Harlequin side table

[Derek Cohen]

My wife requested a side table for the family room. This will be situated between two arm chairs, and replace the small table (which is too high and dominating) ...
 

 
Not just a side table, but it also needed to house her needlework thingies. In other words, shallow drawers for cotton reels and sewing kit. I played around with several ideas, and eventually came up with a design that borrows a little from a piece I recently made.
 
Lynndy liked the softness of the rounded dovetails and overall dimension of this coffee table I built some months back for a nephew ...
 

 
The plan (looking down) would be to create a curved front and back, with round, splayed legs to the outside (an alternative is a straight, tapered round leg) ...
 

 
In contrast to the Jarrah in that piece, the carcase will be built in Hard Maple, dovetailed and mitred at each corner. It will feature 8 drawers. All drawer fronts will curve as well. The reason for "Harlequin" in the title is that the drawers will be a mix of woods, as depicted in the elevation of the drawer section ...
 

 
A harlequin design is often thought of as a diamond pattern, but does also include a rectangular checkerboard. Anyway, it's just a name, and I like giving my pieces a name

 
At this stage I have chosen for the drawer fronts Black Walnut and Blue Gum. I may also add in Hard Maple. Always interested in your thoughts here. The Blue Gum is lighter than the Black Walnut and is a good foil against the Hard Maple …
 

 
The legs will taper and curve from the carcase, attached with a loose mortice and tenon ...
 

 
The sides and top were arranged so that the grain flowed continuously. The carcase is 20mm thick, 800mm long and 350 at the wide, centre point ..
 

 
The initial dovetail plan was to keep the boards parallel and saw the curves later. It became apparent when joining the first set that this would not work ...
 

 
.. there would be too much at the sides to mitre, and so I decided to shape the top and bottom panels at this stage rather than later.
 

 

 
This was the first opportunity to use the modification I made to my Moxon vise (see article: http://www.inthewoodshop.com/ShopMadeToo...nMods.html). It now enables the pin- and tail boards to be clamped together to aid in marking out (see earlier photo).
 
In marking out for mitred corners, the side tails are not sawn out from the front ...
 

 
... the board is reversed, and the mitres are marked ...
 

 
... and sawn ...
 

 
The reason I had wanted to retain square carcase sides was that it would make it easier to square the chisel guide for the mitres. I got around this by squaring them to the front of the carcase ...
 

[Derek Cohen]

The pin board is seen here ...



One of the difficulties in fitting this many tails and pins is that any slight errors are magnified. The fit below illustrates that the left side is too tight ...



To deal with this, the tails were given a pencil scribbling ...



Fitting the board together left this behind ...



This process needed to be done once more, before the fit was satisfactory ...



The four sides were dry fitted together, and the front and rear upper and lower panels planed to shape (this was close but not enough) …



All is coplanar …



Where we are up to at the end of today …



One set of mitred corners …



… and the other …



Next up is building the internal dividers for the drawers.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Aram]

This looks great! Keep the posts coming.

[hbmcc]

This looks nice! 

"A harlequin design is often thought of as a diamond pattern, but does also include a rectangular checkerboard. Anyway, it's just a name, and I like giving my pieces a name 

 
At this stage I have chosen for the drawer fronts Black Walnut and Blue Gum. I may also add in Hard Maple. Always interested in your thoughts here. The Blue Gum is lighter than the Black Walnut and is a good foil against the Hard Maple …"

I'm sure you are already finished with the dividers, but my vote is with maple. It frames the major frontage now. However, the drawer configuration feels odd. (Tension?)

[Derek Cohen]

Well tension is not what I have in mind, quite the opposite. This piece is going to be so laid back, so cool ... hey man ...


The Hard Maple was chosen for the carcase, as were the mix of lighter coloured woods for the drawer fronts for this reason. Similarly, there are no hard edges .. I like the contrast of hard dovetails and curves here at this time, but the plan is to round them later. Even the corner drawers will need to be rounded to fit the internal round in the corner of the carcase.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[hbmcc]

Well tension is not what I have in mind, quite the opposite. This piece is going to be so laid back, so cool ... hey man ...


The Hard Maple was chosen for the carcase, as were the mix of lighter coloured woods for the drawer fronts for this reason. Similarly, there are no hard edges .. I like the contrast of hard dovetails and curves here at this time, but the plan is to round them later. Even the corner drawers will need to be rounded to fit the internal round in the corner of the carcase.

Regards from Perth

Derek

I forget.... "Tension" is created by the imbalance of the divider outlines. The diagonal arrangement of drawers alone expresses a degree of energy. The darkened panels reinforce the angle and, tension. That angle mimics the angle of repose in the furniture on the pool deck. Relaxing. I associate it with my visits to the dentist, also relaxing and laid back. A client of a firm I worked for found height stimulating. A metal "hammock" reached by a catwalk was built for her, over a cliff by the Narrows Bridge on Puget Sound. Relaxing for her. ... My vertigo gets worse with age. So, for we/us three the design is relaxing; but not by compositional definition.

By your title, "harlequin" means action, stimulation-- for the rest of us. For you, probably "jazzy" or older is more familiar.
  I was too young and cool for Owsley Stanley; rather, grew up in the midwest, a backward region of the (6k young) world even then. 

Walnut is considered a dark wood in its native range. Darker than most maples I am familiar with.

[Derek Cohen]

With the carcase completed, it is time to turn to the internal dividers for the drawers.

I took the time first to plane the rebate for the rear panel. Knowing my spatial weakness of getting parts back-to-front and upside-down, I marked these when the carcase was a dry fit (and later briefly thought I had screwed this up!) ...



One of the benefits of mitred corners is that the rebate can be planed across without fear of it showing ...





The rebate is 6mm deep as the rear panel will be 5mm thick to bend it around the curved rear. The carcase is 20mm thick, and the rebate extends halfway into this.

I was curious to see how rebating on a curve would turn out. No problem ...





Here is the rear of the carcase with the rebate ...





Moving to the stopped dados/housings ... the centre panel is solid rather than a frame. I decided that this would be less work, plus there will be a series of stopped dados to be made. The panel is 10mm thick. This was made first, that is, the dados were sized to fit the panel thickness.

I made up a couple of templates. One was the height of the dado, and the other was the height of the dado plus the width of the dado. The inside of the carcase is marked on both sides using the same templates to ensure that they are exactly the same height from the base.



The lines are deepened with a knife, and then a chisel wall is created to register a saw cut ...



The end of the stopped dado is defined ...



A Japanese azebiki was used along a guide to ensure it cut on the vertical ...



Now that the sides are defined by the kerf, this could be deepened with a chisel (this is my favourite chisel - a 1" Kiyohisa. Sublime!) ..



The waste is removed with a router plane ...



Check that the side walls are square ...

[Derek Cohen]

Completed side panels ...



I was so confident that the dados were perfect that I dry fitted the carcase once more ... and then found that one dado was a smidgeon too tight for the test piece. It turned out that a small section of a side wall was not as square as I thought (probably the saw did not cut deeply enough at that spot). The best too to clear this is a side rebate plane. Set for a very light cut to clear the waste, not the dado width ...



Perfect fit this time ...



Time to fit the centre panel. This has been shaped to size, but will need a little fine tuning at a later time. Note that the rear section is secondary wood (Merbau) ...



I had just enough time to slide the panel in. Nice tight fit. Not enough time to saw the rebates for the stopped dados. This will be done next time ...



Regards from Perth

Derek

[TraditionalToolworks]

Beautiful work and project.

[cputnam]

Just got back from a 2500 mile road trip and saw this. Wow! I love the curved and rounded stuff - so much softer and natural feeling. Brings out thoughts of Sam Maloof. Watching with fascination.