Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
So I went to my local specialty wood store looking for long 8/4 walnut for a table I plan on making and to price things out… answer – really expensive! Anyway, while I was there I found on offcut of Mahogany that was 8/4, approximately 6 wide and 3' long (which is unusual because they won't leave anything shorter that 6'). So I picked it up and brought it home figuring that something would occur to me. I have a side table in my room that is an antique piece and I had been examining it for ideas. I decided though to make something a bit smaller (it's about 3' high), modeled on a table I had against the couch that was 2' high. It was modern contruction though and was essentially screwed together which isn't my aesthetic at all. I decided to do a half blind dovetail stretcher to hold the top together and started resawing the wood by hand… this was exhausting, I used a power planer to help me thickness a few of the pieces.
This is what I eventually came up with, but I had misjudged the width and the board I had left was too short to be the top. So I went back to the figurative drawing board (I didn't sketch anything out, I was playing by eye) and decided to put a drawer underneath (closer in kind to the original antique that had peaked my interest).
Here you can see I added a bottom mortise and tenon all the way around. The nice thing about this design is that it holds together fairly securely even without glue. Sketched out in pencil in the picture above are the through and stopped dados that I was going to cut to hold the side panels. The through dados were cut with a plow plane (which was a pain in the butt because the piece was so narrow that finding a way to work hold it so I could use a fenced tool was almost impossible) and the stopped dados were cut with a router plane.
This was the front of the piece where the drawer front would go.
Here the panels are slotted in and I have added supports for the drawer.
View from the top.
From the side.
Drawer sides and front cut and ready for dovetailing. The sides and back were scrap cherry and the bottom of the drawer was resawn out of the stock left over from the carcass.
The handle I made from a scrap piece of black walnut using my molding planes (really the first time I'm ever used them) and a few rasps. It's not screwed in, there are two brass nails that are a bit angled out from each other going through the drawer front and into the handle. I can glue that or replace with screws, but it's working for the moment (I was in the flow of things and I didn't want to run down to Woodcraft to get brass screws). There is also a brass nail acting as a stop so the bottom of the drawer doesn't slide out.The picture below is the carcass, all built from the same piece of Mahogany.
You can see I tapered the legs and rounded the front legs. I used a spokeshave for the rounding and it was a terrible idea. Mahogany reverses grain direction all the time and is a pain to work with hand tools. I should have put it on the lathe and rounded it that way.The figure of eight attachments are for the top connection.I didn't have enough lumber from the original 3' piece to make the top. Luckily I had some Mahogany left over from building my Japanese tool box and I was able to join some pieces together to make the top.