Making of Grid Coffee Table

Have been doing more work on the coffee table I started a week ago. I had a bunch of short off-cuts, that I trimmed down to 1.5″ by 1.5″ and lengths of 4.5″,6″ and 9″ respectively. It’s nice to have as little waste as possible but it takes a bit of time to cut and sort the various small lengths. The pieces were joined and glued together to form a solid top and 2 sides. The first  few steps involved a sketch and laying the pieces out on table and experimenting with different layouts like so.

Next, the joints for the biscuits were cut using a plate jointer, a really useful device which cuts semi-ellipitical mortise joints. The biscuits are inserted into the mortise joints and glued-up, top and sides were assembled seperately. The top and side were clamped up with heavy-duty tube clamps and left to dry overnight.

Followed by lots of sanding using the my favorite tool the belt-sander. The end joints resemble large box joint, it’s nice to see the end grain of the wood.

And the piece is about 90% finished, going to leave it for a while until I decided how best to err.. finish it, probably tung oil or danish oil finish or varnish. It looks something like this at the moment…