Having the ability to make almost anything you want can lead one to go a little overboard to solve a simple problem. I would put this hall table project in that category. This project happened because I wanted a nice place to set a drink.
I have this 3-season room where I spend lots of time working and watching TV for about 9 months a year. It’s uninsulated and uncooled. A wood burning stove keeps the room comfy on those days we want to use it in the winter. It is uninhabitably hot and humid from late June to mid-September.
I’ve made several projects to furnish this room. I’ve learned a lot about wood movement. I’ve seen drawbored pegs sheared off. I’ve heard startling pops from a tabletop releasing tension. The environment in my 3-season room is hostile to wood. Putting furniture in this room is tantamount to aggravated battery.
When I use the room, I sit on a sectional sofa. I need a place behind the couch for a drink or a TV remote. I’ve made do with a couple embarrassing stools, stacked, with a serving tray on top. Really just a pile of rubble. I saw an opportunity to make something better.
I struggled with making a piece of fine furniture for an environment like this. I wasn’t sure I could make drawers that would operate consistently in such inconsistent conditions. Or worse- what if something split? It eventually occurred to me that we’ve only had air conditioning for about 100 years, but people have been making fine wood furniture for about 5000 years. I decided to take a chance and make a legit table, using traditional techniques designed accommodate changing conditions.
The purpose of the table and the space available dictated a basic hall table. I went looking for inspiration. I zeroed in on a hall table design by Kevin Kauffunger (FWW #212–June 2010).
The main thing about this design that captured my attention is the frame and panel aprons. I’m confident that using panels instead of solid wood aprons will help considerably to protect the piece from wood movement drama. My expectation is that stable aprons will help keep legs straight and drawers functional year-round. On the downside, frame and panel aprons present some strength challenges at key corners. I judged the plan to be insufficient in this regard, so I went about figuring out how to execute the frame and panel approach with more robust joinery.
The problem is at the top corners. Long legs without a lower structural member operate as levers. Solid aprons spread leverage and risk over several inches of glue surface. Frame and panel aprons turn the lower rail into a fulcrum, placing tremendous potential leverage on the upper rail. An impact low on a leg from a vacuum cleaner or unsteady toddler could be catastrophic. The top corners need to be strong.
My solution was to combine multiple joints into one at all 4 top corners. Each corner combines a half-lap with half a dovetail which also forms a mortise with a big fat peg through the whole affair. I’m no engineer but my experience leads me to believe I have addressed potential forces from every possible direction and that there is something in this joint to resist all of them. Having solved that puzzle, it was time to select stock.
The tail extends down only half way. The short
rail extends under the tail, creating a sort of
half-lap with the long rail. Sharp eyes may
notice that I had to add material to the walls where
the rails meet the legs to correct a measuring error.
rail joinery and deep into the leg eases
concerns about forces that may be
placed on the legs near the floor.
I had a decent inventory of walnut on hand for a project I have forgotten I wanted to make, so walnut was an obvious choice for this table. Among my boards were two with unique figure. One was perfect for the top, with a weird and wonderful combination of cathedral grain streaked through with something I can’t describe. The cathedrals look ghostly. It wouldn’t have looked right anywhere but on the top anyway, so that board was set aside immediately.
I had another board with undulating grain that created dramatic cats-eye swirls and mirrored cathedrals. I wanted to make all the apron panels and drawer fronts from this board. After flattening the 5/4 board, I had about 4/4 left. The apron panels are only about 5/16” thick so it was easy to resaw material off for those, but that didn’t leave enough thickness to make solid drawer fronts. The solution was to veneer the drawer fronts.
One added benefit to veneering drawer fronts is that the drawer boxes use simple through-dovetails. Adding the veneer, about 3/16” thick, gives the appearance of fine, half-blind dovetails. On the downside, introducing multiple boards created some grain direction drama when fitting the drawers with a plane. Everything comes at a cost.
I digress. One hiccup in the materials selection process involved the legs. In my entry, “Arts and Crafts Nightstands” I alluded to a Fine Woodworking article by Mike Pekovitch, “Make a Table From a Board” (FWW #243–Nov/Dec 2014). In it he discusses how to harvest straight-grained, rift-sawn stock for legs from a plainsawn board. This seemed important to me, especially given the environment to which this table would be subjected. I didn’t have any stock thick enough to yield straight grained rift-sawn legs. I tried gluing up legs but the grain was too busy and I was worried about stability. I decided not to cut corners and headed to the sawyer.
I quickly learned that walnut does not grow straight like ash or oak. Walnut is a dancer like me. Plus, it has contrasting sapwood. After an hour or two sifting through hundreds of pounds of 8/4 walnut, I found one plainsawn board with fairly straight grain near the sapwood edges. It was the best I could find. I took the ticket to the counter and discovered I had selected a $200 board. It was too late to turn back. Each leg on my table cost about $50 with heart-stopping waste. Thankfully, my wife doesn’t read my blog.
Even with all this effort and investment, the grain on my legs is far from straight and only rift-sawn in sections. I did the best I could. The legs look great and time will tell whether they move.
Typical for a table like this, one starts with milling and joining the legs. Among other joinery, I had 8 double mortises to cut, 2 in each leg, for the lower apron rails. I recently ran across a video by Fine Woodworking contributor Tim Rousseau, where he describes using spacer blocks to make mortises with a router and tenons with a bandsaw. Using the same spacers with both tools ensures the tenons match the mortises. I gave it a try and I’m a convert. https://www.finewoodworking.com/2013/05/23/spacer-blocks-make-double-mortise-and-tenons-easy
Just to be snooty, I’ll say I would prefer to make these joints by hand. If there had only been two or even four maybe I would have, but 8? Nah. It was totally worth it to set up the machines. Now that I have my spacers made, it will be no trouble to make ¼” double tenons ¼” apart this way. As other projects call for different dimensions, I’ll make other spacer sets.
Cutting the M&Ts isn’t all there is to it. The lower apron rails meet at the legs, so their tenons will interfere with one another inside the mortises. Each tenon must be modified to play nicely with its colleague from the other apron rail. Mitering is an option but removes an awful lot of glue surface for the short, inside tenons. I like stepped tenons, or half-lapped tenons, or whatever you want to call them. This ensures that at least half of every tenon gets glued to full depth.
can see these rails meet in the front left leg, or “FL”.
That nearly completes the carcass joinery. Eight double M&T joints secure the 4 lower apron rails, and 4 Frankenstein tenon/dovetail/peg joints secure the upper apron rails. All that remains is the coplanar groove for the panels in all the rails, the legs, and the rear panel dividers.
for a panel on the face that will serve as the side of the drawer pocket.
and rehearse for complex glue-ups.
I turned my attention to the drawers next. I have come to love cutting dovetails by hand. I modified my process a little for this project and I’m happy with the results.
all parts are labeled and ready for glue-up.
Most of the imperfections visible here will be planed away,
but there will still be enough irregularity to
show these were made by hand.
One change I made to dovetailing was to use my router table to establish the bottoms of the pins and tails. Pekovitch’s article referenced above has a companion video series where he demonstrates the use of a Whiteside 3000A Dado Cleanout Bit to relieve part of his cabriole leg design. I bought one to make the legs for this table and have found other uses for it, including the cleanup of dovetails at the baseline. It’s easy to cope out the bulk of the waste in the traditional way, then clamp the parts vertically to a square, stable support scrap and route out perfectly square, consistent base lines. Where this approach really shines is at glue-up. Perfect baselines virtually guarantee square drawers.
My all-time favorite article on making drawers is “The Art of Making Dovetailed Drawers” by Mario Rodriguez (Popular Woodworking, #174, Apr 2017). It is full of wonderful, detailed advice. One of my favorite takeaways is in the way Rodriguez lays out his tails to make glue-up easier. The tutorials I’ve received recommend making the pins a hair longer than the thickness of the tails and planing the pins flush with the tails after the glue dries. Rodriguez does the opposite. He makes his tails stand a hair proud of the pins. This eliminates the need for cauls when clamping. If you’ve ever made a set of dovetail clamping cauls, you already see the value in this. His approach to fitting drawers in their pockets involves planing the entire drawer side anyway so it makes no difference whether the pins or the tails are proud. So long as careful planning leaves enough material to plane the sides flush to the fronts with a perfect fit in the pocket AND careful planning ensures the grain of the drawer sides rises front to back for joyful planing, this process is easy and fun.
Drawer bottoms are always an afterthought for me. For some reason I am always caught having to stop everything and mill the stock, glue up the panels, wait for glue to dry, then mill the drawer bottoms. I just refuse to use sheet goods in fine furniture. One day I will remember to mill the drawer bottom material when I’m milling all the other parts. Better yet, maybe I’ll spend a weekend turning out yards and yards of solid wood drawer bottom blanks so it will be as easy to grab as a piece of plywood.
I can dream, but for this project I was caught out again without drawer bottoms. Everything had to stop for resawing, milling, gluing and waiting until the next day. If getting caught without bottoms weren’t bad enough, I ruined one of them in the planing process and had to start over, which took another day. Not my best performance.
The final component to make was the top. The only oddity I had to work around was a sizeable bullet hole.
Aside from this easily concealed defect, the material for the top was flat, straight and true. I opted for breadboard ends left proud to hide the inevitable movement. I used a tenon configuration I haven’t tried before, and secured the breadboard ends with drawbored pegs made from scraps with the straightest grain I could find. The front pegs are simple offsets. The offset holes in the rear tenons are slots to allow for movement. I hope I made the slots long enough. Thankfully, if there is a failure I can easily drill out the pegs and make repairs. There is no glue involved in the top.
chiseled away most of the waste, leveled the
tenon at the router table, then shaped the
tenons with handsaws. Mortises were made at
the drill press and router table. You can see
the marks from a brad-point bit at
the bottom of the deep mortises.
The top is secured to the carcass with screws. Three in the front apron rail are driven straight. Three in the back apron rail are slotted for movement.
I used the simplest, fastest finish I know, and one Pekovitch describes in his article referenced above. Careful surface prep, padded on coats of shellac, steel wool and wax. You can pad on more than enough coats in an afternoon and rub it out the next morning. It may not hold up to a wet glass, but it is more than durable enough for this project. It imparts a luxurious luster and silky feel that encourages petting.
That’s the story behind my walnut hall table. It’s a tale that has become a theme for me; solving the simplest possible problem with a very complicated solution. Nevertheless, my mission is accomplished. I have a very elegant place to sit a drink when I’m on the couch. Time will tell how the table fairs in its environment but even if the whole thing ends up in the wood stove, I will still have had a great time making it.