Side Table in Walnut and Curly Maple

 Getting the Lumber

A couple of years back I built a corner table in walnut and maple, described here, to fit in the space between two couches set at right angle to one another.  Due to a lack of suitable timber, I did not build a matching table for the other end of the couch, something I heard about from SWMBO roughly every 4.7 days.  With loving diligence, though, I had been for a few years keeping my eye out for another matching board of figured maple, without any luck.  But patience pays off.  While walking through one of the big box stores recently, looking for some plywood, I chanced to spy a maple board lurking behind several others in the hardwood lumber section – and it seemed to have the figure I was looking for.  After shuffling about fifteen other boards out of the way, I got my hands on the prize – ten feet of 6” wide figured maple.  What was a wonderfully figured board like this doing hanging out in a seedy big box store lumber pile?  I rescued it.

Making Sawdust   (Build blog can be found here)

For the top, I used the same construction as the corner table, scaled down to be 14” wide and 28” long.  As before, I made breadboard style ends from walnut, with the tongue and groove reversed from the traditional placement to allow using maple dowels on the maple side of the joint.  The walnut came from a slab I had bought years before because it had some wonderful crotch figure.  The top inlay is cut on the CNC router with a 1/8" bit.  The inlay strip of walnut is thinned on the drum sander to 1/8”. 

The leg blanks are cut from the same walnut 8/4 crotch slab, glued with mortise and tenon to the maple cat feet, and tapered on the table saw.  Finally, I used a 45 degree bit on the router table to arrive at the octagonal cross section tapering to the narrow square cross section at the bottom.  The curved rails are cut on the band saw, smoothed with a spoke shave and sanded smooth by hand.  For the frame, the cross members and legs are attached with maple floating double tenons in thru mortices; the square "buttons" are actually the tenon ends. 

Finish is two coats of hand rubbed shellac and five coats of wipe on Minwax satin Tung oil varnish.