G&G style end tables

[roger wiegand]

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After a longer time than I would have thought possible I've finally finished this pair of Greene and Greene-style end tables in walnut with ebony pegs and splines. The wood was a gift from a friend, and is quite delightful. The design was modified from a nightstand in Darrell Peart's book and uses a lot of the details he describes.

Construction is all pretty traditional, the curved parts were all done by template routing. It was my first design project in Sketchup.

Finish is Waterlox topped with a paste wax. Because I didn't want the color to fade to a light brown I used a mix of transtint dyes to color the wood. That was too much of an adventure! Despite saving the cutoffs, sanding and finishing in exactly the same way, the actual tables came out way darker than my samples. I then stripped and refinished the table washing them extensively with dye reducer to pull out as much of the extra dye as I could. The end result seems pretty nice, but way too much work.

Bedsheets make terrible backdrops for photography.

[Von Bickley]

The end tables look GREAT....

[Phil Mueller]

A lot of nice details in those tables. I can see why it would have taken some time. Sometimes the finishing seems to go as long as the build, but in the end your tables came out great. Love working with walnut.

[Frederick Skelly]

Those tables are really nice. I too like the details!

I agree with Phil though - finishing often takes nearly as long as the build for me too.

Fred

[roger wiegand]

Thanks!

The color was supposed to match the lightest of the dilutions on my sample board. I had a few choice words when it came out looking like this:

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Fortunately with the stripper, a couple rolls of paper towels. and lots of DNA most of the unbound dye came out.

[Phil Mueller]

While I like a rich dark walnut finish, it would not have given you the nice contrast with the ebony. The effort to strip and redo was well worth it.

[John TenEyck]

Beautiful tables Roger; worth all the extra work. But I think you must have mixed up your master dye batch wrong, or you applied it differently. I've never had something come out that different from my test boards. To confirm my master batch is OK, I always make a test board with it before moving on to the project.

John

[roger wiegand]

I weighed the dyes for good accuracy (I'm a biochemist, I know how to make up reagents, calculate dilutions and such -- even when I was just a grant writer I'd occasionally sneak back into the lab, my data reproducibility was always better than the rest of my folks, much to their consternation and my pleasure.) After settling on a formula I made the test boards in the picture using the big batch. The two boards represent the most disparate pieces of wood in the project. The wood for both the early test phase and then these samples was sanded along with the tables in exactly the same way. All I can figure is that it took a lot longer to wipe down the whole tables than the samples. I tried to keep everything wet, but I think the solvent was evaporating making the dye much more concentrated. It was also done on a hot day, which didn't help. There was a *lot* of unbound dye, as evidenced by the amount I could wash out.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Well done Roger!

[glenn bradley]

Those are are beautiful. I love me some green and green.