I can just about declare victory in the epoxy battle. I learned something 
interesting too, but a bit late. After scraping the hard as glass epoxy for 
nearly an hour-aggravating my thumbs and elbows, I decided to send it through the wide belt sander. I was sure it was going to trash the belt so I put on an old one. To my surprise it worked great, and it didn't gum up the belt. When sanding this stuff with the orbital, it loads up the paper in no time. The wide belt must not generate as much heat. So, no more scraping!


Now that the flattening, planing, and filling is more or less complete, I am ready to put the two back together again. I put a couple clamps on to reassess the joint. It needs a bit of fine tuning as the ends are just a hair open. I give the edges another pass on the jointer, little stroke with the hand plane and they are good to go. Here is a shot of the second half of the table in clamps.

Now the two halves of the table are back together, filled, flat, and planed to thickness other than finish sanding. They will no longer fit through the 15" wide belt sander. Setup on the other machine is going well. Yesterday the new bearings were installed on the recovered contact drum, and it was put back in the machine. This was greatly assisted by Bob Wood's mechanical mind. Thanks Bob. Once we took the top and the doors off the machine, and removed the dust collection fitting, access was quite a bit easier and it went in pretty easily-other than being heavy. We put the new feed rollers in too, and then realized they had to come back out to remove the bed for its new belt. That is on the agenda for today. With some luck, it should be running by the end of the day. Maybe I'll post some photos of that process, should be interesting.