Modern Dining Table Build | Easy Mid-Century Table

in this video i'm going to show you how to make this mid-century inspired white oak dining room table so enjoy and don't forget to subscribe down [Music] below [Music] like any table i build i like to start with the top first so i pre-milled up a bunch of six quarter white oak now i'm just gluing this thing together no biscuits no dominoes because your glue joints are going to be plenty strong don't be fooled into thinking you have to put biscuits or dominoes in a table top now this is a big old boy it's a hundred inches by 45 inches solid six quarter white oak so when you get it all glued up you're probably going to want to you know lay down and take a little snooze but not too long just a quick rest then you're going to want to trim the ends to the appropriate length now i glued it up to already be the right width so after trimming one side you just gotta flip it around and trim the other side until you get a tabletop that is your desired dimensions once you have your tabletop cut to size i like to at this stage pre-sand the entire top just get it pretty much ready to go that way you can set it aside and focus on your base which is what we're going to do now now this kind of has a funky base it's got some legs that are angled they are splayed out starting at the top and then moving outwards as they get to the base now you could do a bunch of fancy math and geometry and try and figure out all your angles but i hate math and i hate geometry and i hate angles so the easiest way i found to do bases of this sort is to just trace out the shape that i want them to be onto a scrap piece of ply now my ply is the width that i want my base to be and it's also the height that i want my base to be so i know that i can trace out the shape of my base onto that scrap piece and it's going to wind up the right size in doing this you kind of just have to determine what you think is going to look good for your specific base for this base each leg is gonna be three inches wide so i mark out my three inch wide legs playing around with the angle just a little bit until i well think it looks good now i'm also going to have a top piece that comes down three inches so after marking out my legs i mark out where my top piece is gonna land and then there's gonna be a little stretcher that connects the legs and i'm doing that about eight inches up from the base so i simply mark eight inches up with a tape measure and then using a t-square i get a nice square line all the way across now my stretcher is going to be a little smaller than my legs it's only going to be two and a quarter so i mark two and a quarter up from that line and wouldn't you believe it then i just trace on where i want my stretcher to go now the nice thing here is once you get your base all drawn out it's just like a giant puzzle you just have to cut your pieces to fit into your drawn out base dimensions so first i just cut down a bunch of stock pieces of oak i'm using eight quarter oak to make my entire base and they're already three inches wide which is what i want so i just plop them into my pre-traced lines mark out on the bottom where it meets the piece of plywood and then i take them over to the chop saw and i just cut them to that angle you'll notice i'm not setting my chop saw to any specific angle i'm just using my line as a reference i don't really care what the angle is i just want it to match up with the base of my plywood template so once i cut the bottom piece on one i make sure that it fits nicely and then i do the exact same thing to the other side i should also note that you're going to need two of these bases so you can actually do all the pieces for both faces at the same time i'm really only showing you one but rest assured i'm building two of them so once i get my bottom pieces cut i put them back on make sure they're lined up and i trace to make the cuts at the top of my legs and then i just walk over to the chop saw make sure that angle is right on my pencil line and i cut them down to the appropriate size by cutting my pieces to fit my pre-traced template on this piece of plywood i have successfully cut both my leg pieces to the right angle without doing a lick of mathematics take that my high school math teacher that said that stuff would come in handy with both of my leg pieces cut i can flip around my plywood template and start figuring out the appropriate cut for my stretcher you think i'm gonna have to do math now don't you wrong o all i'm going to do is clamp my two legs in place to keep them from moving and then i'm going to set a piece on the top it doesn't really matter where it goes and then using a square i'm going to get my stretcher perfectly lined up with my traced out line on my plywood template then i'm going to set another piece above where my leg is and again using my square i'm going to get that perfectly in line with the lower leg and then i'm going to do the exact same thing on the other side now what this is essentially doing is giving me a perfectly marked edge where i can then transfer a pencil line and know exactly where i need to cut my stretchers to fit between my legs below again no math was used in the making of this table a lot of people like to try and complicate table bases like this and figure out all the math and angles and do it all on a sheet of paper and just hope that their math is correct and it lines up but i find that it is so much easier just to trace out your base on a sheet of plywood and just go off your pre-marked lines after marking out our stretcher we test to see if it fits and as you can see once my dumb arm gets out of the way it fits perfectly in between our legs with just a hair of that pencil line visible next we're going to start working on fitting our top support piece now we're going to secure this piece to the legs using half lap joints now i've purposely left this piece longer than i want it so that i don't have to get it exactly perfect i can just throw it on there mark where it crosses my legs mark on my leg where the brace piece crosses them and then we're gonna cut some half laps so that those perfectly fit together like two new lovers holding hands that was weird anyways i'm gonna cut my half laps using my chop saw or miter saw believe it or not now the capex like mini chop saws have a trenching feature which allow you to flip this little switch and control how far down the blade goes which means you can make trenches and things now some people might wonder why i'm not just doing a dado stack with a crosscut sled on the table saw and the reason is that i like the chop saw because i can fine tune my half lap i cut it pretty much where it needs to be and then test it with a scrap piece and then using the chop saw i can just shave off a 64th of an inch or a 32nd of an inch until it fits nice and snug which is much harder to do on the table saw so i just keep going back and forth trimming off a little until i get a nice snug fit in between that trenched out you know place area thing i just made on the board and then i flip it around and do the exact same thing to the other side until i have a nice snug fit on that side as well then before i cut the corresponding lap on my legs i like to take my top brace piece over and just test and make sure that it's going to fit where it needs to now once you put this in place your leg should still be within those pre-traced lines on your board if they're not it means your lap is off and it's creating an angle that wasn't correct so just make sure everything's still lined up and now we have to cut the lap on our legs so we do the exact same thing i take it back over to the chop saw and i just trench away and then i test it to see if it fits and what do you know this one's a much easier cut because it's only cut on one side and then i try and hook the two together and if you've done it right it should look something just like this a perfect half lap then with the laps cut on both our legs and our top support piece i can now cut that top brace piece down to the correct size like i said i left it long so that i didn't have to fiddle with getting it in the perfect placement but now that it's in place i can mark out how long i'd like it to be for this i'm just going four inches off of the inside of my legs making those marks and then i just chop them down on the chop saw you know you want to call the miter saw you dumb trolls but i'm chopping things with it so there then you should have all your pieces cut at this point and like i said you want to do this twice so that you have two bases you don't want to make a one based table at least not with this space next we're going to figure out hooking in that lower stretcher now to do this i'm going to be using dominoes so that it's a nice clean look but i know that some of you don't have a domino jointer so here's some other methods that you could accomplish the same thing with the go-to replacement for the domino jointer is always the doweling jig which would work just fine but you could also use the half lap method on your lower stretcher just the same as we did on the upper support piece next with my domino mortises drilled out i'm getting ready to glue everything up now gluing those angled legs can be a challenge so i just took some of the offcuts from my pieces that already have that angle cut into them and using a little ca glue and blue tape i just glue them on the outside of my leg that way when i hook my stretcher in i'll have a nice flat surface that i can use to get my clamps on and clamp perfectly parallel from leg to leg and not pinch on one side or the other or have my clamps slide down the legs towards the skinnier end it just it makes it a lot easier so it's a good trick to have in the bag then of course once you get one set glued up you can set it aside and glue up the other you'll notice that we're not hooking in our top piece yet i like to glue in my stretchers first then once they dry i'll hook in my half laps but while i'm waiting for them to dry i decided to add a little bit of a rounded profile to my upper support pieces so just using a little round tracy red thing that i got on amazon i make a nice line with the pencil and then just using my eyeball my favorite measuring device i just get that round profile on the belt sander and about that time our legs are dry and as you can see those clamping calls just pop right off because of that blue tape and it clamped very nicely and with those all dried up it is time to glue our top support in place via those half flaps you want a nice amount of glue both on the lower lap part as well as that little shoulder and then i just plop my top brace in place and just hook it on with a few clamps it says simple as that then you're going to want to grab a beer take a few long pulls off of it because now it is time to sand gosh i hate sanding but the beard does make it better so i highly recommend drinking beer while sanding maybe not drinking beer while operating the table saw or the band saw but i make an exception for sanding you can drink while you sand and there's really no limit to how much you want to drink your sanding might go downhill but just go for it so after a little while of drinking and sanding and sanding and drinking your two base pieces should be completely put together and look something like this as you can see we've got our nice tight half laps at the top and our perfectly positioned stretcher at the bottom next we're going to take our two base pieces and set them on our tabletop to determine exactly where we want them to land and then they're going to be held together using this two and a quarter inch piece of round stock now if you're like where the heck did that thing come from i didn't see him make that i actually have a whole nother youtube video showing how i made this round stock i'll leave a link at the end of this video and you can check it out there but we're going to take that piece of round stock and i'm going to cut off this nice little ring treasure and we're going to use it as a little template to determine where we want our round stock to sit on our stretcher i want it to sit down into the stretcher a little bit so after finding the center of that stretcher i use that little ring to mark out exactly where i want it to go now yes i probably should have done this before i hooked the stretcher in place it might have been easier but i forgot get off my back but it worked okay all put together i just took it over to the spindle sander and using a two inch spindle i was able to pretty much perfectly match that two and a quarter traced out line and as you can see our round stretcher now fits perfectly into that cross stretcher just like that isn't that fancy although the round stretcher looks really cool i didn't think it was enough support for my base pieces i didn't want the table to rack back and forth so i decided to add some upper supports as well these are going to kind of be hidden under the table and you won't really see them but like i said it will secure our base pieces together and keep the entire table from racking to make these i just used two pieces of eight quarter white oak and then before we hook everything together i wanted to soften the edges of all my pieces so i took a three quarter inch round over bit with my trim router and i just went round over crazy it was madness i tell you i just rounded over every possible edge on both of my base pieces and gave them a nice soft rounded look and i also took my stretcher off and well i rounded over the end of that thing too like i said i went a bit crazy now it's hard to do the round over in this angle without getting it all burned up so after you know getting my profile mostly done with the round over bit i took a sanding block and just sanded the patootie out of it until it looked nice and clean just like this haha you thought i was done with the round over bit nope um i also rounded over the bottom of the stretchers that are going to be up underneath the table you're not really going to see them but i just thought if somebody looks up underneath that table and they're all like hey why don't you round these over well that wouldn't be good so i rounded those over to match as well and with that all of my pieces are shaped and sanded and looking mighty nice the last thing i wanted to do before i started hooking them all together was i drilled some countersunk holes on the bottom of those upper support pieces these are going to work to put some screws through to hold the base into my table top now you might be saying well what about wood movement well those brace pieces are running in the same direction as my top pieces so wood movement should not be an issue there i then took my base over to the floor i forgot about this for some reason i thought i wanted to use it to work out should have edited this part out anyways with my base on the floor i flip it over to the correct orientation and using some long clamps i just clamped my top support pieces in the correct position and i marked them out to secure them into my base pieces with some 10 millimeter dominoes again if you want to forgo the domino joiner completely on this project you could hook them in place with some countersunk screws and then just plug your holes with some dowels and then flush trim them off it would look just as nice and they're tucked up far enough underneath the tabletop that you're not gonna see those plugged holes at all but i have the domino joiner so why not let's get crazy but before i clamp everything together i like to tape a few pieces of scrap wood where my clamps are going to land this just ensures that my clamps don't mar up my base and by taping the scrap pieces on i don't have to worry about fumbling around with them once it comes time to get my clamps on now i'm one man trying to do this by myself so i had to get a little creative with the glue up process so i enlisted the help of these little outfeed roller thingies to hold my braces up while i got everything glued and clamped in place and i have to say it worked pretty darn good as you can see i was able to get everything together and clamped and as you can see those taped little scraps work perfectly right where my clamps land now this was not filmed during an earthquake i accidentally set the camera in front of a fan so that's why it's all jumbled but you can see after i took the clamps off my base was still nice and clean because of those taped scrap pieces now that our top braces are secured and the glue has dried we can hook on our lower round stretcher so to do this i just flip the entire base over and i drill a counter sunk hole on the bottom of each one of those stretchers perfectly in the middle then i made this little clamping call to hold the stretcher in place and allows me to clamp on either side of it so that i can still get to that counter sunk hole you just gotta make things sometimes to make it work and as you can see this worked very nice so once i get it clamped in place and measured to the correct dimensions spacing whatever you want to call it i pre-drilled a hole through my stretcher and into that lower round stretcher thingamabob and then i just held it in place with a single cabinet screw and with that our base is completely assembled and looking pretty fly if i might say so in fact i just had to see what the top was going to look like so i enlisted the help of my beautiful wife to set the top on and get the first look at the table in all its glory but it's not quite finished yet because well we have to finish it so before applying the finish i went over the entire thing by hand and sanded sanded sanded until i was pretty positive it was all good to go and ready for finish then i just blew all of the dust off and started wiping on some rubio monocoat i like using rubio monocoat on white oak specifically the cotton white you've probably seen that in previous videos because in my opinion it's just well the easiest and the best and gives it the most natural nice look and no they're not paying me i just really love this stuff so after getting the base done i do the top and just like that the table is complete [Music] so there you have it a mid-century inspired white oak dining room table with an angled base without the use of any math i hope you enjoyed that video don't forget to subscribe down below

Channel: Bourbon Moth Woodworking

Views: 346,130

Rating: 4.9567351 out of 5

Keywords: Modern Dining Table Build, Easy Mid-Century table, mid century, mid century modern, modern builds, modern furniture, homemade modern, dining room table, how to make furniture, how to build a table, mid century modern furniture, do it yourself, how to, dining table build, dining table diy, dining table design, mid century modern home, mid century home, mid century modern interior design, mid century modern decor, how to make a table, Modern Table, making a modern table, diy

Id: tOU99O8nFkM

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020