21 Dec, 2020 – Oakland, CA
Ladies and Gentlemen, behold my first piece of furniture built with the express intention of being sold retail!
This fall I had the honor of visiting the Aborica Saw Mill in beautiful western Sonoma County to get a brief tour and to shop from the the locally famous “Wall of Anomalies”. Aborica specializes in milling salvaged lumber from around the West coast and is really something to see. Their off-cuts and other oddball scraps are stacked semi-precariously against a wall at the far end of their massive warehouse/natural air-drying kiln and are sold to visitors at a steep discount. There were some nice pieces of cedar mixed among walnut, redwood, bay laurel, all sorts of mystery oak, eucalyptus, elm, and who knows what else. I paid a very modest price for about 40 board-feet of rough lumber, took it home and started scheming…
What I came up with was a a design (sketch-up plans available) for a slick little coffee that draws inspiration from some of my favorite styles: live edge, mid-century modern, and Shaker, with a few little nods to the Stickley/Greene ilk.
After carefully removing some bark and scrubbing with a hand-held planer, a modest amount of sanding revealed a lovely grain pattern and unique hourglass shape with an interesting feature about half way down one edge. It also revealed some checking (cracks) running along the grain at either end. I did some light shaping of the ends and non-bark edge to create symmetry and then turned my attention to those cracks.
I added three mahogany Dutchmen (aka bow ties) near the ends on the under-side to mitigate any further checking. I cut the inlays on my band saw, traced them onto the slab then chopped the mortises by hand. They are each about 7/8″ in deep each, and should hold things steady as the seasons swell and shrink this ~20″ wide slice of glorious smelling cedar. On to the body of the table.
I knew I wanted something light and elegant to compliment the thin look of the slab which is only about 1 1/8″ thick and looks even thinner because of the natural bevel along the edges. A tapered leg was an obvious choice. The stock I had for aprons was pretty twisted at one end (presumably the reason for it ending up on the Wall of Anomolies) meaning I could really only get ~30″ of straight boards out of it, so I decided to splay the legs in the long dimension to help add some stability and balance to the form of the body which worked well with the taper. After tapering the legs on the table saw I chopped mortises for the short stretcher, but decided the legs needed a little more flair.
I decided to add some simple geometric shapes to the legs and short stretchers to compliment (contrast?) the organic shape of the table top. By setting a mitre on my table saw I was able to add these interesting triangle shapes to the legs using a simple tapering jig. I used a similar technique (sans taper) for the short stretcher, which ultimately took a delicate, narrow extruded diamond shape highlighting the grain.
Finally I added a slight bevel to the longer aprons too, just for a little extra flair.
I vacillated quite a bit on the best way to attach the legs to the aprons. I needed a strong method to hold these delicate little legs in place and support what could be a decent amount of weight if someone decided to sit on the table. I considered using a glorified dowel technique from a recent issue of FWW, which I think would have been strong, but it seemed kinda fussy given all the angles I was dealing with and the lack of thickness in the top. In the end, I cut a bridle joint creating with a small shoulder on the lower face and left the tenon long as one more little flourish. This joint creates a ton of long grain surface area between the parts giving me the strength I needed to resist any racking forces.
The whole body of the table weighed in at 4.5 lbs in the end. How strong could that be? Well, I (175 lbs.) and my (45 lb.) kid sat on the un-finished table for a ~220 lb. test without making a creak. By my calculation this pretty little fame comfortably held up about 50 times its own weight – pretty solid.
A bunch of sanding, filing cracks, several coats of Danish Oil, and a little poly on the top brought this one in for a landing, I thought…
Sadly, as I was waiting for the final coat to dry, my cats knocked the slab off of the sawhorses in the night and created some significant dings in the relatively soft wood. I was able to steam and sand to pretty much make them disappear, but it was frustrating to have to go back a few steps finishing-wise. Given other life-demands this added two plus weeks to my timeline which made me very anxious.
Finally, I brought this to my friend’s shop: Mudlab (a zero-waste café and grocery here in Oakland) where as of this writing, it awaits a happy new home priced around $300 – a steal in my opinion.