Knot How It’s Supposed To Work…

It can start with a need. In this case, a friend has been remodeling his house and needed to put a key in a door at the end of a hall. All he told me was that he wanted a table to put a lamp on, so he could see the door knob, and that the space in the corner of the hall was 10″ by not more than 18″.

I like to have some kind of symmetry in my designs and the one dimension that seemed fixed was the 10″. Quickly I thought, how about 10″ deep by 15″ wide and 30″ tall… multiples of five.

I looked through my piles of wood and lumber for some walnut but didn’t really find anything that jumped out at me. I uncovered some gnarly pieces of Red Oak that my friend had given me last year and I’d completely forgotten about. I planed off the sides to see some nicely figured pieces.

They were just  29″ long, perfect legs for a 30″ table height. I squared them up on the jointer and thickness planed them. There were a few defects, checks, splits and splintery grain. I also thought because the piece was pretty small, I needed to cut them down so they would make sense within the scale of the piece. Hopefully I could cut out the defects too.

I fooled around with a bent piece of quarter round moulding that I use with a string to adjust the bow for marking curves. My idea was to make curved legs and cut out the defects. I cut a piece of plywood the size of the leg blanks for a template.

The hardest thing to do was figure out the sequence of cuts so I’d have a flat surface to run the against the fence and get a square part with which to join the carcase. Here is the first cut…

…then flip it 90 degrees for the second cut, and still have a flat surface to run against the table.

Legs.

That was the end of the day. I had a few random pieces of Red Oak in my stash but not enough to do much. I left the shop that night about eleven thirty in a driving rain. I got to the end of block where there is a new and used resteraunt supply business. They always have stacks of pallets and cardboard set out for the recyclers. There was an Oak counter with white melamine top and shelves sitting in the rain. I got out, kicked the particle board sides and top off it, and stuck these nice raised panels in the truck,

Nice stash of free material, except that when I cut them apart, the panels had been run through a sander or planer and were only 9/16″ thick. Couldn’t use them for a top like I hoped. Oh well, the styles and rails were still 13/16″, so I cut them up. I couldn’t use the panels, so I rummaged around and came up with this…

… a piece of Goncalo Alves that one of my shop neighbors gave me. It was an

off cut from a big board he used to make cabinet doors.Next I laminated pieces of

the Red Oak from the styles and rails on the salvaged counter and laminated

Black Walnut for the feature strips in my new top.

Next, I miter the edge band and…

… and glue the top together. Next I made the carcase sides, cut out the drawer front.

I make the pieces a little wider than I want, so I can rip the drawer front out and glue the frame back together. The you see the grain pattern run through the piece. At least that’s the idea. Next I machine the tenons for joining to the legs.

Next I machine the mortices in the legs on my router table equipped with an IPM fence. Same deal, it was harder to figure out the sequence of cuts, so I had a flat surface to run against the table and fence, than it was to machine the parts.

The IPM machine allows me to make extremely tight fitting joints. I have to make them at least sloppy enough, so that when they get wet with glue, they slide together and won’t wipe the glue off the joint or have to force it together. Every click of the detent wheel moves the fence a thousandth of an inch.

I sand all my parts then glue up. Unfortunately, in my haste to get everything square and true, I flipped the front backwards and by the time I realized it, I couldn’t pull it apart again, the glue dries that fast.

I know and you know, but nobody else will every know. I make runners that fully house the drawer, so I can have tight fitting drawers that slide smoothly and positively. I should have dovetailed the drawer sides, but once I have made a mistake that I can’t or don’t want to spend the time recovering from, I just want to finish and see if the overall design works for me. Still, I make traditional box joints to hide the dado for the drawer bottom.

The drawer bottom was a scrap of Jatoba. I looked through a big box of my signature drawer pulls. It took me years to come up with pulls that felt good in your fingers when you open the drawers. I make them by the dozens because it takes six router setups to create them. I don’t want to stop and make one in the

middle of a piece.

 

Unfortunately, I used all The Red Oak pulls on a previous table,

but at the bottom of the box was one I made from Spalted Apple. Here I route a

mortice in the drawer front to accept a tenon on the back of the pull. A perfect

color match!

Finally I put it all together, did some finish sanding and applied three coats of a

water based lacquer.

When I showed it to my friend, he told me his father had worked at a millwork company in Tigard, Oregon for thirty years and that the pieces he had given me, were  rejected turning blanks he brought home to burn forty years ago. My only cash outlay was for the Lacquer.

I was disappointed that I didn’t get the grain to run through the front of the carcase, but I like the way the legs came out.  I’ll put them in my repertoire and do better next time… maybe in Black Walnut.

My friend really like the piece and thought it was better that he envisioned.