Coffee table rebuild

A while back, the children demolished our wood coffee table; a total collapse of the table's base. It had been wobbly for a while, and it kept getting worse and worse, and it was too finely engineered for us to be able to beef it up much, although we did try, a time or two.

The table was a hand-me-down, and I was not particularly attached to it. Still, it did fulfill a purpose in our living room. So I hauled the pieces down to the basement, to wait until I had time to look them over.

When I did, I saw that almost all of the broken wood was in the plywood shelf and in the long pieces (rails, I will call them) that were attached to the top.  I also saw that all of the breakage was in the ends of these pieces. The two ends of the base, which included the legs and the connecting pieces for each pair of legs, were intact. So it was possible that I could cut the rails and shelf shorter, drill new holes for the hardware, and then put the base back together, just several inches shorter, and reattach it to the table's top.

Easier said than done, of course, but even with Technical Difficulties it only took me about two days to work through the rebuild.

I'll skip the step-by-step, and list some of the sticking points and solutions instead:

1.  Laying out where exactly to drill new holes. I messed this up in one place, drilling a larger hole where a smaller hole should have gone. I ended up fixing it by cutting the rails even shorter than I had planned. For the rest, it was a bit tricky to measure and precisely mark where to put each hole. No doubt they had templates for that in the shop where it was made. For the depths of the holes, I put masking tape around the drill bits to mark where to stop.

2.  How to hold a long, narrow rail while drilling into the end of it. I found that I could clamp it to a leg of the workbench (which was originally for our kitchen and has 2x4 legs, and yes, it wobbles now) because the working surface doesn't overhang on that side.

3.  Replacing bent screws. Two screws of the original table were bent, and it took some serious digging through our Very Valuable Box of Assorted Old Screws to find replacements. Then later on, I stripped a couple of screws, and had to dig out some more.

4.  Replacing a bent screw with a screw that was actually identical. One of the replacement screws didn't have the same thread spacing as the original, which mattered because of the hardware it had to screw into, so I had to find a replacement for the replacement.

5.  Drilling holes exactly on center. Drilling a smaller pilot hole first helps keep the larger drill bit from drifting when starting a hole; using a punch to make a starter dent would have helped in some places. The shelf plywood's thickness left little room for error when drilling holes into the end of it.

6.  Using the power drill. I almost always use hand-powered drills or bit braces for drilling, but in this case I didn't want to go to the trouble of changing the bit in the bit brace. We have several used drills (discarded by a contractor) that are in rough shape but that still work. I was confirmed in my belief that power tools mostly just let you make mistakes more quickly; it was with the power drill that I drilled the hole in the wrong place. Also, even with a pilot hole, I had trouble getting holes started cleanly.

7.  Driving the screws in. Some of them I had a bit of trouble getting in, and the very last one of all absolutely did not want to go in. I had to fiddle with the hardware a lot to get things lined up right, which was awkward because of the things I had to reach around while watching it.

I did nothing with the length of the (rectangular) wood top of the table, so the end result looks a bit odd, like part of the table shrunk. I thought about reshaping the ends of the top, but I am waiting to see how well my rebuild will hold up, and I don't have any more of the Danish oil (which I used to refinish the top when we first got the table) on hand at the moment.