You might ask why did a woodworker that loves to build Arts and Crafts furniture build a sleek modern dining room table? The answer is that this is a legacy piece of furniture for one of our adult children who has different taste in houses and furniture than I do. It is used daily by our son and his family and will long out live me. I started building legacy pieces of furniture for our 4 children several years ago after seeing what having legacy furniture meant to a friend whose father was a hobbyist woodworker and built beautiful cherry furniture for her. I will post other projects I have built for family members in the future.
The genesis for this project came from our son Luke who at the time was building a very modern house here in Cincinnati. He had seen a number of dining tables he liked and found some pictures online that had features that he liked. Basically, he wanted a long table that would seat 10-12, wanted the legs at the end of the table and wanted it to be thin and sleek. In other words, this would be like no other piece of furniture that I had made before. The problems I had to solve were how to make it a table at least 10' long look thin but not sag in in the middle and how would he get in the house. The answers I came up with were to put beams in the middle of the table and make the legs removable. Since I had never built a piece like this before, I decided to make a smaller version as a desk as a trial run. I made the desk out of poplar because it is a low cost hardwood and easy to machine.
I decided to solve the apron support issue by building two box beams in the middle third of the desk. I first glued a 1" thick board to the middle of the desk on each end to hold the knock down fixture that would allow the legs to be removed and serve as a guide for the vertical member of the box beam. I attached the vertical member to the desk top with pocket screws. Note that on the inside of the vertical members that there are pocket holes for screws to later attach the legs.
I milled the two side members with 45 degree angles to complete the box beams and glued them to the vertical member as well as the desk top. One mistake I made was to nail the side members to the top with nails that were a little too long. That meant a little bit of filling to do during the finish stage. You can see in this picture that I tapered the edge of desk down to 1/2" at the edge. I did this by beveling the outer boards before I glued up the top. In this photo, you can more plainly see the thick center board.
The next task was to create the legs for the desk. From the pictures I had seen of the tables our son liked, I thought the legs were about 6" wide and the top 4" wide so I milled 1 1/2" thick leg stock to about 6" wide. I say about because I left one leg wider because our son wanted the wiring to be hidden. I was able to hide the wiring inside one of the legs by cutting 1 1/2" off one of the leg pieces and then routing a 1/2" x 1/2" grove in the larger piece and then gluing the two pieces back together. After notching the inner side of the leg to allow the cord to come out, I then trimmed that leg down to the 6" width. With all of the pieces the same width, I cut angles on the top of the legs and both ends of the top piece to create the 90 degree angle. I will later show a picture of the jig I used on the miter saw to cut these angles.
Before joining the leg pieces, I determined where the grooved in the leg would meet the top piece and cut a groove in the top piece to match the one in the leg. This would allow me to run the cord inside of the box beam to the middle of the desk. I later cut a hole in the top into the box beam from the top and vertical member so that the computer wiring would all be hidden.
This photo shows how the wiring went through the leg and into the box beam. You can see that I had to stain some of the openings black before I put in the wire because I had to loosely leave the wire in to finish the top and legs prior to assembly. You can see here that pocket screws in the vertical members and in the thickening plate will attach the legs to the top. The screws in the vertical members of the box beam are critical to preventing any rack of the top and leg joint.
I did not photograph the joinery of the legs to the top before I applied finish but you can see from this photo that I put in thick dominos in the center piece and smaller ones laterally. Only the middle two dominos fit into mortises on the top member of the legs that are the same size as the domino and the outer ones have wider domino slots to allow wood movement. In the center is the mortise for the domino knock down fixture that holds the top to the leg as well as the pocket screws.
These pictures show the finished desk prior to final wiring. You can see how the thin look was achieved and that the box beams were not that visible from most viewing positions. However, you can see at the top/leg joint that there is a V groove at the joint. I did that because I could not get the joint gap narrow enough so I hid the joint in a groove.
Also, I was able to try out using India ink as a stain and it worked very well. I used waterproof India ink and flooded the surface with ink and spread it out with a foam brush. Waterproof India ink contains some shellac so I felt comfortable spraying water based polyurethane and a finish coat.
Remember that the desk was a prototype for the much bigger dining room table and was to test out some of structure and how well the worked. The box beams in place of an outer apron added enough rigidity to the top to prevent sagging, the leg top joint did not exhibit any racking and that Indian ink provided a deep black finish. While unique to the desk, the hidden wiring worked very well. What didn't work so well and would be very important to the aesthetic of the table was the gap in the end joint. I will show how I was able to fix that in the table assembly process.
Next up will be wood selection, construction of the table and final assembly in place.
Selecting the wood occurred quite by accident. I was selecting lumber for a different project at Paxton's, my favorite hardwood store here in Cincinnati, when I saw this dark brown black exotic looking wood in 10-12 foot lengths at $7 a board foot. I immediately took a picture of the wood and asked our son Luke if he could meet at Paxton's and look at this wood. A few days later, he met me on his lunch hour and I found out that the wood was thermally modified white ash, also known as torefied ash. The thermally modification process is one where the wood is baked at 400 degrees for 2 weeks which changes the color and chemical nature of the wood. The wood becomes a dark chocolate brown with black grain and much harder and now insect resistant. The clerk there put some mineral spirits on a sample to see what it would lo0k like with a clear finish. As you can see below, the wood becomes almost a black brown color with very distinctive grain.
We both liked the look of the wood for the table and I thought that the added rigidity of the modified wood would make it less likely to sag with the box beams in the middle third.
The boards were nearly an inch thick so the next challenge was how was I going to plane these 10' + long boards with no snipe to retain as much of their length as possible and how was I going to joint the edges so I would have a seamless glue up. I tackled the first problem by adding 1 foot "ears" to both ends of the boards and put them through my thickness planer to get a smooth surface on each board. If you have taken my shop tour, you will see that I have a large and heavy planer to do the job and it had 14' on each side for the input and output of the planer. I have to open a door to the adjoining storage room on the input side.
The ears were cut from one of the board and then clamped to the sides of each end and screwed in place. I then planed all of the boards to 15/16th of inch thick. The boards were too long to joint on my jointer so I first established a straight edge on each board using my track saw. I then sawed each board to its maximum width on the table saw by flipping the boards on their width and sawing each edge. By flipping the boards, any small error introduced by the saw in creating a 90 degree edge would be compensated by the adjoining board in the glue up. I arranged the boards to create a 36" wide table top and sent a picture to Luke for his approval.
Although I was happy with the layout, Luke was not. He thought it would look better with equal with boards. Fortunately, I had plenty of additional stock and then ripped all of the boards to an equal width for this layout. You can see that I had to rearrange the boards several times to get it just right. Also, you can begin to see the challenge of working on a project this long even in a fairly big shop.
Before glue up, I had to bevel the edge of the outside boards to create the thin edge.
To make the glue up come out a flat as possible, I decided to put dominos in each joint. I put a tight mortise on the edge of one board and a loose one on the other to make it easier to glue up. Also, I did not glue the dominos in place because the glue can make the wood swell making it harder to get a flat surface.
It is probably no surprise that I had to borrow clamps to do a glue up this large. Once this first joint was done, it went pretty smoothly. In preparing for the glue up, I screwed a long straight board to the floor to hold the alignment of the clamps and put freezer paper on the floor to keep the glue off the floor. I used Titebond III glue for its strength, dark color and a little longer set up time. In the second picture, you can see the L and T on most of the boards indicating what time of domino mortise that edge of the board was to receive.
Once the glue up was complete, I moved the top to two work benches to sand it flat and smooth. The task of moving the top and turning it over to sand both sides required the help of a neighbor. I first sanded it with a belt sander at 45 degree angles both directions and use a 6" random orbital sander to get a smooth finish. The sanding made the hard part of the grain more prominent and gave the wood a 3D texture.
In the picture above, you can see that I have already glued a center plate for the knock down hardware and to space the triangular box beams.
The next task was to laminate the legs by gluing two piece face to face. To get a seamless joint with no gaps, I clamped both the bottom and top of the joint.
Any small gaps were filled with glue and sanded before final assembly. After seeing the finished desk, Luke wanted the legs to be narrower so I reduced the legs to 5"and the top member to 4". To cut the angle at the leg/top joint, I created this jig for my compound miter saw.
I had to use several different clamps to pull this non 45 degree angle together. The joint was held together with two 14 mm dominos.
The glued up leg sets were now ready for the domino joints.
The domino placement in the table top was 3 fixed 14mm dominos in the center plate and 2 14 mm domino knockdown joints. On each side of the middle third, I placed 3 8mm dominos and 1 8mm domino knockdown joint. All of the lateral dominos were fixed on the table top side and in wide unglued joints in the upper leg member. The 8 mm knockdown joint at the outer edge is round so can allow for some wood movement.
The real test came when I put the joint together as a test before I start the finishing process. I wanted a much tighter joint than I was able to achieve on the desk.
What I found was that I needed to keep the legs completely square to the table top when I was clamping the joint. The result was that I was able to get a very tight joint when I assembled the table at Luke's house.
Now, about the finish on the table. Remember at Paxton's, Luke seemed excited about a clear finish on the table. After sending several samples with clear finish variations, he and his wife Minh decided on black. He also wanted a hard oil based varnished surface and not a sprayed on water based polyurethane. I dyed the table with India ink just as I did on the desk and applied multiple coats of wipe on oil based polyurethane. Here are the results.
In these photos, you can see how tight the leg/top joint is and how prominent the grain is in the finished top. I have to admit, it is beautiful in black.
This photo shows that I was able to achieve a light, elegant look on a large table.
This project led me to other modern pieces.
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