Here's my back yard tree stump table

Phase I - Carving the stump...

This was, by far, the hardest part of the project.  At first I thought I could do the whole job with my reciprocating saw, but after about 10 minutes of that I knew I was barking up the wrong tree (no pun intended).  So I went over to my neighbor, Mike's, and borrowed his chain saw.  I have a strict policy about returning items in better condition then when I borrowed them, so the first thing I did was clean the saw up, as it was very dirty.  Next I fired her up.  She seem to run okay.  As I touched the blade to the tree I was discovering that this saw wasn't cutting very well.  It seemed the blade was quite dull.  But honestly this was much better than using the reciprocating saw, so I continued to use the chain saw.

Here's a couple pictures of my first cuts.

 

As you can see I drew circles in the top of the dowel as a guideline towards a perfectly round cylinder.

The only way to get the dowel round was to use a belt sander.  I purchased a really good Porter Cable belt sander a couple years ago.  I was really glad to have it for this project.  However, even with a good belt sander, it was still me vs. the tree.  I was going into battle...BTW, you may notice a weed or 2 in the yard with me.  I had to battle those, too!

After a while the dowl started to take shape.  Eventually I was able to get the table top to sit on top of the partially shaped dowl.  If you look closely you can see that the dowel is still tapered.

Eventually I had enough of the wood ground away so all that remained was a nice, round dowel.  I was eventually able to get the spool wheel to fit onto the dowel with no fasteners or glue.  The table top is completely removable by 2 people.
















I started thinking about that perfectly round, carved goove in the center of the table top.  It only made sense to take the smaller wooden wheel I had scavenged from the spool and make a Lazy Susan out of it.  I added a couple of roller-blade wheels to the mix.  That idea worked perfectly to form a perfectly functioning Lazy Susan.  There were 8 holes already drilled around the perimeter of the Lazy Susan, so I filled those holes with dowels so one could grab them to rotate the Lazy Susan.

What outdoor table is complete without an umbrella to shade you from the sun?  I borrowed an auger bit from my friend, Drew, so I could drill a large hole down through the center of the dowel.  As you can see, the umbrella fits nicely in there.

No project is complete without Smokey's approval.