Thread: First furniture project...and some important lessons

Well, time to finally get around to posting on my first minor piece of furniture. We were in need of a coffee table and to be honest I was disappointed with what is available in the shops at reasonable prices. Looking for something on the mid century spectrum, but after months of looking I couldn’t find anything with the right timber / shape combination. A lot of what was available from the shops was blonde and we were looking for something in the red spectrum. So......brilliant excuse to try my hand at making something.

I had purchased some western Australian sheoak from auction near Harvey. Beautiful timber, but it took me a while to get up the confidence to use it, hoping that I wouldn’t ruin the timber.



Once I settled on the design, I got to work finding boards for the top.Top was sourced from some book matches boards, that started life at a good thickness in excess of 40mm but only came to 24mm one flattened. Thick enough for the project given the support under the top...



From here, is was a matter of planing the top flat, and then I wanted to cut a 30 degree champher on either end. Wasn’t sure how to do this at the time, so made up a jig for the job. Screwed a piece of timber underneath that located into the track in my sliding table, took a deep breath making sure my fingers were clear and pushed it through the blade....






It was at this point, I forgot to take any photos of the assembly of the base.....constructed out of 30mm thick sheoak, with all joints Slotted and glued.


Once glued up, I finished it with hard burnishing oil, which did a good job of bringing out the grain in the sheoak.





I finished the coffee table in December 2018, and promptly started to use it. So far, it has held up very well. The finish isn’t as tough as I had hoped, but strength wise it has been good. There are 2 stretchers running along under the base plus a third directly under the top which has held it together pretty well.

If I made another one, I’d attempt sliding dovetail construction rather than dadoe and probably spend a little more time easing the edges......



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