Making A Cleave Table

The process of building a Cleave table involves a lot of joining, splitting, and rejoining, hence the name Cleave.

Cleaved together

Using my big cast iron veneer press, I glued together the two halves of the Cleave base. To help more evenly distribute the clamping pressure, I used two half-pipe shaped cut off pieces from a different turned project. The diameter of the half pipes was greater than that of the cleave base, so I filled the gap with layers of 1/8” mdf.