Bookmatched Walnut Coffee Table
About a year ago, I purchased a pile of Walnut lumber from a local sawyer that included a couple of 5/4 bookmatched pairs. I decided that one of them should become a coffee table and that I wanted to try out a cantilevered design. I explored the design in SketchUp and sought some design feedback. Around that time, I was reading “By Hand and Eye” (Walker/Tolpin), and decided to use some of the principles in that book to work out as many of the final dimensions as possible. I prototyped the table using some scrap material to see if it would be stable enough to live with, and once I was satisfied, I got to building the real thing.
I used a combination of hand and power tools to build this table. The exposed butterfly joint, the leg tapers, and the bevel angles on the legs were all done by hand. The table top, with the exception of the mortises for the butterfly joint, was built using power tools. The concealed joinery used to connect the legs to each other and to the top used a domino joiner. The finish is General Finishes Arm-r-seal.
A full build album is available here:
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