Esteemed Galoots,

Part of being a Galoot is completing a project in wood every once in a while. Now I'm not talking every other week, or even every other year.  Haven't completed that piece for SWMBO yet? How old are you? Relax, you've got plenty of time.

So I figure I oughta be good on projects for SWMBO for a decade or so.

I (almost) finished the coffee table that she asked me to make back when I first got into handtools. This is the project that more or less got me into handtools. I bought and made many a tool in the name of this coffee table. "Honey, I need to buy this blurfl to use on the coffee table."

I started on this project by purchasing about 50 BF of rough curly maple and cherry at a little mom 'n' pop sawmill in Harford, NY. That's near Ithaca (PRINY, Tom), the home of the list. The wood sat in my shop in Ithaca to "acclimate" for about 18 months. Then my fiancé (as she was at the time) and I moved to Vermont (next time I move I'm going to do so without moving lumber). We got married and started new jobs. Been working on the house like crazy since we moved in last spring.

Haven't been able to get the shop time that I wanted, but did manage to get some in this winter. Here's the result:

The top is curly soft maple, the legs are soft maple, everything else is cherry. Joints are drawbored M&T. I drowned the poor thing in BLO and then finished with Rev Ron's finest garnet candy coating, padded by hand. It's pretty simple, as you can see, but was a great exercise in basic joints and proportion. I don't really like how the curly top has conspicuous joints, but I guess that's why folks try to bookmatch figured wood.

The most important thing is that SWMBO likes it. Maybe more importantly for me, she now thinks that a project takes about five years to complete. She's right.

-Andy

GG's,

Thanks everyone for the kind words regarding my coffee table. There were some questions regarding various aspects of the table that I glossed over in my original post. Seems that the vast majority of you are concerned about my breadboard ends. Now before you get all concerned and worry yourself that I didn't take wood movement into account, let me tell you that I used listmom Chris Swingley's breadboard technique as can be seen here:

http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/woodworking/images/bedside_table.pdf

His technique has the outermost pins (where the most movement occurs) riding in slots. I must say that it's worked great so far since there's been about 1/4" of movement on either end!

Somebody else asked me how I attached the table top. I gotta confess that I mixed up about two pounds of 10-ton epoxy and smeared it on the underside of the table top, then used thirteen gizmo band c-clamps to smoosh the top onto the bottom. OK. Really, I made some of those cute L-shaped buttons in wood using my moving fillester and plowed some grooves into the apron.

Somebody else asked me how much sandpaper it took to tame the figured wood. Well, this was my first project with highly figured wood. That being said I really didn't find it very difficult to plane to baby-butt smoothness. It was soft maple, maybe that makes a difference? But I just attacked it with my not-so-special Stanley made in England numbah fowah (cast iron smooth plane, Jeff) with original paper-thin iron.

Didn't really even pay attention to which way I was planing neither.

Thanks again for the compliments folks.