A Plank Table for Woodworking Dummies

Plank dining table

Somewhere along the line – about 2010, we think – eHow.com began to require contributors  to provide references for their posts. That caused a lot of problems for the ones who were just making stuff up, but the smarter ones figured out that the trick was to "cite" a book or magazine article unavailable online. That way the content editors couldn't look it up without a trip to the library. Sneaky! and it allowed the writers to continue to collect those glorious stipends. Here's an example a staffer noticed not long ago: the Hunker.com post "How to Make a Plank-Style Dining Table,"¹ posted by Amma Marfo (perhaps using the name Margaret Telsch-Williams at the time).

According to archive.org Marfo, a "communications graduate," cited two offline books: one in the Fine Woodworking collection and another allegedly written by Anthony Guidice. The second doesn't exist (a book by that title was written by Kim Graves and Masha Zager), and the first has no plank table in the table of contents. It sure looks to us like Marfo faked her refs.
Besides, no book published by Fine Woodworking or any reputable woodworker would have the problems inherent in Amma's instructions, problems like

• Marfo clearly does not know that a 1-by-10 is not 10 inches wide.
• She clearly does not know that four 36-inch boards butted together will make a rectangle 36 by 37½ inches.
• Does Fine Woodworking really instruct its readers to, "Nail three nails across the width of each 10-inch board at both points where the frame boards rest below"? We doubt it: that's not particularly "fine."
• Amma's 3-by-3 legs are the right length, but attaching them to the table by nailing "through the frame into the post using two evenly spaced nails on the sides where the frame touches the post" won't be sufficiently stable for a table.
• What furniture maker anywhere is going to tell you to, "Space the boards roughly a ¼-inch [sic] apart" on the top of a dining table?

We can't be sure, but it looks like Marfo cribbed some directions for making a picnic table top and just "winged it" for the rest of the instructions. A table built according to the dreck our Dumbass of the Day pounded out would look like crap for the entire two hours it stood before collapsing of its own weight. Feh.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_12030060_make-plankstyle-dining-table.html

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