The Woodshop Shed

Corner Table in Walnut and Curly Maple

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


This was for one of the few occasions when I build something for my own house. A new end/corner table was needed to sit at the ends of two couches that are positioned at right angles to each other. I was inspired by the floating top table that Leec posted here a few weeks ago, plus I had a 5/8” thick board of curly maple that had been sitting around for three years. That board was meant for a customer project, but he never seemed to be able to pony up the $100 down payment (a good practice when dealing with unknown clients so I can at least cover cost of materials if they ghost).The dark woods are black walnut, the top is the curly maple, and the cat feet are white maple. The curly maple has a lot of high angle grain, so a combination of a shelix carbide cutter in the planer, a drum sander, and some significant hand sanding afterwards got down to a smooth surface.I chose to use breadboard ends to stabilize the thin top board ends, and used (nearly) hidden 1/8” hard maple dowels to attach the walnut end to the curly maple. I wanted the strength of the maple for the dowels, and also did not want the dowels to show, so walnut dowels were out, and the maple dowels had to be on the maple side of the joint. This meant that the traditional breadboard mortise and tenon positions had to be reversed (tenon on the walnut side) so I could position the dowels on the maple side. The cat feet (last two photos) are attached with internal floating tenons to strengthen the otherwise end-grain glue joint. I could have done the top inlay with a template and hand router, but opted to use the CNC router with a 1/8” bit in a single pass. The 1.25 degree leg tapers are cut on the table saw. Finish is 5 coats of wipe on Minwax satin Tung oil varnish.

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