Operation: Nicer Coffee Table

As is traditional, I shall begin my post with the completed project. This is my new coffee table, I built it to replace the several year old IKEA Lack coffee table I bought when I moved here after graduating college.

Somewhat wider view of New Hotness next to Old and Busted.

The IKEA Lack in Birch served me quite well for many years and realistically has several years of faithful service left...however it's a bit...dull. It will likely be pressed into workshop service.

I started by making the legs/sides. I am the type of person who would normally be referred to a "a cheap bastard" so all the wood for this table came from the local Home Despot. It's California White Cedar, more commonly known as that stuff your pencils in the 1st grade were made of, and Black Walnut. The intent of the dowels here was to keep the board from sliding around as I added clamps and also keep everything relatively flat. As a cheap bastard, I cut the dowels myself from a longer stick.

This worked fairly well. I love that little Stanley rasp plane, from The Home Despot, it chews wood like a cheese grater. Rasp down the high bits, clean up the undulations with a jointing plane and a rough sand at 120.

I suppose these would be half-blind mortise and tenons to hold the aprons to the sides. I had made equal-sized shoulders on this first set but decided that the outer side was far too thin. The next set had uneven shoulders, a thinner tenon, and left more wood on the outside of the joint.

Pretty much every project I make can include a nice section called "Mistakes were made". In this case I dropped my marking knife on its tip and bent the shit out of it. Naturally this would not abide so I busted out some glass and 80 grit sandpaper to rebuild the shape and then re-sharpened on a Japanese waterstones (King...$38 on Amazon. Cheap.)

With the marking knife repaired I cut a dado across the sides. Notice the difference between tenons on the right leg vs left. Also I did NOT need to make a dado this large, I could've saved a ton of time making small 2 inch wide cuts where I knew I'd be putting cleats. Also no one makes cleats this deep, the dado should've been like 3/8", maybe 1/2" from the top. #MistakesWereMade

Making the shelf for the table body. Always need more clamps. The shelf is actually 3 boards together with the thinnest board in the middle to match the width of the base sides.

Test-fitting the sides, aprons, and shelf. Notice how low the grooves on that far side are... Yup...Mistakes were made. I marked the wood on the wrong side so the aprons were duplicates of each other, not mirror images.

Time to fix the problem! Step 1) Blow straight through the apron to make big square holes all the way through.

Step 2) cut off some small plugs of the same sort of wood, plane it to about half the thickness of the aprons and thick enough to fit into the holes.

Step 3) Cut to length and glue in. Fill any gaps with wood filler.

I did the base and didn't take any photos. Basically applied a coat of boiled linseed oil and then applied 3 coats of arm-r-seal urethane.
With the base finished, start putting the top together. This was as far as I could go with all of my clamps fitting.

The solution? Buy more clamps, of course! I did this in pieces. First I did the 3 boards in the middle, then each of the 2-board sides individually, and finally put all 3 segments together. These were all also doweled to try to keep things flat.

Observant imgurians will notice that in the above photo the walnut skunk stripe is shorter than the cedar. Not a mistake for a change! I cut these curves in the sides so the top matched the shape of the legs! Also one joint didn't quite come together and this cedar has a tendency to develop voids and knots explode during planing. Filled in as many of those mishaps as I could see with wood filler before flattening everything. That giant knot in the walnut looked cool and I didn't want to wreck everything so it was also filled with epoxy to stabilize it.

I just cannot get past how awesome ANY wood looks when sanded up to 220 grit and flooded with oil. This is just boiled linseed oil. This top is destined for 5 coats of clear brushing lacquer, and lacquer and oil don't mix. So it had to sit in the corner for a week until it stopped smelling awesome, that meant the oil was finished off-gassing and wouldn't mess with the lacquer.

Getting real close now. After the lacquer dried for a few days I wet-sanded it with 800 grit to knock down the nastier bumps in the lacquer. Then to get the shine back I applied Johnson's Paste Wax. This is the paste wax after it dried for 10 minutes. It's very matte.

This is the same spot after a good rub-down with a heavy shop-towel. It's so not-matte that you can see the reflection of the wall behind it.

I've really grown to hate lacquer...but dear me paste wax is AWESOME. This is dry as a bone but it looks like wet oil.

Project done! Time to kick my feet up and drink scotch. The Dalmore 15, for the interested.

Was trying to take a full picture including the base when the cat-tax photobombed me.