Weekend update:

Wow, so cold over the weekend. No time in the shop whatsoever.

However, on Friday the 21st I had a little brainstorm concerning one of my little "back burner" projects. I have a friend who has a table that has 4 legs, and the top is pretty much round, but has 2 drop down leaves. When the leaves are up, there is supposed to be a mechanism that pivots under each leaf to hold it up. One of these was missingand the other looks like a piece of junk. In looking at it carefully, it appeared that both had broken long ago, and SOMEONE just cobbled together a repair in a few minutes. It works, but looks terrible. The repair was just 3 pieces of wood, nailed together in a triangle.

I took the table apart and brought that triangle home, intending to duplicate it, but using better joinery. Then it occurred to me that this is too junky and I should try to find out what the original might look like. So, I did some web searching and found that this type of table is referred to as a "butterfly" table, so named because of the design of the curved supports that hold up the drop down leaves. Aha! Then, I quickly found that Norm Abrams had built one of these on an episode of "The New Yankee Workshop." Using his picture, I decided to make PANELS instead of the triangles, and cut the panels with a nice S-shaped curve...one for each leaf.

I fiddled around with circles in Powerpoint, and came up with a nicely shaped curve using a circle and two half circles. The radii and diameters of the circles were all the same and when moved together made a very nice curve. I have found a reference to a "sinoid curve", which shows up a lot in nature, and my curve looks very much like that. Using Powerpoint, I drew a 5 inch radius circle, which hangs off a slide, and printed this half circle 4 times. I then cut these out with scissors and taped 2 together, forming a circle. I can't demonstrate here, but using the circle and 2 half circles, I can position these on the panel, then tape in place. Then I can trace the curve with a pounce wheel, connect the dots with a pencil, and cut out on the bandsaw. This can be sanded smooth, and then transferred to another piece with a pattern bit in a router. That way I will have pieces that are exact duplicates (2 wings of the butterfly).

Finally, a couple of holes to drill for the pins that allow the wings to pivot and the repair will be complete. This should only take a couple of hours. In fact, I may just make a template and attach that to the underside of the table, so that replacements can be easily made at any time in the future.

After that is done, I will need to repair the leg stretchers on that table. They are connected to the legs with dowels. A couple of the dowels are broken. SO, I will disasemble it, drill out the old dowels, and glue it all back together with new dowels.

This will be a great little table when all done. I hear that it had been in someone's basement for many years because it was broken, and was just GIVEN to my friend. It costs nothing but time to fix it right. I will leave it to my friend to do any staining and finishing once I finish the repairs.

That's all for today. Sure hope it warms up soon!