Thread: Bi-Walnut Contemporary Console Table

Over the last nearly two years, I've mostly been furnishing our apartment. With the exception of a couple of things, you can see just about every piece of furniture in it if you just look at my posts from mid 2016 onward. As of the completion of our pie safe cum shoe larder, I wanted to do some considerable "piddling", which involves restoring tools, making shop appliances and cabinets, developing techniques (this year it's carving) and the like. I also wanted to try to move in some kind of direction where I could potentially market myself locally (Seattle, WA) and recover some of the costs of this hobby.

So I decided to make a piece of furniture for one reason and one reason only: So someone would buy it.

I made a piece in 2014 that I always kind of liked, and that a couple of people showed some interest in buying, but, ultimately, which never sold and which I ended up giving to a close friend before leaving Australia. This is it:

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It's New Guinea Rosewood and Huon Pine. It's a basic, mortise and tenon construction with a flat, square edged top joined with shrinkage buttons. Fairly basic with minimal embellishment save the main stretcher and the curved edge joint in the top. Using two strongly contrasting woods isn't really my "thing", so to speak, but I always thought this worked.

And, more importantly for the current exercise, it's kind of eye-catching and it incorporates something which I think people are drawn to which is a "how the hell did he do that" factor. The curved edge joint appears to be something which is difficult to do, but I hope to explain below that it is, in fact, quite elementary.

I'd like to point something out as an aside... Some time in late 2014 a video went viral where a guy takes natural edge slabs and rips them in half, then puts the two live edges facing each other, then fills the void with blue glass. Since then the "River Table" thing has gotten annoyingly popular, so it could be said that this design is "played out". Whatever... I did it before it was cool and I'm sticking by that. So there.

I have some Queensland Walnut (C. palmerstonii) of a pretty high quality and I also have a small (two giant boards) selection of Queensland Yellow Walnut aka Canary Ash (Bielschmeida bancroftii). The two contrast nicely and they're both called "Walnut" despite their complete and utter lack of nuts, so I decided those two would work.

To cut a curved edge joint, you start by thicknessing two pieces of stock to uniform thickness, and cutting them to be about 75mm or so longer than you plan for the finished board to be. Then, you take whichever piece will be the outer edges and rip it in half (it doesn't have to be bang on half to the mm. Just halve it.). Then, mark pencil lines on both of the inside edges of the outer boards, and both edges of the inner board:

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Then, align the inner edges of the outer boards with the lines on the inner board and put screws into the very ends:

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Then draw your lines. Then bandsaw your lines.

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You can see here that I've abandoned the line. I don't feel too bad about this. I'm kind of just going with the flow, like... you know... a river.

You want to use a sharp bandsaw blade for this, particularly if you're using thick stock. If it drifts or burns badly during this cut it could create gaps, in theory. I haven't had that issue, however, and every time I've done this, which is these two tables and maybe four cutting boards, it has been air tight. So you just make the two cuts, pull the screws, clamp it (hard), cut the extra ends with the screw holes off and voila:

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Curved edge joint. No sanding. No fine tuning. It just fits. A note: It's important to use the screws because after your first cut, you want the offcut to remain attached so that the middle, higher board remains supported on both edges.

From here, it was just a matter of creating the frame. This is fairly straightforward and as far as cutting the joinery goes, I did a bad job of keeping a photographic record. I decided to chop some mortises by hand, which I don't often do now that I have access to a hollow chisel mortiser. It was way less awful than I remembered. I may go back to doing this more often.

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One thing I did take photos of, however, was ripping out the legs.

If you were to call me a "stickler" or "pedantic" when it comes to my woodworking, I'd probably agree most of the time, and one thing I simply will not do is have radial grain on one edge of a square leg and tangential grain on another. I'm just not going to do it. I find it distracting and if I see it on a table it's the first thing my eyes go to. This is what I'm talking about:

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Rowed, radial grain on the left face and cathedral, flat grain on the other. This is an unfinished piece of wood, but I can assure you it'd be more obvious with finish. I will happily waste my material to get it right. And since my QLD walnut beams are perfectly radially sawn, I had to do just that, unfortunately.

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A lot of waste to achieve it, and also some fairly unnerving table saw cuts, but it resulted in even, rowed grain on all four faces, so I can continue to sleep at night.

The bottom stretcher is cut in a fluvial pattern after the joinery is cut, and the top is joined with shrinkage buttons:

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In the past I've cut discrete mortises for each button, but this time I decided to just plow grooves along the length of the interior sides of the skirts. That turns maybe an hour's work into about two minutes' work, and the end user will be none the wiser. I'll probably go this route in the future when possible.

Bit of oil on the

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Bit of oil on the bottom and she's done.

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So far, people have really been excited about it when they see it, and I actually had someone interested in buying it who ultimately said it didn't fit the wall they wanted to use it on, so as long as people like it then it's a success. You may recall that I built it to sell.

But all I can see is that I blew it on the proportions. It's about 50-75mm too tall and that makes it look too narrow. I know, I know, "You are your own worst critic", but if I could do it over I'd make it just the same as it is, but shorter.

I'd like to comment on the wood. People talk about how Queensland Walnut has blunting properties with its high silica content. I think I probably hit the jackpot with mine because I haven't really noticed that. The Yellow Walnut, on the other hand, I feel is best described with one word:

Brutal.

I had to resaw a board to get this 20mm stock, and it smoked a 3" wide dedicated resaw blade before I could get through a 1m board. The curved cuts destroyed another 1/2" blade, the ripping I did wrought havoc on our table saw, and what little chiseling and planing I had to do on this (mostly power tools) project absolutely mangled my hand tool edges. I had visible chips in everything I used on it. I cannot stress enough how bad this stuff is on steel cutting edges.

Anyway, that's another one in the books. Now I need to figure out how to sell the thing...

Any takers?

Cheers,
Luke