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David B. Morris
09-11-2015, 10:52 AM
I call it the Magic Flute Coffee Table, because I designed it during some downtime in the dressing room when I was in that opera last year. (Yep: a singing woodworker). I was inspired to build it by the chess set my parents passed along now that they are starting to get rid of things in their old age. My mom bought it for my dad in Heidelberg in the early 1950s while they were courting. They were married in the castle and then brought it to the States with them, and it's the set my dad taught me the game on. The right-hand drawer holds the chess set.
Here's a view of how the legs and carcass go together:

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David B. Morris
09-11-2015, 11:59 AM
This was my first time making mortise and tenon joints (and there were a lot of them) and also the first time building anything with legs and aprons. Overall I'm pleased with the result, as is my little girl. This is a highly visible piece we use every day in our living room, where we formerly had to contend with a piece of Ikea.
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Edited to add the chess set now in its new home:

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Build pics to follow...

David B. Morris
09-11-2015, 3:09 PM
This might have to be thrown into the Neander Valley, for I used handtools for everything except rough dimensioning of stock. The engineering of this coffee table with two drawers was based on Will Neptune's article in FWW #130, June 1, 1998. The design is based on the chess-set requirement and the existing furniture in our house. It's probably over-engineered, but this table must contend with daily around-the-couch-TV-watching and gangly adolescents with unpredictable movements of their extremities.
The first step after fine-tuning the non tapered portion of the legs was to mortise them. Derek Cohen's thread on his site was my guide. I didn't fiddle with boring holes and the like (and who wants to fiddle with those?), but just used Ray Iles' pig slaughterers to do the job. My problem was staying perpendicular to the face, but after a couple of practice runs and using a visual guide for square (as Derek recommends) I was off and making bacon.
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You'll see these are haunched mortises (again, those gangly adolescents), and a horn is still at the top of the leg to avoid blowout/splitting. Derek's treatise on M&T I think is as close to definitive as one can get.

David B. Morris
09-11-2015, 3:34 PM
Next come the tenons in the aprons. No pictures of the ripping here, which I did with an LN 16" tapered (after some hesitation I ended up really appreciating the length and weight of this saw for this application). But below you'll see the crosscuts (courtesy Ron Bontz and his sweet saw), router-planing to the gauge line, truing with shoulder plane, etc. Again, Derek's site was the guide here. (I recently took a class with Jeff Miller, who said, "there are probably only 4 or 5 people in the country who can cut tenons off the saw." He meant perfectly fitting ones, of course. I tend to agree.)
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David B. Morris
09-11-2015, 4:29 PM
In addition to the mortises for the right and left aprons, the front legs require twin mortises for the tusk tenons in the lower drawer blade plus a dovetail socket on top to receive the upper drawer blade. This was all completely new territory for me. Because of the reveals and offsets of these parts in the final design, I had to set up my cutting gauge separately for the mortises and their corresponding tenons. A double blade gauge like the Kinshiro (which I also learned about from, yes, that guy in Perth) was a big help in this, but in future I will probably make a spacer to attach to the fence of the gauge that corresponds to my desired offset. How do others handle this problem, so common in leg-and-apron construction?
My main task was to focus like a laser on my shoulder-to-shoulder dimensions to ensure squareness across the carcass, but the differing depths of some of the tenons and all the offsets made that tricky. Here is the lower drawer blade with its tusk tenons and the tenon that goes into the apron spacer.
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And here's work on the leg dovetail socket:

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David B. Morris
09-11-2015, 4:48 PM
After the tricky joints in the front legs came the comparatively simple task of tapering all the legs on two faces and rounding them over on their outside corners. For tapering I immediately thought of a table saw jig like I had used in junior high shop class. Actually, our teacher used it for us because it was so dangerous. I thought of buying a safer version: too expensive. I thought of making one of my own: too time-consuming (plus the safety factor). So I marked out the taper, cut it rough on the band saw, brought near to the line with the joiner, and finished with the venerable LN low-angle jack. It was tricky keeping the line between the the taper and the square portion of the leg crisp, but I was happy. I love handplaning for the precision it allows you to command. These all turned out dead accurate and square.

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Rounding over the corners was easy with my old Stanley skew rabbet followed by a mill file and sandpaper.
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Despite my initial fear over tapering the legs, this work was pleasurable and relaxing after the fussy joinery.

Joe A Faulkner
09-12-2015, 2:27 PM
Beautiful job on the table. I love the tapered edge on the top. Very well done.

Brian Holcombe
09-12-2015, 3:13 PM
Nice work David!

David B. Morris
09-14-2015, 12:41 PM
Brian and Joe, thank you for your kind comments!

The center partition is housed in a dado with a dovetail out front, kind of an abbreviated sliding dovetail. It turned out OK, but I let myself get a bit sloppy.

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David B. Morris
09-14-2015, 1:01 PM
After all the joinery on the show parts was completed, I turned to the many M&T and other joints that make up the heavily engineered guts of the carcass. These were in maple and less aesthetically exacting, but they had to be dead accurate if I was to end up with square drawer openings.
The drawer runners and kickers were tenoned into the front drawer blades...

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...then lapped into the ledger in the rear of the carcass:

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Overall I was pleased with my accuracy, but I still needed to get in there with a shoulder plane to square up the openings before I even thought of building the drawers.

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David B. Morris
09-14-2015, 4:11 PM
Drawers: I am not an expert at them, but even for those who are, making an imperfect dovetailed box fit snugly into another imperfect box contains innumerable chances to get things wrong. Here is where handwork comes into its own. Once I got a good grip on the basic joinery, the fine tuning afforded by a sharp handplane to adjust the imperfect box to its imperfect mate was a revelation.
For learners like me I'd like to point out a few sources that helped me design and make relatively snug and crisp drawers. My drawer bible is Alan Peters' article, "Fitting a Drawer" in Woodworking Techniques (Taunton, 2000), which probably is a reprint of an FWW article somewhere. The design Peters used in this article to illustrate his techniques was the basis for the first piece I made, a jewelry box for my daughter, when I got back into this craft a few years ago. Following his guidance taught me things I never thought of being able to do. Peters also wrote the chapter on making and fitting drawers in the latest edition of another bible, Ernest Joyce's Encyclopedia of Furniture Making (Sterling, 2000).
For designing and engineering a drawer, Rob Porcaro's series on "high-end drawers" on his website was invaluable, especially on the point of fully dovetailed drawers.
Despite all this theory, I still need a lot of practice, but I'm happy with how they turned out. Above all they fit beautifully and make you want to open and close them just for the sake of doing so. And who wouldn't want that done to their drawers?

I got some nice QS white oak and with the cherry it's a classic look. I have to work on my tail baselines, though. Do you let a sliver of daylight through when marking the pins, or close that gap? The rear joints are a bit funky, but I actually like the look. Whatever that means.
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In any case, I'm proud of my fit, and the case is slightly proud of its drawer, which is fitting.

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Some pigskin to line the bottoms...

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...and pulls made from ebony and cherry:

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Christopher Charles
09-14-2015, 4:20 PM
Great work for an inspiring story. Woodworking and singing is an impressive combination. I too am a singing woodworker, but the only place i'm allowed to sing is in the woodshop :)

Any plans for a board to go with it?

Cheers,
C

David B. Morris
09-14-2015, 4:38 PM
Thank you Christopher! I never sing in the shop, but the lowly shower is always good, especially while getting walnut dust out of your bronchi. My family marvels at the noises I make.
I wanted to make a board and inset it on one side of the tabletop, and then be able to flip the table top to the chess side and secure it with cleats and threaded inserts, blah, blah, blah--a silly and unforgiving design.
My mother bought a board along with the set in the 1950s. It's a pretty standard walnut and maple veneer affair, probably made in Spain, as many good veneered boards still are. But it is now irretrievably dished--not just cupped but dished, sagging in the center. It was built into a table in which it was suspended only along its perimeter, then various people of course were pounding on it for 50 years trying to checkmate one another. It's really a lesson in how wood moves and sometimes will never come back.

Brian Holcombe
09-14-2015, 5:03 PM
Awesome work! Thank you for following with the detail photos of work in progress.

David B. Morris
09-15-2015, 9:35 AM
Thank you Brian--high praise considering the beauty of your own work that I've seen here.

David B. Morris
09-15-2015, 10:42 AM
That damned tabletop. After all the joinery and harrowing glue up of the legs and carcass, I thought this would be the easy part: glue up a board of cherry, cut some curves around the edges, maybe plane it a bit so it's good and flat. I thought the hardest part would be planing the double bevel on the curved edge. Nope. I spent more hours getting this panel flat and true than I spent on the joinery of the carcass. Really!

I don't know if I jointed my edges wrong or what, but after I glued up the one-inch-thick, 24 x 39 panel, it cupped almost a quarter inch across. Behold the progress of my folly:

1) Put that cool serrated blade on the LN #62 to remove a lot of wood fast without tear-out. Just criss-cross back and forth across that sucker until it's flat.

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Brilliant! Now I ended up with a cupped board with a lovely toothed surface.

2) I realized the #62 was just following the curve of the board and I needed to buy a proper jointer. So I threw up my arms in helplessness, told the wife I "had no choice" (which was true this time) and bought a LN #7. Something like this really was the only tool for the job.

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3) But it still took forever to get the thing flat. I also worked too aggressively, leaving some tear-out and traces of work which you can still see on the finished table (though they are "characterful" enough not to bother me).

Lessons learned: work on the high spots first before you start to criss-cross; don't bring a jack to a jointer fight, and never lose the opportunity to buy a new tool.

I finished with a smoother at York pitch and (not seen here) some rather intensive work with card scrapers. I hated cherry by the time I was done with this beastly job. Damn you, cherry, and your interlocked grain!

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Next came what turned out to be the relatively easy part: fairing the edges and planing a shallow 1.25 inch bevel on both sides. Below you see me marking out the arcs with the bendy-stick method, and then after they were cut on the bandsaw. Originally the table was to hav an inlaid chessboard on one side, which required it to be an inch thick. I chose the double bevel to lighten the look of the piece, though I think it still ended up a bit top-heavy.

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After fairing the bandsawn edge with a shave, the bevel was marked out with a gauge line (a mistake, as I had to plane more than I wanted to get rid of any trace of those lines in the wood). Then I simply planed the bevel freehand with the #62, not needing a shave as I had thought. This worked pretty easily and was fun to do, even across the grain. Card scrapers helped here as well. The resulting 1/4-inch thick outside edge was rounded over with a strip of sandpaper used shoe-polish style with me straddling the cherry beast. (Sorry, no pictures of that.)

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Brian Holcombe
09-17-2015, 8:40 AM
Couple ideas for you for the next panel;

- Set a blade for the #5 that has a big camber (like a 7" radius), I have this set on my plane at nearly the maximum depth. I will miter the back edge of the panel to reduce blowout and cut crossgrain with that, a 1/4" cup will be gone in no time.

- Radius the edges of your jointer plane like this if you havent already done so.
http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c181/SpeedyGoomba/92B5E0F5-E191-4750-BFB9-BE52F4DD14A0_zpssaysmyyi.jpg (http://s27.photobucket.com/user/SpeedyGoomba/media/92B5E0F5-E191-4750-BFB9-BE52F4DD14A0_zpssaysmyyi.jpg.html)

Make sure the radiused corners are also sharp everytime you sharpen the blade. Then set the chipper to about .010". If the chip rolls your good, straight out is better, but an accordion shape means to back off. The chip should be about .003-.005" thick in my opinion.

If you are getting tearout with your finish plane set the chipper to .005" as a baseline, if you get an accordion back off, if not just keep tightening until straight chips come out. You'll be able to read the chip, meaning if the chip doesnt have holes in it then the board doesnt have tearout.

Barry Dima
09-17-2015, 10:43 AM
Man, thanks for bringing us along for the ride. The exploded view of the table made me think of some crazy interlocking puzzle that I get my fingers stuck in before a shopworker kindly asks me to leave, but watching you put it all together is as smooth as your tapered legs. Thanks for teaching me a few things, too.

David B. Morris
09-17-2015, 11:06 AM
Thank you, Barry. I'm glad my fun and games on this piece could be helpful to you in some way.

Brian, modifying a #5 into a scrubber as you suggest is exactly what I did after learning the lessons of this panel. Next time I run into this problem again I'll know exactly what to do.

I have an old #4 with a Hock blade and eased corners like you show which actually right now is better tuned than my LN #4 1/2. I am still learning about chipbreaker adjustment so your suggestions (especially about chip profile) are very helpful. Part of my problem also is that I tend to undertighten the lever cap screw. I learned about that when I was up at Lie-Nielsen for a workshop this summer.

Brian Holcombe
09-17-2015, 12:04 PM
Excellent, those changes should help a lot. That old number 4 might be more helpful on panels than the 4-1/2, reasoning being is the narrower blade and the sole is usually less perfectly flat….which is an advantage on a full panel where friction is the biggest challenge.

One thing I forgot to add about the chip breaker, if you put a micro bevel of about 40-50 degrees on it, it will be easier to tune and perform better than a really shallow angle. Personally, I don't use a perfect facet on the chipper, but instead will make more of a smooth transition.

David B. Morris
09-17-2015, 2:01 PM
More tabletop tribulations. Unfortunately, my labors with this now finally flat hunk of wood were not over. After I had worked the panel into submission, it was time to apply a finish. I naturally chose one of the most user-unfriendly finishes on the market: Waterlox. I had never worked with it before, and all the horror stories on this site very nearly dissuaded me from trying it. But I needed something that would penetrate with the warmth of an oil while giving me the durability of a varnish. This is a coffee table, after all, and a recent article in either PWW or FWW rated it tops for such an application.

I followed the instructions but ended up with cross-grain ghosting:

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When will it end? Think of the children! Prashun and others on this site advised and consoled me. Before I dug myself any deeper I planed and sanded back to bare wood, then reapplied with the grain only. No more ghosts.

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As I built up the 7 or 8 coats (wiping on the last few, wet-sanding with the finish a few times) I began to appreciate the advantages of this product (I used the Original Sealer/Finish). It is warm and durable and can be worked with steel wool, etc. to achieve the desired sheen. I will definitely use it again, but will probably precede it with BLO and/or shellac. It remains an extremely fussy and temperamental product, IMO.

The carcass and drawers were easier; I used a wipe on technique exclusively. Everything got a few coats of paste wax afterwards.

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In the end everything turned out lovely, and the chess set lived happily ever after.

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David B. Morris
09-17-2015, 2:43 PM
Excellent, those changes should help a lot. That old number 4 might be more helpful on panels than the 4-1/2, reasoning being is the narrower blade and the sole is usually less perfectly flat….which is an advantage on a full panel where friction is the biggest challenge.

One thing I forgot to add about the chip breaker, if you put a micro bevel of about 40-50 degrees on it, it will be easier to tune and perform better than a really shallow angle. Personally, I don't use a perfect facet on the chipper, but instead will make more of a smooth transition.

Brian, thanks. I like the 4 1/2 on panels precisely for its mass. Obviously it's too big for some things, but with beeswax on its sole it's sweet. I think my problems really do lie in all the usual places: chip-breaker, blade adjustment, and also throat opening. My sharpening skills are pretty good so any difficulties I'm having I think are mechanical. I will try your chip-breaker idea for sure.