Castle Joint Tables - Become a BETTER Craftsman with this Joinery Addition to your Table Builds

Hey guys, welcome back to Crafting with Cook. I'm Brian Cook and today we're going to make our

table

s extra special. Instead of just the basic farmhouse style

table

with pocket holes, we're going to do

castle

joint

s. Follow me and look at

this

. So our design is probably one of the most important steps we're going to do. I have all my boards lined up and clamped so they are all the same. I'm going to mark my bottom slot where my shelf is going to be three quarters of an inch wide, so I'm marking both sides and then I'm going to color in where I'm going to cut, so let's move to the top now and we're going to do mark at an inch and a half,

this

is where our stretchers for our table will go and this is where the

castle

joint

will go back in, this is probably the key component of making a quality castle joint, so one thing that is Really helpful when marking a castle joint is to make the legs divisible by three, so ours measure an inch and a half, which means I can divide them by half an inch and get a perfect design.

Here you see me marking a half inch on center so I can cut it for the castle joint frames, so we want to set up our table saw so we can make repeatable cuts. Here I'm placing half an inch in the center. between my template and the saw blade so that every time I cut I get that half inch. I also want to raise my blade so that it is just below my layout line, so in this case it will be just below one and a half inches I can always chisel down to my line, the template you see us using here will help keep it vertical and square with the saw blade as we make our cuts, so let's make our first cut.

We're going to turn the board and make our second cut. Then we'll turn it to the adjacent side and repeat both cuts to get a plus-like pattern that will create our castle joint and we'll continue. and repeat that process for all

your

legs, so the next step is to remove the debris between the posts and the castle joint. We will use a jigsaw to do this, but there are many different ways to do this. sounds, a chisel works great, the point is that we want to remove that debris. Now you'll notice that I'm leaving that line so I can go back with a chisel and clean it up, after removing most of the debris with the jigsaw.

The option is to use a chisel to reduce that key line with small chisel cuts and go halfway to reduce the tear, so another option is to go back to the table saw and set up a stack of grooves that you can configure. For whatever width

your

joint cut was for us, which was half an inch, set the height of the blade to the exact line you want to cut and go ahead and cut. The nice thing about this is that it gives you a uniform flat bottom cut. As a side note, you can use the dice stack to make all your cuts from the beginning.

The key is that as far as the height of the blade goes, you want to cut in small increments at most half the width of the blade on each pass. So the next step will be to make the aprons, so we'll use the dice stack to cut a little bit off each side to fit between the castle joint stud. Okay, here we are marking the ends of the boards. I'm marking them on the half inch that will be the overhang for that decorative look and then I'm also going to mark the inch and a half that we're going to cut into the groove that we're going to make.

To cut both sides to fit the castle joint studs because I'm using three-quarter-inch material and I need to fit it into that half-inch slot I cut, we're only taking an eighth of an inch off each side. I'm using the crosscut sled here to help keep it square to the blade or perpendicular to the blade so we have a nice clean cut. One of the most difficult parts of the castle joint is getting the aprons to fit properly. having to cut slots in both the long aprons and the short aprons to make them fit together in a lap joint style, as well as those slots we made in the previous scene to help them fit into the table legs, here I am marking where I'm going to cut them so they fit properly and we'll take them to the band saw to cut them.

You can use a variety of different tools, jigsaws, jigsaws, whatever you have available, cut them up, we just need to make sure they fit together well and here they are. The longer apron has a slot cut to fit over the leg and another to fit on the shorter apron. The shorter apron has the opposite lap joint cut and you can see that they should fit well so that there is a good friction fit and we don't need to use any fasteners. Hey, I hope this was helpful and you can

better

understand how to build a castle joint from this video if you got something out of this.

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