Cantilevered End Table – Viewer Project

This week’s project is submitted by Bryan. Let’s check out what he has to say:

“This is my first piece of “fine” furniture, which has helped to develop my passion for woodworking. I built this piece as part of a Furniture Design class in the architecture school during my undergrad, even though I was a finance major. The piece is made of red oak and walnut and the table tops stand at 12″ and 24″ respectively. I started out with all rough lumber, 5/4 red oak, and 8/4 walnut. I milled the oak with the thickness planer down to 1″ thick by 3″ wide for the larger side, and 1″ thick by 2″ wide for the smaller side. Once I had these measurements, I used the table saw to cut all of my angles for both the longer pieces and smaller head and foot pieces. At this point I had cut all of my oak pieces and it was time for glue up. I did this in sections. First I glued up the 3″ section by combining two long pieces with the appropriate head and foot pieces. Once all of these smaller sections were done, I glued them together until I eventually had one long row of alternating blank sections and long sections 17″ wide. I then built a jig to hold this entire piece at the appropriate angle in order to route out the section for the walnut/glass, which took a nice long 2″ router bit a while to hog out. Once this step was done, I was able to put the last two outside boards to make the ends look more finished. I cut the walnut to size, drilled the holes for the dowels, cut the angle on the walnut and glued it into place, along with the red oak dowels. I used a piece of wood as a spacer for the glass. I did the a similar process for the 2″ smaller side, except I didn’t glue the alternating boards on the bottom section until after I meshed the two together. Once together, I glued in the missing pieces, securing the two sections forever. The last step was inserting the 17″ W x 23″ L x 1/2″ D glass into the top section and the 17″ W x 11″ L x 1/2″ D glass into the bottom section.”

“It is finished with about 3 coats of Danish Oil sanded down to about 400 grit and has a poly spray topcoat. Overall this is a very strong piece, and has no problem holding the glass, even with me leaning on it, as the table will tip over before the joint would ever fail. There are definitely things I would consider doing different though, but that’s the challenge for my next piece. Enjoy my cantilevered end table and thanks for all of the inspiration. As always, I look forward to the next video!