Walnut coffee table

Well, my wife wanted a coffe table and after completing several smaller projects but never an actual piece of furniture I thought why not. She wanted a very plain table, which was good for me. I actually considered trying some breadboard ends, but she didn’t want them. So, what we have is a very simple table made of walnut with regular tapered legs. The aprons are attached with haunched mortise and tenons. The top is simply butt jointed together and attached to the base with wooden buttons set into small mortises in the aprons. The finish is umpteen thousand coats of garnet shellac topped with a coat of wax.

I learned a lot by working on this project. I learned to always get the flattest stock you can find and then buy extra. I had to make two extra trips to the hardwood dealer to finally have enough wood. Although I do have a nice pile of exta walnut in the basement now. I also learned to match the color of the wood as closely as possible while at the lumber dealer. I had to stain the apron material to make it match the legs as close as possible. I built a jig for my plunge router to cut the mortises in the legs. I learned that my plunge router stinks and doesn’t plunge straight up and down but has a slight rock in the plunge actions which can hurt your mortises. I learned that you can’t see a pencil mark on walnut, completely cutting the end off of one of my mortises requiring me to glue a piece back into the leg when the haunch should go.

The one smart thing that I did was to build the taper jig off of antiquesbuiltdaily.com, which worked wonderfully for tapering the legs.

All in all it was a very educational experience and it turned out okay.

-- PeteMoss