Some of you may have noticed my current project - I’m the one crazy enough to think that a YouTube video and a cool-looking coffee table are good enough reasons to take a perfectly good 4x8 sheet of plywood and turn it into nearly 1000 1.125x3.5” pieces to be re-assembled into a herringbone pattern. Anyways, I’ve run into a bit of an(other) issue that I’m hoping someone can help me address.
I have experienced some occasional de-lamination of some plywood layers as I have constructed the legs. This gives me concern for structural stability as I fear even the tiniest lateral load could end up with my coffee table returning to its natural state of being thousands of pieces on the floor. The legs are about 16” long and at about a 110deg angle. The solution I’ve thought of (and brainstormed with Burt significantly - I can’t thank him enough for his help throughout this project) is to put a threaded through the center of each leg with a washer/nut combo on each end to provide some compressive force and internal reinforcement. Burt had the great suggestion of looking into the drill bits used for pulling Cat5 cable which are around 18” long and not all that expensive. Paired with the drill press, this would do the trick. However, from what I can tell the drill press only has about 22” between the chuck and the table, 12” smaller than I need (18” bit + 16” leg).
I have two ideas so far:
- Use the drill press with a normal length drill bit to start the hole then switch to a handheld drill and clamp the leg horizontally onto a table to drill straight through it. I see this possibly ending poorly in a multitude of ways.
- Drill as far as I can into each side with the drill press, try connecting the holes with a slightly shorter drill bit (12”?) in the style of Idea 1. Seems moderately less unsafe in my head, but not much better.
- Use increasingly long drill bits so that my total height is always less than 22” and I can use the drill press (drill ~4” deep hole, insert 8” bit into leg 4” deep and both pieces into drill press, drill ~8” deep hole, insert 12” bit into leg 8” deep and both pieces into drill press, drill ~12” deep hole, insert 18” bit into leg 12” deep, drill through). I don’t think I’ve ever seen this done and I’m sure there’s a reason for that (beyond not wanting to buy 4 different drill bits). I don’t even know if it could be done safely (or at all).
Does anyone have any better ideas? Obviously the work will be properly supported with clamps and blocks at whatever angles are necessary to maximize safety at all times.
