Use your skills to make the world a better place
Sep 19, 2014
This is what the old tabletops looked like. Scary!
Each summer during my college years, I worked at the NY YMCA Camps, about 1-1/2 hours north of the city. The place changed my life in a lot of ways. Set on three lakes on 1,100 pristine acres, the camps offered me a supportive environment where I grew tremendously as a person. It worked the same magic on the campers, and it still does today.
For many of the kids, camp is a rare opportunity to get out of the city and into nature, to let their guard down, and to be truly carefree, at least for a few weeks. It is a life-changing experience for many.
Today, I’m lucky enough to be on the board for the camps, and I give back in any way I can. When I asked them what a woodworker could do to help, they pointed to the tabletops in the dining hall. Chipped and cratered from decades of use, they were literally a hazard to arms and elbows.
Working over last winter, I ordered a stack of plywood, had it delivered to the FWW shop, broke it down into halves on our panel saw, trucked the pieces home 8 at a time, and then, in my own shop, knocked off the corners, rounded the edges, sanded everything, and applied a polyurethane floor finish for maximum durability.
It sounds corny, but I felt good every time I worked on those tabletops, and you can only imagine how good I felt when we installed them and saw campers use them for the first time. Those tabletops are a piece of me, left in one of my favorite places on earth.
The moral is how the most basic woodworking skills can be so helpful to someone else. Look around in your area–you might be surprised at what you can do.
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This is what the old tabletops looked like. Scary!
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This is the dining hall at Talcott Village, part of the New York YMCA Camps. Replacing the tabletops (and repainting the bases and benches, which we did during an alumni work weekend), we transformed the whole place.
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After ordering plywood and cutting the big sheets into 4x4 tabletops, my first job was to knock off the corners. To do that, I made this simple jig. It has guide blocks underneath, to position it quickly.
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The jig positioned in seconds, and guided my circ saw for a quick cut.
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Next I softened all of the edges with a roundover bit.
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I called on some camp alumni to help install the tops. We cut back the edges of the old tops first.
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Then we simply screwed up through the old tops to install the new ones.
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I finished the tops by pouring on polyurethane floor finish and then spreading it with a foam brush. Three coats each, and each coat had to be sanded! Behind me you can see that I turned my lumber rack into a drying rack.
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In a similar vein, I've started a free hand tool woodworking program for veterans in my basement workshop. You can read an update, with links to full details and a local newspaper sort on it, at http://www.closegrain.com/2014/09/jotmost-underway-for-veterans.html.
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