A Little End Table

I sometimes find that circumstances help to dictate my work and the circumstance that confronted me recently was too many short lengths of interesting wood.  What to do? Well, there are many uses for such pieces, from cutting boards to box panels to fuel for the wood stove. After some pondering I decided on a little end table.  This would only use up one chunk of short stuff, but it might lead to a run of little end tables too which would obviously use up more short stuff.  Honestly, I was also intrigued with the possibilities that had arisen while building the sofa table I featured a few posts back.  That piece had the legs dovetailed right into the thick top and I wanted to explore that theme a bit more.

I put together a mockup based on a quickie sketch using 2 x 4 glued up for the top and other bits and pieces. I liked the idea of including some simple steam bent legs in the design.  I also penciled in the dovetails and a through-tenoned rail — I ultimately gave up that treatment for the rail as it struck me as too busy.  The mockup gave me a lot of good information concerning proportions, splay of the curved legs and construction details. I took a trial run at the steam bending to check on spring back and to confirm that the bend was mild enough to omit a tension strap. It also provided me with a sample to try my hand at shaping a tapered parabola (in cross-section) into the leg. There was enough positive here to give me the confidence to dive right in.

I had some very lovely birdseye maple that I resawed into veneers and then glued onto a substrate of straight-grained hard maple.  Then came the big dovetails.  I used the same bandsaw jig described in the sofa table to cut these.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I took time to document only one other in-progress shot, but it’s an interesting take of the leg glue-up.

This shows the padded and shaped clamping cauls required to direct the pressure in the right direction while also providing protection to the finished parts.

Here’s a few looks at the finished piece:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This basic form opens up lots of other possibilities to explore. You will probably be seeing some variations of this in the future. While building this, the red oak used for the legs proved to be a bear to shape with a spokeshave.  No matter how sharp or fine the cut it would tear out in strings. I decided to try making a high angle spokeshave to tackle this problem and it worked brilliantly! I’ll give a brief chronicle of that soon.

This one’s for sale:  $650 (SOLD). dimensions: 21″ x 16″ x 12″

Until next time!
df