Journal of A Studio Furniture Maker

All done and finished. You can see more photos at my website. I have had a great response to this piece so far, and I want to thank everyone for their kind words. Positive feedback keeps me moving. Documenting the making of this table has been a fun experience and will most certainly do it again with my next piece. Until then, I will be posting sketches and inspiration to give everyone a better idea of my creative process.

Thanks again everyone. I hope you are all well.

I was playing around with one of my gouges and carving grooves in a piece of wood, seeing what kind of textures I could create, when I looked over and saw what else I was making at the same time. These little wood coils were all over my bench. I just became fascinated by them. It is simply a beautiful shape.

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This next step is where I finally cut and apply all the small walnut pieces to the top. This is particularly enjoyable for me because I get to be free and creative. My intention is to work with the grain and color of the individual pieces arranging them around the top so they transition from active grain to subtle then back. Also, the pieces I am working with are different thicknesses so there is a play in the heights as well. This gives the final look a very nice texture.

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As I work on any piece of furniture I am thinking about where I am at, where I am headed and what the finished product will be. While shaping the legs for this table and thinking of what the top was to be, I started to become unsettled. With so much energy and detail in the top I decided the legs had become a bit of an afterthought. They needed a little more detail and some way to have more of a foot and connection to the ground. This post will show where I decided to go with this and how I did it.

After playing around a bit and doing a few sketches I came up with this shape which will become a relief in the leg. This will play off of what will happen on the top while creating a foot in the leg that connects it to the floor. This shows a plywood jig I have made that I will use a router to create the rough shape with.

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As you move through this post you will see the shaping of the legs. As you saw before they were fit to the top while still solid blocks so that cutting the joinery would be easier. Now it is time to put the curves in and also a taper from front to back.

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This what we will have at the end of this post. I wanted to show you where we were headed so the descriptions make sense as I go along. I will cut the joinery to fit the legs to the top. They are left as blocks so I have a flat square reference for machining. The final shaping will take place after the fitting is done.

The top is left as one piece and the legs are made to look like they are cutting into it. This will be the strongest way to put it together. This way the weight of the ring is resting on top of the legs.

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It’s been a few days, but now it’s time to catch you up on what I have been doing. Last post I had the rail (top) for the coffee table glued together and ready for shaping. The rail is a 61/4″ ring two inches tall. I want to slope the rail toward the middle so it will be 1/2″ on the inside edge, and still two on the outside. I did some fancy footwork with a router jig and got really good results.

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With the core of the rail made I’ll band the inside and outside edges with walnut. I take solid 1/8″ thick strips, bend and glue them to the edges.

I used a series of clamps and backing strips of plywood to glue the band to the rail. I used four pieces to band the outside edge. Each seam will eventually be covered by the legs. By using four pieces cut in series there will be a pattern created as they move around the top. First I glued the two opposite pieces, then came back in with the other two.

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After getting all the solid wood milled up the next step is to build up the rail for the coffee table. This is done by laminating layers of plywood together to get the thickness I need. I used two layers of 3/4″ plywood and two layers of 1/4″ walnut plywood. It will be two inches thick, and later I will mill an angle in the rail so it slopes to 1/2″ in the middle. One of the walnut layers will be used on the bottom to finish it out.

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As I said in the last post this wood has been air drying since 2004. The rule of thumb for air drying wood is that it needs one year for every inch of thickness. These planks are about two inches thick and should be quite ready. Air dried wood, though more time consuming, is highly prized by wood workers. The wood is more stable. The accelerated drying in a kiln introduces a lot of stress and tension in the wood. So, when the wood is being worked with that stress is released, resulting in warped and twisted wood. Also, the color and grain of the wood is not effected by the high heat of a kiln, therefore the color will be more true and sometimes richer.

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