Reclaimed Barn Wood Entry Table - Metal & Woodworking How to

So I was out at the tool sale and while I was looking I found this old rusty treadle sewing machine and I asked the guy how much and he said just take it with the rest of the stuff. So I managed to clean it up and that's what you're seeing here and I'm going to throw a wood top on it an old barn wood top on it and turn it into a nice entry table. I also have an opportunity to do a little generator that can charge a cell phone and run a lamp. So here I am just sizing up the tabletop and I have to extend it right where that X is. That X needs to be wider so I've got some old rail stock that I'm using to cut basically in half and then sandwich back together to kind of create a nice profile front and back. You'll see here. So here I am clamping it up just trying to line up what is typically the bottom side of the railing together so I can get two tops facing basically opposing each other. And I haven't welded with a settling torch for a while so I did my tack weld with an acetylene torch just to practice a little bit. I could have used my big one. I'm just flushing up the ends so it's nice and flat. So this cross piece is cast steel or cast iron rather and I'm removing it so I can start marking it up to cut in half. This is a little drop a little piece from the railing I cut off and I'm marking the profile. I'm holding it 90 degrees so I can find the spots to mark it and I'm going to cut it right in half where this line is right here and I wanted to reduce the amount of metal I removed from this so I used a hacksaw. That's a thinner curved blade. So you can see the inside of this pipe has got a unique shape to it and I'm just sizing up what I have to remove from this brace and now I'm just carving away the metal. Now this is going to get welded up so I need to kind of knock the corner off of the railing pieces I made for the cross member so they kind of round over and meet the cast metal when I weld it. I also wanted to put a patina on this so I had to sand it down to the metal, the raw metal, so that it would receive the chemicals. So now this is the process of lining up the top of the table and the bottom of the table. I have to extend the foot section where the treadle is and I also have to make sure everything's parallel. So I just clamped my straight edges or my levels to it and I didn't really show you all the time I spent sliding this up but there's actually a lot of math, a lot of cross checking. I actually originally tried to braze this because it's cast to not cast and I thought it might be better but I failed miserably so I had to take it off and clean it all up and start over. This is the crossbar that's going to support the treadle foot pedal and connect over to the other cross member. So I had to weld a washer onto it so it could have kind of a platform to press up against the existing cast. You'll see how this goes together in a minute. I love these stepper bits for cutting washers and holes. For thin stock it works really well. So I just used threaded rod that matched the old bolt and I extended that table all the way over to the framework. Those bolts or those nuts on there are just to kind of keep it from unthreading. And there's the extension tube and it slides right over the cast portion of the pedal and then gets sandwiched up against the framework. I probably took this thing apart and put it back together maybe seven or eight times during the build because you just have to keep rechecking all of the parts and making sure that they all fit. Right now I'm kind of creating a cleat that'll hold the lower shelf and cutting the shelf a fifth. And now I'm just marking the curve of that steel and the width of that step to kind of custom cut this cleat to kind of match it and make it look a little more aesthetically pleasing. This is bed frame stock and I don't know if you've ever worked with it but it's brittle so you can snap the pieces off without it bending too much. It also ruins your drill bits. I don't like drilling it. So I also wanted this to come apart so I only welded the cleat to the framework and then the crossbar is independent so you can still unbolt this and take it apart and do work to it. Now I'm removing the cross member. Now that everything's fit and everything's welded, I'm taking that back out to put a patina on it. I used hydrogen peroxide and then I also added a salt water mix after that because it wasn't rusting like I wanted it. So the salt really sped up the process and then I came back with peroxide a couple more times. This piece is like 22 inches deep and about six feet wide. It came out of an old barn. It was actually a shelf on an old steel rack and it and a bunch of other shelves I managed to pull out and bring home. This is just water-based polyurethane. I ended up doing three coats. They want you to sand in between but with the rough wood I didn't and it turned out fine. This is Rust-Oleum clear coat and I'm sure any clear coat would work but that's what I got for this. It seemed to work fine. I used a satin finish. So I'm installing the base shelf and it was a little wobbly so I had to add a couple washers underneath it right at the points where I installed the screws and it seemed to take the wobble out pretty well. A little trick, I didn't show it here but I taped the washers on with blue tape so that when I tipped it on its side they wouldn't move and then I lined up the screws and installed the bottom shelf. So I did the same thing. There was a spot on this that had a little bit of a twist to it so I added a washer to one of the legs there and installed the top but it's just four screws. Okay so now we're getting into the generator portion. This is just a little motor I pulled out of a I think it was a printer and just an assortment of rubber connectors that I store over the years and that piece seemed to fit just fine on this motor. So here I'm just testing to see if it'll even work at all. This is a little three volt LED and it seemed to work just fine so I'm gonna go with it and that was just luck. I didn't I didn't figure that out. It just fit. This is just a car charger. You plug it into your regular car and it takes 12 to 24 volt. 24 volts to down to 5 volts for your devices. So I literally just extended the positive and negative leads. I didn't do anything else. I didn't add any other electronic components. I tested that motor and it produces about 12 volts so it was pretty close. A little bit of heat shrink and just snapped it back together. So I'm just pulling off the old connector from whatever that motor was connected to and I'm trying to make the two components, the charger and the motor, as close together as possible because I'm going to slide them into a housing and just straight on to the positive and negative leads of the motor. So this is the housing for the generator and I'm just using this steel tube and I think that the bottom. That way you're not dropping the stuff every time you cut it. There's no reason to cut all the way through. We can just bend the last piece off and then you have control over your drops. I could have made this bracket out of plastic to hold the generator but I had the pieces here and I felt like it was more appropriate for the metal cast iron portion of the treadle anyway. Just kind of go with the design. Here's another trick I do. I haven't had any ill effects from this but I usually heat small components that I want to work with right away with a propane torch and then I just spray paint them. It creates kind of a matte textured finish. It's a little different than what the prescribed finish on the can is but you can handle it pretty much right away and the paint dries quickly for you. So I'm just tapping this to run bolts into the housing to kind of keep the motor tight inside the tube. I did this because I didn't want to glue it or wrap any tape and fit in there tightly and have it be stuck later because if I have to do any repairs to the electronics I'd like to be able to just pull it out and fix it or replace it. And I used a wig nut to attach that generator to an existing hole on the treadle. Here's a shot of it charging one of our cell phones. I wouldn't recommend this for long long-term use but in a you could charge your cell phone it would work. There it is. 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