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Fine Hardwood Furniture

by

Andrew Pitts ~ FurnitureMaker

Work in Progress
Cherry, Walnut, and Red Oak Pedestals (Plant Stands)

Article Completed 25 October 2008


Disclaimer: This discussion chronicles the making of a piece of furniture in my workshop. My intention is to bring the reader virtually into my shop to generally see how I do the work and share in my thought processes. Although I try to point out how the tools work and the applicable safety considerations, this discussion is not intended to be a text on how to work with tools, nor how to execute operations with the tools shown. I am not providing instruction in woodworking methods. Woodworkers attempting to imitate my methods do so at their own risk.
Click on images to enlarge and see details
             A few years ago I made two series of plant stands, later called pedestals to make it obvious that they did not have to be used to hold plants. There were two styles of stands, with a taller and shorter model of each. I sold one tall stand, donated the shorter of the pair to the Rappahannock Community College "Preakness" fund raiser and gave the pair shown in the photo below to my wife for Christmas. But I always liked this particular style, so I decided to make another pair for sale, but to modify them a little. First, I would refine the sweep of the legs to be a little less curved, and then I would cut a slight arch in the bottom apron to complement the curve of the legs. Otherwise, they would be the same stands.

Pedestals
 Leg patterns and stock
             I dusted off the plans and set to work. First, I designed leg templates that would reduce the leg curvature a bit, and while doing that I also selected the cherry wood stock for the legs. The templates and stock are shown at right. In order to do the mortise cuts in the legs Cut bevel legfor the aprons, I made the leg blanks wide enough to square up for cutting the joinery, and then bandsawed the curves. But I'm getting ahead of myself. With the leg stock squared up into leg blanks, the first step was to cut two 45 degree bevels on each leg. These bevels would be the flats into which the mortises would be cut. Since the bevelsMark domino met at a 90 degree angle, they formed the corner of the stand. The photo at left shows me cutting the bevels. Note that I did not have the saw guard installed. This is because for this particular cut the stock tends to push the saw guard into the blade, which is bad, so the guard had to be removed. However, the Saw Stop saw has a great riving knife which reduced the chance of kickback, so as long as I was careful with my hands the operation was safe. Now, with the legs beveled to Domino Legform the corners of the stand, I marked for the mortises, as shown in the photo at right. I used a wheel marker, which is really nice for this. The marker has a sharp wheel installed at the end of a rod, and the wheel makes the score mark. What I was actually marking was the center of each mortise, since I intended to use my Festool Domino tenonDomino mortise machine to cut the mortises and the tool indexes off a center mark. The Domino cuts a round end tenon into which a pre-made floating tenon, called a Domino fits. For the applications in which the Domino works, it really saves time cutting mortise and tenon joints. The photo to left shows me cutting the mortises on the beveled legs. You can see that the Domino machine fence is set to 45 degrees for this cut. The photo at right shows one of the mortises cut into the leg.


Bandsaw LegsSand leg
             With the mortises cut, I next set to shaping the legs. Using the templates I made earlier, I drew the curves on the leg stock, then band sawed the stock, as shown in the photo at left. With the curves rough cut, I next cleaned up the convex side with the edge belt sander, as shown at right. The edge belt sander is really nice for this. it uses Taper Jiga six-inch wide belt, driven by a motor and hooked up to my dust collection system and makes quick work of smoothing theSpokeshave Leg curves. The concave curves had to be smoothed with a spokeshave, however. Before doing that, I cut a taper on each side of the leg to complete the saw work. Using a really neat taper jig I read Leg tenonsabout in Fine Woodworking I cut each taper on the table saw, as shown at left. With the tapers cut, I spokeshaved the legs smooth, as shown in the photo at right. After the spokeshave work I sanded the legs to P400 grit, applied a wash coat of thin shellac to raise the grain and seal the cherry so it would not blotch when the finish was applied, and then glued the dominos into the mortises, as shown at left.


Domino Apron
             With the legs completed, I worked on the aprons and stretchers. If you look at the photo of the last set of pedestals I made Stretchersyou will note that the top seems to float above the aprons. That is because stretchers are attached to the top of the aprons and the stretchers are attached to the top using floating through tenons. Making the walnut aprons wasDrilling mortise straightforward, and I mortised them with the Domino machine as shown at right. The stretchers with the floating tenons were also easily made, and you can see them prior to being attached to the aprons in the photo at left. If you look closely you can see cuts I made in the tenons. TheseChisel Mortise are for wedges to be driven in from the top to wedge the tenons in the mortises in the top. They help hold the tenons in place, and look neat! The tops were essentially one-inch thick pieces of red oak, made by edge gluing two pieces of wood together to get the required 11-1/4" width. I then marked the mortise positions and drilled out most of the waste before using a mortise chisel to square up the sides, as shown in the photos at right.



             I assembled all the parts and glued them up, then applied three coats of an oil and varnish mixture followed by three coats of a tung oil, boiled linseed oil, and beeswax mixture. And here are the finished pedestals! See more at this link.
Finished pedestals