Last month I shared my living room coffee table DIY, which — if you hadn’t noticed — I am extraordinarily proud of:
I made the frame out of raw steel, and then used plywood and iron-on veneer edging to make the top. It was the biggest furniture project I’ve ever taken on, and I still smile every time I see it. But I’ve been keeping a secret from you: the whole thing nearly went off the rails during the construction process when I accidentally cut way too deeply into my plywood:
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. It wasn’t directly relevant to the tutorial because it was a freak accident and I didn’t think anyone needed to be reminded not to saw into their tabletop, but I did plan to tell you eventually, I promise. And today that day has come at last.
As you may recall, I had the plywood cut to size at Home Depot, but had them leave a few extra inches that I planned to trim at home. Once I had the frame constructed, I put it on top of the plywood to get the exact dimensions for trimming:
Then I marked a straight edge for cutting:
The piece was a little unwieldy for my table saw, though, so I decided to use my brand new jig saw that I’d triumphantly mastered to cut the steel for the table base. First I positioned the plywood so that the edge hung over my work table. To give myself a straight guide for my jigsaw, I clamped down a thin piece of wood along the whole length of the plywood, with one clamp on each end. And then I started cutting, keeping my jigsaw pressed tight against the guide wood on the left.
It took embarrassingly long for me to realize that something had gone terribly wrong. The thin wood had bowed in the middle as I applied left-ward pressure with the jigsaw, since it was only clamped on either end. I was only trying to take off a few inches, and suddenly I realized this had happened:
You’d think I would have noticed this, but I was so convinced of my foolproof “just press up again the guiding piece of wood” method.
OMG, right?!? I spent a few minutes cursing myself and everything in sight and dramatically exclaiming “Disaster! Disaster!”, but eventually decided there was nothing to be done but try to fix it. (Note: In retrospect, this would have been a perfect chance to try out my circular saw, but at least I finally broke that out just this week — more on that to come Friday!)
First I needed to glue the loose edge back to the rest of the tabletop, so I used wood glue and a q-tip to apply glue through the length of the (very long) cut.
Then I clamped it as tightly as possible while the wood glue dried, pressing a scrap piece of wood along the edge to create sideways pressure on the cut.
Once the glue dried it was secure like a single piece again, but there was still a big visible cut where the thickness of the jigsaw blade had been.
I applied wood filler along the length of the cut, and waited for it to dry:
Then I sanded it down to get a smooth surface. Remember my sanding shot from the tabletop tutorial?
Well here’s how it looked with the shot “styled” on the other edge of the plywood:
A little less beautiful.
Anyway, I hoped that it would completely disappear when I stained the tabletop:
But even though the wood filler said that it was stainable, it really didn’t take the stain the same way the rest of the plywood did — so there was a thin, light colored line that wasn’t terrible but also was way more visible than I wanted. I did some internet research about how to get wood filler to take stain, and found a) that this is a common problem, and b) a suggestion to use a dark crayon on the wood filler to bring it closer to the color of the stain. I immediately ran out to CVS to procure myself a crayon (well a pack of crayons, it’s difficult to buy just one), and put the suggestion to the test:
It worked! The line definitely went from super light to much closer to the color of the wood. And once I did all the coats of high gloss poly (more about that process in my original post), it really faded away. It isn’t 100% invisible up close, but from afar it’s pretty difficult to find even if you’re looking for it. Can you see it?
The correct answer is “no.” Here it be:
Not too bad, right? The natural wood grain of the table definitely helps mask it. I had really high standards for this table, and I would have bitten the bullet and gotten another piece of plywood if I hadn’t been able to fix it satisfactorily. But I’m so relieved it didn’t come to that! And also if anyone ever asks, I will probably just say, “Hey, I MADE this table, back off man! What have YOU done lately? Get out of my house!” Because I’m amiable and open to critique like that.
