Dan Shapiro

This is Part II in a 3-or-so part post describing how I made our coffee table.
Part I (with the blueprints) is here.
Part III is here.
Part IV (with pictures) is here.
So you saw my blueprints in Part I–how do you make a table from it? Here’s how I went about doing it.
First, I got four 8-ft 4/4 walnut (or your favorite hardwood) boards totalling 32 inches in width. When buying, here’s some things to remember.
— Try to handpick your lumber so you get boards that look similar. If you’re working with a local sawyer, you may get boards from the same tree, or even a flitch matched set, which would be quite excellent.
— If you buy rough lumber, try to get lumber that will plane up to at least 13/16. 3/4 is pushing it aesthetically.
— Walnut grades differently from many other species. I used Select lumber, which is required to have only pinholes or small tight knots. The catch is, in Walnut (unlike many other species), is graded on its best side, not its worst side. That means one side may have significantly more “character” than you intended. Woodworkers call that side the “bottom”. Of course, if you’re going for more character, by all means spec #1 common instead and save yourself a bunch of money. Or go the other way and buy boards with crotch flame. Actually, if you do that, can I have your scraps?
— If you can find 6′ boards boards, definitely do. These should cost less than 8″ 8′ boards, but that’s all my supplier carried. I paid twice for the waste–once when they charged me the higher bf price since it was a long board, and again when I cut off the excess.
Next, joint and plane the boards as necessary. Remember that you only have to plane one side to a glossy flat surface. You can leave the bottom with some rough patches and clean them up with your Sander of Wonderous Delight. Don’t forget that all boards have to end up the same thickness, so every time you take a pass on one, take a pass on all. If you’ve already got a side you like and you have to take another pass, take it from the bottom. You never know when you might plane down and uncover a nasty knot inside your board, so don’t mess with a good side.
Now lay down your boards, good side up. Try to arrange them so the grain patterns on the edge match up nicely. If you can match the grain well, the seams will be nearly invisible. Note that you haven’t cut your boards to length yet, so you can shift them up and down slightly to line up the patterns. You can also move them around, and even turn them over if you planed both sides. Now is the time to draw your cutlines on both ends and mark the order of the boards.
Crosscut the boards to length. At some point you’ll need the 4″ piece for the ends; this may come from scrap, or you may need to buy wood for the purpose. Keep it in mind if your boards are too wide; you may be able to use a 12″ board for both a main 8″ plank and both pieces of 4″ endcap.
Now comes the sneaky part. Take your middle two boards and rip them to 6″ width, saving the scrap. Slap a dado blade on your saw and make multiple passes to cut 12″ wide recesses in three places. You’ll do this for both your center boards–see the diagram in Part I for details. When you put both boards together and glue the 2″ cutoff back on, this will hold your 12″x12″ slate tiles. It may look tricky, but it’s actually pretty straightforward. A crosscut sled helps though if you’re table sawing. And be careful if you do it on a radial arm saw–the travel of the bottom of the blade is not necessarily parallel to the table, so you may not get a consistant depth of cut.
The trick here is that when you glue the 2″ cuttoff back on, the seam will be virtually invisible. It’ll look like you carefully chiseled out the opening with handtools and got 12 perfectly square corners, but you actually did the whole thing in an hour with your table saw.
So it’s glueup time. First step, make sure you’ve got enough clamps–one per 18″ or so. I glued up in many small steps, adding one board at a time. This gives you lots of time to perfect each joint, and I recommend it. Or if you the swashbuckling, daring, buy-lots-of-lumber-because-you-screwed-it-up-the-first-time type, just glue the whole sucker up at once. Whatever floats your boat. In any case, I recommend reinforcing the joing with dowels, biscuits, or a long spline. Although I did do a quick beam bounce on this: I didn’t cut the table to size until after the glueup, so I had some cutoffs that were glued together with the same strength as the actual table. I whacked the seam with a hammer, and the wood broke away from the seam–as advertised, the (unreinforced) glue joint was stronger than the wood itself. So you may not need reinforcement. Still, I’ll be damned if I was going to let an opportunity to use my new biscuit joiner pass me by. Most important caution in this step is to be sure that you keep the surface of the boards flat as you glue them up–it’s easy for unequal clamp pressure to cause the boards to be glued at a slight angle to each other..
Once you’re all glued up the real fun starts: making it look pretty. If the boards are cut to size, run a router with a cutoff bit along the edge to get it straight. If not, cut them now with a circular saw.
After the glueup you no doubt have glue squeezeout all over the place (don’t be shy with your glue), so this is an excellent time to repair any minor problems in the finish. Mix yourself a pastry bag of the finest liquid walnut and start gooping it in every nook and cranny you can find. Pile it high, because it shrinks when it dries.
Once that’s all dried, it’s time to hit it with the Sander of Everlasting Joy and Wisdom at about a 60 grit. You might take a look at all my naggings on the subject before you get started. When you’ve sanded it down to roughly flat, you’ll probably notice a bunch more little dips and divots, so hit it with more liquid walnut and repeat.
That’s enough for now, more on making the legs, finishing, the slate, etc to come.

(I’m sure I’m forgetting several steps here… finished this project months ago, so if you see some detail that isn’t explained well, mail me (danieljshapiro at hotmail dot com) and I’ll make it up.)
(I don’t think I’m going to get this done in three parts…)
(If I wasn’t on the NetNanny hitlist before, the “crotch flame” thing whould put me over the top)

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