with a Forstner bit to open up the mortises in the cross bar.  Jeanne-Marie and Barnet chipped in to clean up the holes with chisels, knives and files.  Here you can see Barnet filing away.  The larger square hole below his left elbow is the mortise for the third leg of one of the trestles.  That leg is vertical, so the math we started with saved some fiddling work trying to get that to be the same height as the sloped legs.

Barnet remounted the bench grinder that got broken off its moorings during Friday's open shop, and he got to use it to grind some forge scale off his new greaves.  Looks like it made him happy.

 

I'd like to thank Barnet and Jeanne-Marie for their time and efforts building the trestles and taking pictures of the good time we had together.