I’m taking a year off from school right now. For Christmas, to show my parents that I’m not completely wasting it and that I like them, I decided to make them a coffee table.
Live edge tables seem to be really popular. That makes a lot of sense because they are very nice. I decided to make one.
Around that time, my friend Marc tipped me off to the existence of some slabs of butternut and was kind enough to help me procure one. The whole table including the legs is made from that single slab (well, there are some dowels, so not the WHOLE table, but close enough).
The legs of the table are two squares made of posts milled from the slab, held together with mortise-and-tenon joints. I stained them a nearly opaque black to contrast with the natural top, and to kind of mimic the steel-legged live edge tables one often sees.
The table is finished with hand-rubbed pure tung oil. When getting ready to finish it, I read a whole bunch of stuff on different finishing techniques. As far as I can tell, everyone has a different way of doing things and believes strongly that theirs is the best and only way. That can’t be true, so I picked one of the simplest methods I could find: a hand-rubbed oil finish. I had toyed with the idea of finishing the table with a glassy two-part epoxy, but the toxicity scared me off in the end. Besides, I wanted the wood to look like wood, not plastic.
What I discovered in applying a pure tung oil finish is that it takes a long time. I put on at least a dozen coats, waiting a day or so for each to sink in. The advice that I had read – to apply the first coat mixed with a thinning agent of some kind – was probably pretty sound. Oh well. I’m sure I’ll learn more about finishing as I continue to build furniture.
In any case, this is what the finish looks like. I like it, it’s subtle and natural.
As you can see, the leg squares are attached to the table top with four off-centre dowels. I’ve used dowel joints before, and am pretty comfortable making them. This piece was built in a rush to meet the Christmas deadline, and so it made sense to go with a familiar technique (although, to be honest, the final finishing took place post-Christmas, and much of it was done by my mother. Merry Christmas Mom and Dad, I got you a chore!).
There are also some plastic feet on the bottom of the legs there, to help the table move across carpets and keep wood floors safe.
Here’s one of the leg squares press-fitted and members for a second being milled. Site 3 doesn’t have a complete set of woodworking tools (specifically a planer, jointer, and a bandsaw), and at the time that I was building this table, our table saw was being borrowed. So I was left to mill the posts for the leg squares using a circular saw and a belt sander, which was slow and messy, but kind of fun.
The leg squares are held together by mortise-and-tenon joints. Here I’m just getting ready to chisel out a mortise in one of the horizontal members (by the way, I made that mallet, too! At a great woodworking class at 3rd Ward in NYC.). I ended up changing the orientation of the mortise by 90 degrees from its marked position in the photo.
There aren’t any pictures of the chiseling process – I was having too much fun and forgot! Please accept this great video on how to make mortise-and-tenon joints as consolation:
Here’s a shot of the dowel joints before being sawn flush:
The Plan
Here are a couple of drawings that should describe all the necessary dimensions. Let me know if any info is missing!
Materials
- 1 big ol’ slab of butternut (1 big ol’ == approximately 8′x14.5″x3″)
- 4 screw-in plastic feet (hard plastic will slide across carpets better than a soft rubber)
- 8 3/8″ diameter 3″ long dowels
- Wood glue
- 1 can pure tung oil
