Competition WIP - End Table

[Luke Kelly]

A while back I foolishly promised the following:

I'm going to make an elegant end table in ash with a drawer and it shall be distinctly beginner.

In my head this means something like:

Only with smaller rails on the front as I want the drawer to take up a larger proportion of that space. Thinner legs as well. And a lighter finish, but not too light. The colour of aged cherry maybe.

A design exists on paper, but is so far from presentable that you'll have to wait for any public display of it. It does require very little wood, surprisingly little in fact. Do legs tapering from 30mm to 15--20mm guarantee future failure? I hope not.

The substantive part of this post is to say the following: my brief is a lie. It will not be made in ash. After working out how much wood it needs I realised that I have enough spare beech lying around and so, for sensible fiscal reasons, that is what it shall be made from. Why do I have spare beech? Because when working my way through the book that's currently responsible for my attempts to gain woodworking skills I got very excited when ordering wood. I ordered all the wood needed for many of the projects. This was exciting. This was not conductive to thinking. So un-conductive to thinking that I didn't think at all when drawing up a list of the wood needed. The early project "make a knife block" required a small amount of beech in two thicknesses. Only I couldn't buy wood in short lengths. So bought them in the minimum length. I now have 25 board feet of beech. For a knife block. That I skipped because I wasn't interested in making it. Fool.

 

[Digit]

I've recently completed a similar project in Oak Luke, well I will have when I fit the top, :lol: and the wife insisted on very slender legs.
They taper from 30mil at the top to 20mil at the foot.
No problems thus far but do make sure the the legs are made from straight grained timber.
And if you beat me in the competition now you're dead! :lol:

Roy.

 

[Luke Kelly]

I think you're safe, I'm distinctly beginner. Ambition is masquerading for ability here! Cheers for the leg info, as long as the timber is good I'll be brave and slim.

 

[Digit]

You will need to give some thought to attaching the legs to the rails Luke, thin legs cannot really handle the normal M and T joint.

Roy.

 

[Luke Kelly]

Hmmm. They should be just wide enough for a mortise and tenon I think. The table as a whole is going to be small enough that the stresses should be tolerable.

Spent a few hours working on the legs today.

Ripping the legs:

This is an inaccurate process, until I sharpen the Disston saw I've rescued from rust a cheap saw from B&Q is the primary ripping tool. The results are invariable wavey-edged. Four litres of sweat later, we have four rough legs

and an exhausted author

The next stage is to make the edges straight and plane off the few mm margin I left when ripping them.

plus

gives

One leg! This took a long time, partly because I had to put planes back together, attempt to tune them, sharpen blades and so on. But also because of the amount of wood to remove. The next three legs have less wood to remove so they'll only take a couple of hours and then I'll have four square legs.

(The observant will have noticed a missing nut in the Record No. 6. This is a source of great embarrassment. Every other nut and washer was in the relevant pot. I fear it fell down the back of a load of drawers which would take a long time to move. Argh.

 

[Tony Spear]

You will need to give some thought to attaching the legs to the rails Luke, thin legs cannot really handle the normal M and T joint.

Roy.

Sliding dovetails?

That would be fun! :shock:

 

[OPJ]

What about stub tenons? You would also find it helps to offset the mortises inwards from the outside face of the legs, to prevent weakening it too much, as opposed to cutting them central.

I applaud you for hand-planing all that beech in a modern Workmate... =D> I've just built a solid new workbench and I still have trouble planing beech with some of my planes... :roll:

There's nothing wrong with having too much timber in your workshop either - it only means that it's going to be better seasoned than brand new stock and you can never complain of having nothing to work with!! :wink: