Thread: Mid century modern coffee table

I was in need of a new coffee table, to replace my MDF and cardboard Amart special that was rapidly degrading. I came across this video from Four Eyes Furniture of his coffee table build, which he sells the plans for. I really liked the look of it so bought the plans, and many months passed until I finally found the time to get started.

I selected kiln dried blackbutt to make the table, mainly because I liked the colour and tone of it - and it's reasonably priced. I milled some sections to a few mm off final thickness for the table top, then set them aside stickered and stacked until I was ready to glue them up.

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Then I set to work on the legs. The tapered sections were cut with the aid of a table saw sled and glued up with 2x 6mm dominos each. Clamping is difficult with the angles involved, so the plans recommend making up this angled clamping helper with sandpaper glued to the bottom. Really did the trick! Splines were then added to the leg joint for additional strength.

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The 45mm blackbutt that I had bought for the legs was riddled with holes and gum(?) veins, despite being "appearance grade". So I spent a lot of time filling defects with black epoxy. I also tried a black super glue product from Amazon, which works okay for very small holes but is not suitable for filling large defects.

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Gluing the legs to the middle stretcher was done in two steps because I ran out of 300mm clamps. The legs are attached with 2x 8mm dominos each.

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I partially rounded over the legs using this enormous bit in my Triton router. It was kinda sketchy. I considered doing this on the router table before the glue up, but the resulting rounded legs would have made clamping them to the middle stretcher even more difficult. In hindsight this could have been achieved in a safer fashion using a hand plane and some sanding.

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With the base complete, I milled my table top pieces to final thickness and glued them up with dominos for alignment. This is where I screwed up a little bit. The boards all cupped slightly after glue up, resulting in a 2-3mm cup across the 550mm width of the table. It's not noticeable unless you put a straight edge across it, so I decided to leave it as is. My guess is this was caused by me not milling the top and bottom faces of the boards evenly - I only took thickness off the bottom, which may have caused some uneven drying?

After cutting the top to size, I added the extreme 20° bevel to the edges by running the table top through the table saw standing up vertically, with the aid of a tall auxiliary fence.

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The top is attached to the base using exposed floating tenons, which I milled up from blackbutt offcuts. A simple router jig and a guide bush was used to cut the mortices. Liquid hide glue was used for this joint, in the off chance that I need to pull it apart in future. Before assembling I finished the base and top with Whittle Waxes gloss hardwax oil.

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The finished product!

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This is my second "nice" piece of indoor furniture. I'm really happy with how it came out. I can recommend the Four Eyes Furniture plans for this project, the video instructions make it easy to get consistent results for the tricky leg joins. The "plans" document comes in metric, but several critical measurements are only described in the videos using imperial. So be prepared for a few imperial to metric conversions.

Thanks for reading!