Side Table with Half Blind and Through Dovetails

Greetings fellow shop rats,
We bought a new comfy chair for the bedroom and needed a small side table beside it. A man’s gotta have a place to set down his Irish Whiskey. I kept this in the same style as some previous tables I have built, with a walnut frame and curly maple top and shelf. Unlike my previous tables, this one has a drawer. I decided to build it the traditional way, with half blind dovetails in the front and through dovetails in the back.

The frame was pretty straightforward after laying out everything in Sketchup. I decided to use slip tenons for all the joinery. Most of my furniture projects have been built using a Dowelmax, which is a great system, but with dowels there is no option to tweak the joints if the alignment is not perfect. I wanted to make sure that the drawer enclosure was dead square since I was going for a friction fit. I used a plunge router with a 1/4” spiral bit and an edge guide for the mortises, clamping the work pieces in my Moxon vise. I was able to get accurate joints and like using slip tenons, so my next project will be building a dedicated Philip Morley style mortising jig. Here’s my setup:

The drawer took me longer to build than the frame. I have become comfortable making through dovetails using a DT guide and my homemade version of Rob Cosman’s offset .024” shim for sawing the pins, but I have never done half blind DT’s before. The pin board was challenging for me, and I finally got it right on my third attempt. After making the saw cuts for the pins, I used a sharpened card scraper to extend the saw kerfs to the bottom of the opening. This was a big help. The second help was using a router with a 1/4” flush trim bit to remove most of the waste in the pin board, finishing up with sharp chisels. I added a couple of temporary faces to my vise to allow room for routing. A couple of 1-2-3 blocks work great to level the workpiece to the top of the vise. Here’s a couple of photos:

I thought about making a wood knob, but I really like the look of brass. The finish for the frame was my usual Osmo 3043 Satin. For the maple pieces, I tested and then used Osmo Raw 3051 as a base coat since it doesn’t yellow the maple. I followed up with 2 coats of Osmo 3011 which is called a gloss finish, but in reality it has just a bit more sheen than the satin finish. The table works great beside the chair, the only problem is our cat Ziggy has decided that the new chair is the perfect spot for his long naps.