Sunday, April 20, 2008

Japanese Inspired Coffee Table

This was my first big furniture project. Having some computer skills comes in handy, as I am able to model my ideas out in Rhino before cutting wood. It allows me to make sure I have the feeling I want from the piece and know what I am getting into. I model all of the cuts and joints as well, and I try to design for simplicity in construction since I have limited access to tools.

This was my first experience with Bloodwood, and how I learned the hard way not to use Shellac directly on Bloodwood. One thing I strive for is to work with the natural colors of the wood, I am not a big fan of staining or obscuring the wood in any way. In order to provide a nice contrast with the Bloodwood, I chose Wenge which is a favorite wood of mine. The colors go beautifully, and it makes for an unusual looking table. Besides the bold stripe down the middle, I added some accents in the apron that seamlessly appear out of the legs. Overall I am very pleased with the design... I don't like frilly or overly fancy things: first, they're hard to make, and second, I think they look stupid. I aim for clean, modern looks as this suits my aesthetic tastes and also, I can make them.

The trickiest part of this design was the joints of apron and legs. The legs are assembled from four pieces of 0.5 x 3 x 12 inch pieces of Wenge. The edges are cut with the table saw to 45 degrees, then they are assembled into the blocky legs. There is a nice trick to this, you lay the pieces out side by side with the joint surfaces face down on a table, then duct tape down the edges where they line up. This lets you flip them over as a unit, run glue down the joints, then roll them up and tape the final edge. The tape prevents the glue from spilling to the outside surface, and holds the pieces square. It's a nice, and cheap method if you don't have fancy pants clamps to hold them in place.

Once the legs are cut, I made some square caps on the table saw and cut a bevel in with the router, then ran them upside down on the table saw to cut the slots where the apron would come together. I then drilled and chiseled out the slots. The bloodwood highlights were added to the short crossmembers of the apron with a lap joint, and a gooseneck. I was worried about strength in case the tabletop warped so tried to design the joint to resist the upward pressure well. The angles on the apron ends represent a 30 degree right angle triangle which has a nice feeling to it.

The tabletop panels use a lap joint, I don't have any equipment to make anything more fancy than this and it seems fine so far. Another trick when gluing together long panels like this is to run tape all along the seams of the join (the photo is of another similar table I built afterwards). When you clamp it all together, any glue squeezeout ends up on the tape. There are no worries then about glue cleanup, just pull the tape off when you're done.

The table assembles pretty simply, though there was some painful hand-tuning of the intersection of the apron with the legs. Because everything is hand-sanded, the apron would vary in thickness by a millimeter or so and that caused a lot of unhappy times. After shellacing though, the results I thought were very beautiful.

This project suffered badly from sandpaper contamination, so I had to redo the finish a few times (the pain). Nothing would stick. Furthermore I had really soaked the Wenge with Tung Oil, so much so that there was little chance of it ever properly curing out. That gave me many, many days of re-sanding and re-attempting to put a finish on. Very sad and tedious, and could have been avoided by (a) being sparing with the Tung Oil, there is no need to flood, and (b) making sure to clean all sanding dust. Failure to do so can prevent the finish from adhering. See my on Sandpaper Contamination.

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