Big Build Off Competition week 1 - Hertoolbelt prepping rustic walnut for dining table build

Hi, I'm Amy and welcome to Her Tool Belt. Over the next few weeks, I'll be participating in the inaugural season of the Big Build-Off and I'm going to take you along for the ride. So what is the Big Build-Off you say? Well, it's an awesome new competition where four builders compete virtually against each other, pulling out all of the stops on an assigned project type. The best part is that this is a charity build and so at the end, our projects will go to a family or a charity in need. This season, we have been asked to build a table. Ooh, the possibilities. The Big Build-Off team has rallied together sponsors for this competition and each week, we'll be highlighting one of those awesome sponsors in our videos. Now it's time to get to work. This table isn't going to build itself. This week's sponsor is Firm Grip Gloves. Saving hands from splinters, one glove at a time. All right, so on my table build, I decided to go with beautiful rustic walnut. I cannot wait to see how it pops on this table and I'm excited to work with it. It has super pretty grain. The color is amazing and it's got some fun little knots and cracks that will be fun to fill with epoxy and see how they look. So I bought this wood at the lumber yard and it's four quarters rough cut. So it's one inch right now, but that means I have a date with the planer. So when you buy rough cut lumber, you surface plane it down to three quarters of an inch and that's a standard size to work with. Let's take a moment to admire the beautiful wood grain. On my hobby thickness planer, I can plane about a quarter of a handle turn with each pass of the boards. Many passes later, we will have some nice flat boards. All right, so I've got the boards planed and they're nice and flat. Now the last step that I need to do before I start building things is get at least one of these edges straight. I don't have a joiner yet in my shop, so I cheat and use the table saw. What I do is I measure the board, pick the straightest edge, and set the fence so I'll just barely take a slight sliver off the one edge. I pick the straightest edge to go against the fence and then just flop back and forth until I get one straight edge. It's not the ideal method, but it works pretty good for not having a joiner. So once I get a nice straight edge, then we'll be ready to start doing the detailed cutting. Initially, I set my fence just wider than the nominal width of the board, just so I can barely take a hair off any high points along the board length. Now if your board has a big crook in it or a kink, I would definitely suggest taking a straight edge and a circular saw and taking off those high points first. It'll just make the process go a lot smoother.