Anatomy of an End Table and Drawer

[Music] hello I'm Joshua Farnsworth and welcome to my workshop in my traditional woodworking school here in Early's Ville over jigna today I wanted to talk about the anatomy of a table how a table fits together specifically the anatomy of an end table with a drawer the reason I want to talk about this because I did a little digging I noticed that there is not much information out there you know a lot of the books and DVDs don't go into detail and how everything fits together so I wanted to share that with you and I'm going to share that with you on some end tables that I recently built out of some quarter sawn white oak you might remember a video I did a couple years ago a big tree that fell down in Charlottesville Virginia and a friend and friend of mine and I Todd horn milled it up on a band sawmill so it was a really fun project beautiful beautiful wood and I'm just kind of I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about how to build a table because that would take hours to a video to show you but I just wanted to show you just here in a few minutes how everything fits together so it will make conceptual sense to you so let's get started let's table fits together with Tenon's that are on the aprons and they're inserted into mortises which are cut into the four legs so the rear Tenon's are beveled to allow them to clear each other inside the mortise the rear legs of course have two mortises the front two legs however are different I would like the rear legs they have mortises that accept the apron Tenon's but on the interior faces of these legs are mortises that are cut to provide an opening for the drawer [Music] the bottom drawer rail uses a double tenon as you can see here and the top drawer rail uses a dovetail that's lapped into the top of the leg [Music] the dovetail rail sits proud of the top of the leg so it can be planed down later but don't worry if your rail dovetail looks ugly like mine it'll be they'll be covered with the table top later for aesthetic purposes I set my rails back about a sixteenth of an inch from the front of the legs [Music] sometimes I get a little too antsy I want to see what the wood grain looks like so I'll wipe some mineral spirits on it we don't worry it'll dry very quickly and it won't cause any harm to your wood so now let's talk about legs I love the look of taper legs but you can also use turned legs or taper legs with turnings on them or even straight legs so the taper usually stops just a few inches down from the drawer rails after the table is glued up it's time to make custom spacers or doublers some people call them so these spacers are made of secondary would like poplar pine poplar in this case and they're made to be flush with the legs so these can be permantly attached with wood glue and you don't even need screws or nails for anything the glues plenty strong it just is a way to keep the drawers from moving side to side just take extra caution when gluing and clamping up to make sure they don't shift because they have a tendency to do that you can see here after the glue is dried they're in place and now over the top of those you put runners on the bottoms for the drawer to slide along and kickers on the tops to keep the drawer tight against the runners so there's a variety of methods for attaching tabletops but one way is to cut shallow mortises into the rear apron and also into the side kickers and the front rail and make wooden buttons that hold the tabletop tight while allowing seasonal wood movement or else you know you're gonna have a table that's splits so before the table frame is glued up I usually chisel out the button mortises with the quarter inch chisel you can see these buttons when they're finished you've set it screw in them I'm using some traditional-looking screws and you screw it down and it tightens the top to the aprons or on the sides it is tightening them to the kicker's so here's what it looks like with the table top on I actually think that a sign of craftsmanship is to use a thicker table top and bevel the top like you see here and I do that with a hand plane so let's move on to the drawers it's pretty straightforward there's a drawer front and drawer sides with grooves plowed into them to allow the drawer bottom and we use a half-blind dovetail to hold the drawer sides into the drawer front as you can see here and then there's a drawer back which you uses through dovetails you can see that it's shorter so that the drawer can hang out the back to allow for expansion I like to put the side and then the back on and then the other side that's just how it fits fits in better and don't use a hammer but it's to set these in but before you glue it up you're going to put it together to do some test fitting that looks pretty good and you can see here there's another shot at the grooves how they line up that allows for the drawer bottom and that's the drawer bottom is going to go on last so we just leave that out and those there's a custom drawer poll that I've built with a mortise don't look too closely I tore out some of the grain but you can do different kinds of drawer pulls so then the drawer is glued up taking the extreme caution to make sure the drawers are square and I use a block claim to actually bevel the top of the drawer sides to prevent dings from showing up for the sides so the drawer should fit tight at this point prior to fitting the drawer the drawer fitting process includes creating a slight space above and below the drawer front called a reveal and this prevents the drawer from hanging up and it's also for extended purposes drawer stops are used to stop the drawer from going too far into the table I simply glue little blocks on the the lower front rail but you can screw them down and nail them down if you're so inclined and here's how they look before they got fumed so I actually put them in a fuming tent and fumed them with ammonia which I'll cover in the following video you can see big turnout kind of gray but once the finish goes on them they just look incredibly beautiful you could see that quarter sawn white oak figure just pop there's actually a recipe that I'll put on the accompanying blog post for a good finish that penetrates and but is still protective at this point I also put a few coats of thin D wax shellac on the interior parts of the drawer you don't have to do this but it can't help I've been added drawer bottom so the bottom is grain as you can see run side to side which means the wood will move front to back that's why the drawer back is kept out of the way the drawer bottom is beveled with hand plain and then attached to the drawer bottom with a screw so the screw hole and the drawer bottom is slightly larger than the screw so that seasonal wood movement won't destroy the drawer now you can see we have a beautiful custom built drawer that fits perfectly into the end table you can see here that this end table is finished and just has a really nice Sheen to it and trying out the drawer you can see that it closes tight but not too tight and not too loose so I hope this video has answered some of the questions that you may have about how drawers and how tables fit together and I'm actually gonna use these end tables or nightstands in the next video that I release it'll be a video about how to fume white oak furniture with ammonia this is like a commercial industrial grade ammonia as opposed to the stuff that you can just buy at a hardware store that I did last time so keep your eyes open for that video and leave any comments or questions you have and make sure you visit wood and shop comm and check out my store because I've got a lot of DVDs and woodworking t-shirts and other things that you can check out there so thanks for watching this is Joshua Farnsworth if you're interested in learning traditional woodworking with hand tools this is my website at wood and shop comm where you can find free video tutorials workshop tours of amazing traditional woodworkers and tool buying guides you can ask questions and share your projects with thousands of woodworkers on my free traditional woodworking forum make sure you subscribe to my regular blog posts and also check out my 10 steps for getting started in traditional woodworking enjoy [Music]

Channel: Wood and Shop

Views: 103,177

Rating: 4.9248686 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, traditional woodworking, roy underhill, woodwright's shop, chris schwarz, lie-nielsen, hand planes, hand saws, chisels, table, night stand, joinery, dovetail, mortise, tenon

Id: JeVqO-59aCQ

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2017