The Parker Travels

We left off last month with the pallet boards ready to assemble into a table. Well here it is! We first laid out the boards to get an idea of the design and see which boards would fit best where. Then we started to glue and screw each board into place, one by one. We used liquid nails to glue the board to a piece of plywood. Since the boards were so warped we screwed them to the plywood from behind to secure it into place and help flatten things out. Once all the boards were secured to the plywood it was time to cut off the excess. We flipped the piece upside down and aligned our cut guide on the edge of the plywood. Then we ran the skill saw across the boards, cutting off all the excess and leaving behind a perfectly straight line. When all 4 corners were cut we glued a piece of masonite on the back of the plywood to cover up all the screws and to give the table a bit more structure. We secured the masonite with 4 screws i...

This is the original table in the PUP. It sits in the dinette and folds down to make the 3rd bed if need. There is nothing wrong with it, other than aesthetics. Well I mean even aesthetically it looks fine but fine isn't good enough for this PUP! Time to dismantle.  After unscrewing the legs and other pieces from the bottom of the original table, I put a piece of kraft paper over the table bottom and made a drill map by tracing where all the screws go. I also measured and wrote dimensions everywhere so when we build the new tabletop we can put the legs back in the correct spot. Since this table folds down into the bed, the legs and pieces need to go back in the same spots or it won't fit properly in the PUP. Now thank you to our handy dumpster diving techniques we found this beautiful pallet asking to be made into a table! I used the new Tigersaw to cut through all the nails to take the pallet apart. Once all the boards were off I used a ce...