I headed determinedly to the garage, meaning to make myself a no-frills table. One small enough for a monitor and a keyboard; to be used for the file server I’m trying to Ubuntu. Trying. Ubuntu. Samba. WTF.

This table was to be built from scrap, whatever I had in the garage. I knew the legs didn’t need to be all that strong, modern monitors are light and keyboards weigh next to nothing. I found some dowels, and cut one to the height of my would-be table.  Then my eye fell on a walking-stick, propped in the corner.  Natural!  Wood!  On-hand!  Sweet!

The previous day, my neighbor had lugged his borrowed thingy up and down the street, volunteering to cut back pesky branches.  This of course left me with a ready supply of my environmentally friendly table legs.   About the time I was trimming these erstwhile branches, my daughter came out and wanted to know if I was building a table for her plants.  She’s been on a big green-thumb kick lately, to my delight!

Well bazinga, now my table would serve outdoors, where it could be as wobbilty as it wanted.  Because these legs curve, they need to be cut at the correct angle, both at the bottom and top.  There’s got to be some technique to cutting these things, but it’s trial and error with me.

You can see in the pic above I cut a number of slices off the branches to use a shims.  I’m going to need them.  I thought about using the PVC as cross bracing as well, but couldn’t figure out how to attach them with what I have on hand.

I had originally planned on throwing some cement fiber board on top and calling it done, but that would never work.  The stuff I have is to thin, and breaks easily unless fully supported.  So now I needed a frame.  I uncovered a 12 foot length of pressure-treated lumber, slightly curved.  Well, that sort of fits with the theme, so I cut it into two 4 foot lengths, and two 2 foot lengths and screwed ‘em together.  I had to ride it like a pony to get ‘em more-or-less flush.

Here it is, screwed and braced.  If you look at the front left corner, and rear right corner you might notice neither is touching the floor.  Bummer.

I’ll screw the legs to the corner pieces.  I hope the corner braces are big enough for the twisting legs.  I’ll add the plywood in the next stage; I set it on top of the frame here to see if it’s big enough.  Of course, it’s not.

Since it was well over 100 degrees, I decided this was a good place to stop. I set the plywood on top and weighed it down with the miter saw.  Maybe it will straighten itself out.