Dining table, hard rubbish style

Found a really nice solid timber dining table on hard rubbish. Yet another absurd find on the side of the road. This is easily repairable and has the classic look that everyone wants. It's clearly a student project and had many indicators of the classroom.

...So I bolstered it with dowel pins and glue throughout, fixed some split timber and pinned those with more dowels, and repositioned some table-top fasteners that had shifted completely out of usefulness due to timber shinkage over the years.

The top has been belt-sanded by a barbarian and then coated with combination varnish-stain...the worst timber finish ever. Don't use that stuff, it ALWAYS looks terrible. Use separate products; a stain, THEN a varnish.

I'm putting this table into the spare room as a hobby-bench as we already have a nice small dining table in the kitchen. As such, the goofy finish and whacky sanding underneath is going to remain...still looks pretty good though.

Previously had wood-screws into end grain. What a derp. Fixed with dowels and glue.

Oh I also found some carpet underlay in a different hard rubbish pile. This happens to be precisely what I need for the van underlay. Saved me ~$25bucks/meter for regular automotive underlay, there're a few meters here.

The width on the larger piece is the width between foot-steps. Handy.

This piece had some nasty splits across some of the joinery holes, so it took x5 very long dowel pins to get some strength back into it.

Table-top fasteners floating out in space doing nothing. I repositioned these.

Looks pretty good. Item #3431234 of my hard rubbish finds in Australia.