Half-Round Tables, the Dummy Approach - The Freelance Files MMCCXI

"beveled wood pieces"

Maybe we're in a rut... or maybe we just hit a rich vein of freelance dumbassery. You decide. Whichever, today's the third day in a row for us to feature some greed-sucking J-school grad attempting to lift pertinent information from a couple of online sources to create instructions for crafting a piece of furniture, namely a table. Today, we'll wade through a post at HomeSteady.com (formerly eHow.com) written by romance novelist Becky Lower; something she said would show her readers "How to Build a Half Moon Table." That's one freelancer's opinion...

Lower managed to find a couple of blog posts about building tables (even something about half-round tables), from which she cribbed a handful of instructions. We submit that a reasonably competent woodworker might be able to use her instructions as a starting point, but the sad fact is that Becky didn't understand what she was "writing," so most of her steps left something to be desired. Let's have a look...

First, Lower said to make your table top out of a "Slab of one inch thick wood" (per the original - it's not in the current version) that you "Measure... 36 inches long and 18 inches wide." Well, we don't know about her neighborhood hardwood dealer, but we found a dealer that would sell us that much hard maple for $5.55 per board foot – about twenty-five bucks – assuming that they even sell 18-inch wide lumber (you'd probably have to glue up five or six 1-by-4s instead).

In an astounding demonstration of ignorance about tools, Lower then instructed her readers to,

"Draw a semi-circle connecting these measurements and cut with a table saw."

Yeah, right: cut your half-moon curve with a "table saw." It is to laugh... but, then, this is the same "expert" who said to make the table top by "carving a slab of wood in a semi-circular shape"!

For the apron (a word Lower didn't use), she merely told her readers to,

"Cut pieces of the 1-by-4 inch wood to form a triangle base for the slab."

She more or less got the geometry right for the apron, but after that her instructions became increasingly vague:

3. "Screw these pieces together..."
4. "Position a leg in each of the three corners and screw the leg to the base." 
5. "Add a piece of beveled wood in front of each leg to form a brace which will join the panels together."

Apparently, Becky's grasp of the geometry was a little... hazy. A square-top leg would fit nicely in one of the three corners, but as for the other two? Those legs would take some advance "carving" she didn't mention. And that bit about "beveled wood"? She ripped that (and the word "panel") off from instructions for building a rectangular table; from an image we reproduced above.

And finally, Lower's instructions for his fine, hand-crafted piece of furniture included the following:

"Add one finishing screw through the top and into each leg."

Yeah: run screws through that nice "slab" for which you'd paid an exorbitant amount... That's as well as assembling the apron by screwing everything together (a difficult feat on the non-square corners). No, our Dumbass of the Day seemed to think she could convert plans for a rectangular table to a half-moon table just by leaving out one of the legs. We're here to say, "That ain't right." The only useful information in Becky's post is in the originals she attempted to reproduce.

DDIY - FURNITURE