| Blog series by Douglas | updated 66 days ago | 5 parts | 4650 reads | 14 comments total |
Part 1: Project Planning and Getting Lumber
My sister just moved into a new house, and as a gift, I wanted to make her something. She needed a sofa table, as her sofa backs into her living room. Over the holidays, I took my measurements, floated a few designs her way, and we settled on a two drawer Shaker style hall table, made a bit thinner, to be a sofa table. This will be my first project for someone other than myself & my wife. It will also be the first project with my new bench, so I’m very excited to get use that. He...
Part 2: Legs and Aprons
Since last part, I was able to get farther on the table. After letting the parts acclimate to the shop overnight, I milled all the parts to final dimensions. I then had to rip the front apron into horizontal strips, then cut the middle section vertically to make the drawer fronts, then re-glue the apron together to make the openings. Next I cut the stopped mortises in the legs to accept the apron tenons. After getting those finished, I noticed I’d made a mistake. I apparently did...
Part 3: Base Assembly - a screwed up glue up
I had some time to get to the assembly of the base, and doing the glue up. All the parts were cleaned up and sanded. Although I’d done a dry fit, I hadn’t planned out my sequence, and, well, once the glue was on, I realized my alignment was off, and I clamped some things in wrong order, and this glue up was going badly. The glue was on for about 5 minutes, and starting to set up. i either had to live with it, or turn back. So I decided to stop. I pulled the parts apart, very caref...
Part 4: Drawers - practice and final fitting
Next up was making the drawers for the table. As it was my first time doing hand cut half blind joints, I put myself through a practice run, making two drawers (sans bottoms) with scrap, before using the real grain matched pieces, and potentially screwing those up. I had my how-to down pretty well, but I wanted to get a little more experience in my muscles, and be able to notice any bad trends in technique and correct them. Here’s my efforts, with poplar for the sides & back...
Part 5: Finishing and finishing
I finally had time this past week to finish the table. I tried some test pieces to see which approach to take. I knew wanted to use shellac, and that I possibly wanted to use oil first. So, I created four test finishes on cutoffs, sanded to 220… Dainish oil + clear shellacDainish oil + amber shellacclear shellac onlyamber shellac only The oil made less difference than I thought, but I liked what it did. And the amber shellac was too much, and clear not enough. So I decided to d...
