A friend has asked me to turn two 16 foot 8ins X 8ins beams of pitch pine into a dining table. Another friend, who has a commercial woodworking shop containing giant power tools of all kinds, has turned the beams into 8 foot planks of 8ins X 2ins. These I can now manage with my own tools.
The pitch pine beam is out of an old mill. Its function in the mill is unknown but seems to have required the presence of many nails. These are of the old cut nail type and seem to be quite soft, as my friends giant table saw (22 inch blade) has ripped through them. The beams (and presumably the nails) are about 150 years old.
The friend for whom I’m making the table likes the idea of all the old beam marks, dings, cuts and nails being left in the table. This makes life easier for me; but I’m worried about cutting through these old nails with my expensive TS blade, which is of the usual carbide-toothed type and a mere 10 incher.
Does anyone have experience of cutting through such old nails? Will it damage a normal TS sawblade or is the metal of old cut nails so soft that the teeth are unlikely to be damaged? The first cuts did not damage my friend’s big TS and he says that he regularly cuts such nail-infested timber on a TS. He opines that newer nails of steel or modern ones that have been hardened, are the ones that will do damage.
Grateful for all opinions and experience.
Lataxe
Replies
Why take risks with an expensive blade ?
Buy yourself a cheap thin kerf blade (IE Freud Diablo $29) and go at it !
C.
Probably of interest to all. You may want to add a new weapon to your arsonal. And thats freuds Diablo Steel Demon. DO784F 7 1/4 X48 or the D1050F 10 X 50 Steel cutting blades. I've used both and they are great. Have cut 2 X 2 < iron and the cut is better than any fiber disc on a chop saw could approch. Super for salvaged lumber project.
Would highly suggest any safety equipment available, Goggles, full face shield and leather apron.
Work Safe, Count to 10 when your done for the day !!
Bruce S. Counter Sales, Tech Rep. http://WWW.EAGLEAMERICA.COM
Edited 4/8/2006 1:31 pm ET by BruceS
Watch out for the sparks or this project might turn into a shop restoration or reconstruction.
If your going to attempt the project then don't use a cheap blade especially don't use a thin kerf one. (Less braised surface holding the carbide on).
We had a manager that insisted that aluminium can be cut safely with a wood saw. Talk about rising to your level of incompetence! Cutting the hold down lugs remaining after machining a 10 meter long aircraft part taught him and the company otherwise. He had 3 people behind and 3 people in front of himself feeding the part into the table saw. "Something happened" and 13 teeth came off and 3 buried themselves in the twit's shoulder. They were removed at the hospital. This after I had told him and two other managers plus the General Manager that they should get an aluminium cutting blade at the very least. The alloy was 7055, has about 8 % Zinc in it, and is almost as strong / hard as mild steel.
It wouldn't hurt to pull some of the nails and get them hardness tested so that you know what your dealing with. Better to track down the proper blade.
likes the idea of all the old beam marks, dings, cuts and nails being left in the table..
Get a construction blade.. Some are made just for this.
WARNING!
USE A FACE SHIELD! Or you may be VERY sorry!
WARNING!
I cut up pallet wood all the time. I think the blades are about $5.00.. Well, for a small one.. They work great.. Sorry, I can not remember any brand.. Just BIGBOX stuff at lowest price is what I get..
Besides what everyone else said, don't forget that cutting the stuff will only be step 1. You'll still need to smooth and finish the stuff. A saw blade may survive an encounter with a nail, but your plane blades won't.
Whatever you do, you will be better off at least knowing where the nails are so, unless you are sure they are all visible (and if you think you are, think again), you might want to invest in a metal locator, just so you 'll know when to grit your teeth and duck. <G> (I've used flooring blades to take up a bunch of floors. They're designed to cut through the nails you encounter when doing this. Can you say "shrapnel"?)
Do-able, just be careful.
Mike HennessyPittsburgh, PA
If it were me, I would get a decent metal detector and remove every bit of metal I could find before I even started a saw.
Nail and screw holes can add a lot of 'charm' to a project, but actually seeing the metal doesn't seem desirable. Even if you can cut thru the metal without ruining a blade, you still need to plane and/or sand the piece and metal plays holy hell with plane blades and sandpaper.
Paranoid is almost too mild a word to describe my feelings when I need to run an old piece of wood thru my planer or jointer - lol.
I have accidentally cut through nails and it hasn't done any apparent damage to my blade. If I had know there were nails in the wood, I don't know that I would have used it, but they weren't visible since the hole had been obscured (it was rough lumber) and this was before I bought a metal detector. That blade is an Oldham 40T. As soon as I saw the nail shining up at me, I looked at the blade and the only way I knew I had cut a nail is that I heard a different sound as it went through. If I needed to cut lumber that I knew had nails in it, I would look for a blade for demolition jobs. I know they make them- the fire department uses them and I've seen them for recip saws, too..
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
Thanks all for the very useful advice, which this very day I've taken.
As recommended by most, I took the cautious route and dug out as many of the nails as I could find before staring with the saw. They had to be drilled and cut out, as they are large, square shaped rascals, embedded most securely courtesy of 150 years of rust.
I then trimmed off the nasy bits of dirty and damaged wood with a portable circular saw, using a cheap 12 tooth nailbiter style blade, as recommended by your good selves. Of course, I didn't hit a single nail.
Off to the tablesaw then, hoping and praying that all the nails are gone. Naturally they are not and I discover 4 buried right inside the planks. Happily they are very soft and the TS blade (42 teeth 3.2mm wide) has suffered no visible damage at all. Nor did I hear the nails getting hit; nor were there sparks. The metal of these things must be as soft as aluminium. (I notice the 3-inchers I dug out do bend and snap very easily)
Next is the planing and thicknessing. I've dug out the nails discovered with the TS but realise that if there are more, the planer blades (which are HSS) are going to suffer. I will be going down 0.5mm at a time!
My "customer" will now have holes (plugged and unplugged) as well as scratches, dings, stains and all the other signs of the wood's previous life as a beam in a mill. But no nails.
Lataxe.
If you're going to use a planer and thicknesser, you might try digging into any nail holes that are visible and see if any were missed or if there are any metal fragments. If there are, a nail set will push them deep enough to minimize any damage to the knives. To identify the holes that were checked, mark them with chalk. There are some cheap metal detectors vaailable (Little Wizard is one) and they work well. The small one is less than US$20. There may be a similar version on your side of the pond.
"I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."
These are the metal detectors that highfigh was referring to.http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.aspx?c=3&cat=1,240&p=45125
Highfigh's idea to push them in with a nail set is excellent! Congrats on making it through the first stage. Hope we get to see some pictures down the road.forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
That nailset idea makes sense.
I did use a couple of nailsets to help knock through the nails that were showing at both ends. I baulked at knocking nails further in that showed only the head. Also, they are tenacious little boogers and don't seem inclined to penetrate solid wood anymore, probably because they have rusted and the wood is harder (with the resin now crystalline) than it was when the nails went in 150 years ago.
But I can't dig out any more nails without major poke-damage to the planks, so poking further in before planing is a good option. I'll get a bigger nailset. :-)
I did use a rare earth magnet as a metal detector and this works fairly well near the surface. Buried nails seem less detectable with this method though. I feel a purchase coming on.
There's also the question of what to do if I did detect a buried nail that was invisible. Do I dig around in the hope of finding and extracting it? Experience so far suggests that there will be some big diggings and no guarantee of succesful extraction. Given the saw blade has sliced through a few nails without damage so far, I think the risk of cutting further buried nails in acceptable. When so-exposed, I will try the bang-in-before-planing approach with these too.
In due course, pictures of the tabletop then.
The project as a whole is being done in stages - top; end rails with legs; middle bit with long rails and drawer runners; 4 drawers. The major parts are so large that I cannot fit the whole thing in my assembly area (we British have only tiny sheds) so the customer delivers wood for each part at a time and will eventually assemble them all in his cellar-dining room. Bed bolts are going to join the ends to the middle and buttons the top to the underside.
Judging by the heft of each plank, the table will weigh approximately 75 metric tons (only a slight poetic exageration).
Lataxe
I salvaged two timber frame barns from indiana and i still use a lot of the virgin oak and chestnut I culled from them. Here are the steps I use.
1. Get one of those fancy cats paw nail pullers and a bunch of vicegrips and pull every nail you can. A cheap carving couge helps get at them.
2. Get some day glow orange paint and mark every nail you couldn't pull. I usually section the wood at that point, and cut it out.
3. Get as good a nail detector as you can. I bought a cheap one and I regret it every time I saw a piece of recycled wood.
4. Get a cheap tough blade and cut v-e-r-y slowly.
On day one of my woodworking career using only salvaged wood, I managed to trash most of my meager tool collection on foreign objects.
On day two I bought a metal detector; a good one; the same kind the TSA uses at the airport to prod you in awkward places.
Recycled wood has most of the "hardware" near the ends; simply cut off these hardwarey ends and return them once more to the landfill.
My rule is.....no metal period....for deeply embedded nails try drilling them out; this generally leaves an immense crater to practice your patching skills on.
Save all of the foreign objects you dig out and place them in glass jars around the shop where you will be reminded of the inherent dangers of working with found wood.
Happy hunting.
<<Judging by the heft of each plank, the table will weigh approximately 75 metric tons (only a slight poetic exageration).>>WOW!! That's the first time I've ever heard of a TABLE displacing that much tonnage...... ;-)<< (we British have only tiny sheds) >>Quite....but the gardens are exquisite....On a slightly more serious note: following this thread, this sounds like a really fun project you have here. Please, keep up the blow-by-blow descriptions of building this table. Looking forward to the pics!!Just too cool!James
Edited 4/12/2006 10:48 pm by pzgren
James,
The ladywife does, in fact, have an exquisite garden of the type you mention. Only today she had me constructing a nice little edifice in iroko to house her lovely new cast iron fountain. I've made something that looks like one of those lynch gates (think that's the right phrase) that stand at the entrance to English churchyards. When it's been slated (with Coniston green, no less) I'll post a photo.
Meanwhile I have been having-at the pitch pine planks some more. I now have 2 at 40cm wide, 2 at 11cm wide and one at 8cm wide. This last will become the breadboard ends on the other 4 when they are joined together. All these rascals are 200cm long and 32mm thick, following the planing of the smaller ones to match the (lesser) thickness of the bigger ones.
To plane, I followed the advice given here and knocked all the remaining nails in with a nail punch. Happily, the planer knives remain with only the tiny nicks they had beforehand - no nasty new ones 1/4 of an inch deep! I finished the jointed edges with a block plane, to ensure a super-flat glue surface and a slight gap (less than 1/2 mm) in the centre of the joins, as per the tradition.
I did weigh all these planks after finishing them ready to join together into the table top. Total weight, according to my bathroom scales, is now 112llbs. Normally I joint planks into larger flat surface using a Plano press - a vertical clamping set mounted on the wall, that compresses the glued edges together whilst also keeping the surface dead flat. However, I fear I will struggle to lift a 112llb single piece out of these clamps, the entrance to which are at chest height.
I'l fetch a strong friend.
So, the next step is to put a few biscuits in to help alignment, glue up the main top then cut the tenons on the ends for the breadboards. I normally cut tenons with a woodrat but even the rat will not be able to encompass a 3ft 4in wide, 6ft 6in long 100llb lump like this one. The tenons will instead be hogged out freehand with a router and a straight edge then shaped to final fit with a hand (tenon) saw, chisel and a block plane.
Lawd - I'm having to use hand tools nearly every day!
The rat will cut the mortises in the breadboard ends though.
Then there will be the plugging, sanding and finishing of this vast area of wood. I'll be making this table forever!
And should I knock in new cut nails (ie copies of the ones I just took out) to keep the customer happy? It will be plugging holes with iron instead of wood. I have grey galvanised ones and black cut nails, from that fine Lee Valley place.
Photos in due course
Meanwile, does anyone have advice about getting drawers into a dining table? My various books say it should be 30 inches high with 25 inches leg room. This leaves only 5 inches for the top and apron inclusive of any drawers. As top and apron rails would need to be about 2.5 inches in total, this means the drawers can only be 2.5 inches deep, inclusive of the drawer bottom.
Is it worth having such drawers at all?
Can I safely make the top higher by and inch and/or the leg room 1 inch less?
Lataxe
Lataxe,
<<Lawd - I'm having to use hand tools nearly every day!>>
Hand tools????? In this day and age????? Say it's not so!!! ;-)
<<Meanwile, does anyone have advice about getting drawers into a dining table? My various books say it should be 30 inches high with 25 inches leg room. This leaves only 5 inches for the top and apron inclusive of any drawers. As top and apron rails would need to be about 2.5 inches in total, this means the drawers can only be 2.5 inches deep, inclusive of the drawer bottom.......Is it worth having such drawers at all?......Can I safely make the top higher by and inch and/or the leg room 1 inch less?>>
For my taste in furniture, I'd skip the drawers in a dining table, but....it's not my table, so.....
For the comfort of the people sitting at your table, I don't think I'd lower the leg room any. Depending on the height of the people you expect to be sitting at the table, you may be able to get away with an additional inch or so on the top. But if you add to much variation from the "standard" dimensions, you could end up with a table that doesn't "feel" right, and that no one will want to use.
<<The ladywife does, in fact, have an exquisite garden of the type you mention. Only today she had me constructing a nice little edifice in iroko to house her lovely new cast iron fountain. >>
LOL. My wife also "commissions" me to make various pieces of furniture for the house and the back yard....Keeps me busy and more or less out of trouble..... ;-)
James
Edited 4/17/2006 1:24 pm by pzgren
James,
Photos of edifice and pitch pine for the dining table attached.
I take your point about the leg room. Drawers are required to match an existing 8 foot long pitch pine school desk of ancient vintage, already in the room. I think I'll raise the top to 31 inches and make do.
Meanwhile work has stopped on the pitch pine whilst I make a cherry bedside table for a neighbour, who wants it for his wife's birthday in 4 days time. It nears the finishing post just now (scuse pun).
Lataxe
Lataxe,
Thanks for posting the photos.
That's some very attractive wood; no wonder your friend wanted to use it for his dining table. The nail holes certainly give it a lot of character....
WOW! That's also one very nicely-done fountain house! I especially like the combination of the timbers and what appear to be rather old bricks. Is that copper or brass on the bottom right front? (BTW, I like the fountain too.) Superb job putting it all together! A very attractive addition to your garden and a fitting home for the fountain.
Looking forward to seeing the table as it progresses toward completion.
James
James,
The bottom right shiny bit is the end grain of the 4X4 tanalised timber. It will be painted with liquid manure to encourage the green stuff to grow and blend it in.
The tile is representative of those that will clad the roof (tomorrow).
All the timber, brick and tile are recycled from the remodelling work being done on daughter No.2's house. Waste not want not. :-)
Lataxe
Sounds dangerous to begin with! SEcondly, what a mess. What about your jointer, planer and even sanding teh stuff.
Get a metal detector!
From the mess, a fine table of utility will arise, phoenix-like. The tools have been instructed to avoid the nails and have said they will (or was it all a dream).
The plug-makers are ready, willing and able!
It can't be dangerous or I wouldn't do it. I hate pain.
Lataxe
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