Coffee Table Progress :Friday Update
Last week was a frustrating week for me. I made what felt like very little progress. This week was the opposite. I went from a pile of boards to two almost tables. Well, the parts of tables, but I’m still working on connecting those parts.
The bases for both the coffee table and sofa table are cut out and nearly ready for assembly. I am going with a similar design to the slab dining table I made earlier this year, but with a couple of changes.
The first is the bottom plate. The previous design used a rabbet and screws for strength, which was important given the slab’s weight. But for these bases will support less weight so I’m going for a design element I have been wanting to try, miters with dovetail key reinforcement.
The trick to the miters is getting the angles right. I wanted the legs to lean at 10 degrees which meant I needed the miters to connect at 80 degrees, so I divided that in half and cut a test piece at 40 degrees, but two 40 degree cut pieces ended up with an obtuse 10 degree lean, or 100 degrees. I am very glad I used a test piece, so I moved the saw to 50 degrees and cut those test pieces again which achieved the look I was going for.
In cutting all the pieces to size I found some cracks in two boards I had to fill with epoxy before moving forward.
The second change is to the way the bases will connect to the top. The last base had the leg assembly mortised into the top which made the legs easy to remove. This time I’m going with blind sliding dovetails which will be trapped in the underside of the tables as the top is glued together. These tables don’t need removable legs and the sliding dovetails will give the tables additional strength and support against racking. It’s something I would have added to the slab table, but that would have required cutting the slab in half, which wasn’t an option.
I haven’t quite finished those sliding dovetails yet, but this weekend is going to be a busy one to get all these tasks done and the tables ready to sand.
Oh, and if you’re wondering why there aren’t any photos of the progress, I got a new phone for recording, and I am still figuring things out, so expect more picture next week.