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The boards you're looking at are already edge jointed it seems. In this case, they are using the term "laminated" to mean glued edge to edge. so there will be many thinner strips glued edge on to form a much wider section of stock. If it's bare wood, it will accept stain relatively well but be aware you may see glue lines if the jointing isnt particularly great. The main thing I'd be looking at there is how they have been acclimated. The last thing people generally want is for gaps to appear in a table top later, which is why you should never make anything other than rough furniture out of the "DIY shed" type plastic wrapped timber.
Regardless, ideally *any* timber you bring into your home that you plan to work should be properly acclimated for a few months before being worked. It gives it time to get used to your central heating cycle and the local climate. It also lets it dry a little more. It's fair to say it's not always possible to do this of course. In which case, your best option is to find wood to work with that has ideally been slow grown and air dried and is also of a stable species. Softwoods tend to move a fair bit, but thats a complicated subject on its own and its best to look at the wood database, which you can find via Google.
This is a very expansive subject to be quite honest and I could write a book on this alone almost.
It's not necessarily that the edges of boards to be joined need to be perfectly flat (almost impossible to be honest), they just need to be flat relative to each other. There are tons of ways, but heres the ones I use:
1) Clamp both boards in a vice and plane the edges at the same time to a fine finish. The hand plane used depends on the thickness of the boards you wish to join. Once planed, they should fit together perfectly, even if there is a slight angle to the edges relative to the top. The key is that they are planed together. Generally, unless you have a large hand plane like a No.7, this will limit the thickness of boards you can use.
2) A jointer. In the UK, we call this a planer, often part of a planer/thicknesser machine. To use one properly is something that takes practice not just for the execution of the task, but the calibration of the machine itself. Since you don't have a planer, I'm going to stop there.
3) A track saw. A good tracksaw like the Festool TS55 is capable of jointing boards relatively well. It's not really good enough for a fine furniture finish to a table top straight off the saw, but a pass or two from a smoother plane will make it work. However, for a rustic looking table top, the tracksaw alone will do a good enough job. The idea is that you get the board edges close enough together by other methods (bandsaw etc) that the kerf of the tracksaw blade is enough to perform the jointing. What this means is, you get them to the point where theres say at most, a 1mm gap, then place side by side in the orientation required, and run the saw along the gap. The kerf of a typical tracksaw, being 2mm or so, will cover the gap and joint the boards, any error such as deflection, being distributed equally between the two pieces. This way, any error on the saw cut cancels itself out and you get a near perfect joint. The only real issue there is that to get an invisible joint as you'd want in fine furniture, the saw teeth leave tiny almost imperceptible swirls, which prevent the joint being properly close.
I've attached some pictures of what I consider to be well jointed table tops. They are my own work. I'm not Chippendale by any means, but they are what I consider acceptable personally. The lighter wood is hard maple and was jointed using a bevel up smoothing plane, a Lie Nielsen 62. It's 22mm thick. The darker wood is Black Walnut and was jointed initially using a tracksaw, then planed smooth as pairs using a No.7 jointer plane. It is 44mm thick. Sorry for the lighting, they are pieces I made for home so I just went and took a couple of snaps for you.
On reflection, the walnut has better jointing than the maple, but in actuality, neither is particularly left wanting as far as I'm concerned. For interest purposes, maple has 4 boards in the image, walnut has 3.
The thicker the boards are, the harder they will be to joint successfully and you also have to be careful to avoid tear out, which means sharp tooling across the board and good practice to prevent it.
For 30mm thick, you'll need a lot of clamping pressure, which means a lot of (good) clamps. You'll want to use boards under each clamping face to spread the pressure equally. You'd also want to use cauls (and extra clamps to do so) to keep it flat and also orient the grain of each board correctly to avoid cupping of the finished top over time. Cauls you can make youself, but they do require care in the making if you want to keep things flat. It's best to glue a wide top up in sections. If you try to do it all at once, keeping it flat during glue up is going to be a nightmare.
If you make a table top, it's best to make it over size slightly and wait until the base is complete before cutting to the final dimension. Again, a tracksaw is ideal for that in the absence of anything else.
It all depends on how precise you want the finished result to be and the look you want to achieve.
I think really the best advice I could give you is to practice first on the same wood you intend to use. Don't give up if it doesn't go to plan. If furniture making was easy, everyone would be doing it. Any fool can stick a few nails in a pallet, stick it on pinterest or twitter and call it furniture, but it takes more than a bit of skill to make a table properly.
If I can help you further, let me know.
PS. Before you do any jointing or gluing of solid timber, you do need to make sure you've taken account of how it will move over time. Timber movement, or rather understanding and accommodating it, is one of the biggest and most important challenges in furniture making. If someone simply screws down a table top to a fixed base and leaves it, it will tear itself apart over time. I'd suggest looking into that aspect when formulating your design, if you havent already.
Regardless, ideally *any* timber you bring into your home that you plan to work should be properly acclimated for a few months before being worked. It gives it time to get used to your central heating cycle and the local climate. It also lets it dry a little more. It's fair to say it's not always possible to do this of course. In which case, your best option is to find wood to work with that has ideally been slow grown and air dried and is also of a stable species. Softwoods tend to move a fair bit, but thats a complicated subject on its own and its best to look at the wood database, which you can find via Google.
This is a very expansive subject to be quite honest and I could write a book on this alone almost.
It's not necessarily that the edges of boards to be joined need to be perfectly flat (almost impossible to be honest), they just need to be flat relative to each other. There are tons of ways, but heres the ones I use:
1) Clamp both boards in a vice and plane the edges at the same time to a fine finish. The hand plane used depends on the thickness of the boards you wish to join. Once planed, they should fit together perfectly, even if there is a slight angle to the edges relative to the top. The key is that they are planed together. Generally, unless you have a large hand plane like a No.7, this will limit the thickness of boards you can use.
2) A jointer. In the UK, we call this a planer, often part of a planer/thicknesser machine. To use one properly is something that takes practice not just for the execution of the task, but the calibration of the machine itself. Since you don't have a planer, I'm going to stop there.
3) A track saw. A good tracksaw like the Festool TS55 is capable of jointing boards relatively well. It's not really good enough for a fine furniture finish to a table top straight off the saw, but a pass or two from a smoother plane will make it work. However, for a rustic looking table top, the tracksaw alone will do a good enough job. The idea is that you get the board edges close enough together by other methods (bandsaw etc) that the kerf of the tracksaw blade is enough to perform the jointing. What this means is, you get them to the point where theres say at most, a 1mm gap, then place side by side in the orientation required, and run the saw along the gap. The kerf of a typical tracksaw, being 2mm or so, will cover the gap and joint the boards, any error such as deflection, being distributed equally between the two pieces. This way, any error on the saw cut cancels itself out and you get a near perfect joint. The only real issue there is that to get an invisible joint as you'd want in fine furniture, the saw teeth leave tiny almost imperceptible swirls, which prevent the joint being properly close.
I've attached some pictures of what I consider to be well jointed table tops. They are my own work. I'm not Chippendale by any means, but they are what I consider acceptable personally. The lighter wood is hard maple and was jointed using a bevel up smoothing plane, a Lie Nielsen 62. It's 22mm thick. The darker wood is Black Walnut and was jointed initially using a tracksaw, then planed smooth as pairs using a No.7 jointer plane. It is 44mm thick. Sorry for the lighting, they are pieces I made for home so I just went and took a couple of snaps for you.
On reflection, the walnut has better jointing than the maple, but in actuality, neither is particularly left wanting as far as I'm concerned. For interest purposes, maple has 4 boards in the image, walnut has 3.
The thicker the boards are, the harder they will be to joint successfully and you also have to be careful to avoid tear out, which means sharp tooling across the board and good practice to prevent it.
For 30mm thick, you'll need a lot of clamping pressure, which means a lot of (good) clamps. You'll want to use boards under each clamping face to spread the pressure equally. You'd also want to use cauls (and extra clamps to do so) to keep it flat and also orient the grain of each board correctly to avoid cupping of the finished top over time. Cauls you can make youself, but they do require care in the making if you want to keep things flat. It's best to glue a wide top up in sections. If you try to do it all at once, keeping it flat during glue up is going to be a nightmare.
If you make a table top, it's best to make it over size slightly and wait until the base is complete before cutting to the final dimension. Again, a tracksaw is ideal for that in the absence of anything else.
It all depends on how precise you want the finished result to be and the look you want to achieve.
I think really the best advice I could give you is to practice first on the same wood you intend to use. Don't give up if it doesn't go to plan. If furniture making was easy, everyone would be doing it. Any fool can stick a few nails in a pallet, stick it on pinterest or twitter and call it furniture, but it takes more than a bit of skill to make a table properly.
If I can help you further, let me know.
PS. Before you do any jointing or gluing of solid timber, you do need to make sure you've taken account of how it will move over time. Timber movement, or rather understanding and accommodating it, is one of the biggest and most important challenges in furniture making. If someone simply screws down a table top to a fixed base and leaves it, it will tear itself apart over time. I'd suggest looking into that aspect when formulating your design, if you havent already.
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