The Woodshop Shed

Ebonized Round Side Table

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


One of those impromptu projects. My wife comes back from the furniture store with a side table she liked, assembles it and the thing stands skewed: legs aren't plum but the top is levelled! Table goes back to the store but not before I take down all dimensions and head to the shop.The top is 17” in diameter, 1 1/2” thick and sits 22” above the floor. The shelf is 15” in diameter, 1” thick and sits 7” above the floor. The legs are 1 5/8” wide x 5/8” thick. Made from solid maple so it is surprisingly heavy for its size.The most interesting aspect of this build was to figure out how to attach the legs to the top without an apron. Made a cross with two pieces (same width and thickness as the legs) joined with a half-lap. The legs are attached to the ends of the cross with a glued and screwed rabbet joint (rabbet in the leg only). The assembly is then glued and screwed into wide grooves made with the router, straight edge and top-bearing template bit. Technically there's one groove and one dado because I oriented the slots with and across the grain of the top. This way I was able to glue one piece of the cross to the top over its entire length and only glued the middle 4” for the other. If you look carefully at the picture of the underside you can see the elongated screw holes in the outside ends of the piece that runs across the grain and the dado it sits in is longer to allow for seasonal wood movement. Using a hand plane I flattened 4 sections of the shelf's perimeter to make a good glue connection with the shallow dados in the legs. 16 gauge nails inserted into the shelf from the leg side reinforce the joint.The finish is Saman black stain with Saman flat poly (sold as floor poly) applied using a HVLP gun.

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