Viewer Project
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By Ben Minshall from Mason, MI
Added on May 31, 2012
My wife runs a part-time sewing business, and she needed a new table to hold her favorite sewing machine. The old table was a flimsy Walmart thing and bounced around as she used the machine, so I knew the new table needed to be sturdy and substantial. I had recently taken a trip to the lumber mill to buy a truckload of boards for a different household project, and as I was loading up, the proprietor of the mill tossed on several gnarly boards of American elm he couldn’t sell and just wanted to get rid of. “Use it for something”, he said. “I just want it gone”. I decided this would be a great opportunity to build my wife a table and make something useful out of wood that would otherwise be junk.
I decided to go with an Arts and Crafts style including a bit of inspiration from the Greene & Greene style. The aprons and the leg design caught my eye from a picture of an extension table on page 135 of David Mathias’ book, Poems of Wood and Light. On the tabletop I wanted to play around with inlaid squares because it is a play on the name of my wife’s business (http://hiptopiecesquares.com) and fits with the style of work she does. This table is the first piece I’ve done in either Arts and Crafts or Greene & Greene style, so every step was a learning process for me. A complete photo log of the construction is on my Picasa album: https://picasaweb.google.com/113278041913331532181/SewingTable?authuser=0&feat=directlink
The aprons are joined to the legs with Dominoes for speed of construction where the joinery is not visible. The lower parts of the leg assemblies are mortises and through-tenons with contrasting draw bore dowels. I also used the draw bore dowel technique when attaching the breadboard ends onto the tabletop.
Everything was sanded to #180 and cleaned with mineral spirits. The base of the table simply has a few coats of boiled linseed oil rubbed in with a mild abrasive pad. The tabletop has four thin layers of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal satin wiped on and sanded with #400 between coats. Finally, I put on a thin coat of plain paste wax and buffed it with a cotton cloth.
I’m very pleased with how this table came out, and my wife is thrilled that she no longer has to hold her sewing machine down to a bouncy table as she works!
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