Note the long, green grass in the background- this is almost unheard of for central Texas in June! It's been an unbeliveabley wet year so far- it rained *hard* three times in the last week! Probably not much for the pacific northwest, but it's a big deal here, lemme tellya! It finally dried out enough (barely) for me to start mowing here the last couple of days.
I'm pretty sure that this originally had a glass top, but I wasn't about to mess with that- not with all the materials that I have on hand! To secure the top to the base, I simply drilled two holes in each of the 45 degree crosspieces that used to support the glass top. Flat bottomed pocket hole screws through these will do the trick. Also repainted it with the can of purple spraypaint in the top pic (my only expense for the job). This old piece of countertop has been keeping the rain out of my carport for years- and now I've finally found a new use for it. Note the odd shape- first order of business was to cut a straight line, then work off of that to cut a square table top.
This was a job for the circular saw! Since I didn't want to damage the laminate, it's a two step process. 1st step is to make a scoring cut, with the blade barely protruding- just enough to cut through the laminate, and barely into the wood underneath. 2nd step was the through cut, with the blade lowered all the way. I used the same guide for both cuts. The pic on the right below shows the through cut being made- note the shallow cut ahead of the saw. This works pretty well.
Once cut sqare, I nipped the corners at 45 degrees- much easier and faster than trying to make rounded corners with the router. As it turned out, it looks pretty good that way, too. Once it was cut to shape, I used Durham's rock hard water putty to fill any cracks and voids in the sides (this is a powder that you mix with water- it's widely available, and really is rock hard when it cures). Then sanding, priming (kilz), and turned upside down to paint the edge of the plywood purple to match the base.
Turned it all upside down, screwed the base to the top, and the result is below.
Note that the purple edge really blends the top and base- I didn't anticipate this, but it was definitely a happy accident. The wife is happy, too, but that was no accident :) I had planned to install a keyboard drawer that I picked up somewhere, but it turned out to be *just* too wide to fit between the legs, and there was no way to shorten it, so we'll just have to make do with this :)
