Twisted Top Side Table (2008)

I am a fairly new member here (migrated from LJ), and decided to start sharing a bunch of my previous projects, starting from the first "real" project. This is my "Twisted Top Side-Table" that I built in 2008.

"Where it all began..." should really be the title of this post though.

I built this table in the woodworking course at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2008. I ended up at this university to make my bachelor in "digital media", a field I had been working in for about 12 years before that year. We could take an "elective" from other departments, and since I always liked woodworking, I took this course.

Long story short, I switched to the "Sculpture" department after this course, and made my bachelor in Fine Arts instead of digital arts. Never regretted that decision, the Academy of Art really changed my life around. Instead of looking into a box (screen) all day and programming, I was working with my hands and learned to admire and understand art (and craft...), and actually make it too.

Anyway, on to the project:
Every student had to draw up a simple table or similar piece of furniture. It was then briefly discussed with the teacher, and the building process started. I had a bit of experience already in CAD drawing with SketchUp, and came up with this design:

We had a whole bunch of soft maple at our disposal, while some students also brought along their own wood, as I did for the top, which is "brazilian cherry", or Jatoba.

The table really has two tops, the two are just sandwiched together (you cannot actually turn the jatoba board...).

Since we were taught to make mortise and tenon joints, the teacher suggested to use wedged through-tenons to attach the maple top. Here is me in a young version, chopping out the mortises:

As you can see, the maple top also has a strip of the jatoba in the center, just for kicks.

The leg pieces were glued together from 2" thick pieces, to make 4 x 4 inch "beams". One edge of each leg has a full 1" round-over, while the other edges just have maybe 1/8". I also decided to leave the artifact in that one leg. Just a couple of little things to make the design a bit more interesting.

The legs were glued together with dominos. The Festool Domino was actually used in pretty much every project in this course... it just made things a lot simpler for students to complete their work.

Then it was time for the glue-up:

Of course there was no lack of clamps in this woodworking course ;)

For the finishing the teacher suggested "The Good Stuff". It's a urethane gel that is really easy to apply, and has held up surprisingly well over the years.

I still like this table a lot today; partly because it was my first, but it also is just so plain and simple, with a "twist" (quite literally). My later projects looked a bit more traditional, but lately this table has inspired me to maybe put a more modern twist on future projects again ;)

Here it is in it's current setting, I am using it in my bedroom:

Last but not least... I have been talking a bit about Blender here on Craftisian, a fantastic and free 3D application. I am still a huge fan of this software, I draw all my projects in Blender now.  (Note: I am obviously not "spamming" here, since Blender a free program).
For practice purposes, I have drawn many of my older SketchUp projects in Blender. Here is what the final rendering looks like, I hope this will encourage some people to test out Blender:

Well, that was my first real project. I hope you enjoyed the story :)