Every morning I spend the first couple of minutes of the day trying to figure out where I left my glasses. While a bedside table doesn’t ensure I will be able to expedite that process – the hope is that they find their way there as I stumble into bed each night. This piece is loosely based on Tom Fidgen’s gentleman valet. Rather than building a coat rack and pants holder – I elected to trust the system I have and continue to leave my clothes strewn across the floor. I used a plow plane to cut the banding in the drawer – I wish I had followed Tom’s lead and made a scratch stock; I think I would have gotten less tear out and a much crisper line. Also, I don’t know where people live but my house is not big enough that I can have random tables sitting in the middle of the room – I drastically switched up the legs so the table could be pushed up against the wall. This was one of those projects that lingered in the shop much longer than invited, mostly because of my indecision about how to handle the legs. Eventually Rev suggested I look to campaign furniture for a solution.
The grain on the top really stands out!
The challenge with the legs was figuring out the trigonometry – rather than resorting to guessing my father whipped out the graph paper and did some surprisingly complicated calculations. Turns out someone got more out of highschool math
In order to ensure my miter edges were true across the width of the border – I made a shooting border. Everything just works better when you have a sharp plane and a true jig. I was able to cut some pretty bizarre end grain shavings.
The back is just the cheapest most unusable piece of plywood I had lying around – I cut a rabbet with a moving fillister and than tapped it into place. The backs main function is to hold everything square when I glued up the miters.
Miters are weak – and I am rough on stuff – so splines added extra strength to the joints. Once the miters are cut – the splines are easy, First – I carefully sawed either side of a 3/16ths mark. The challenge here is seeing a pencil line in dark walnut. The original called for molding around the edges – that felt like a lot of work after spending all of this time cutting true mitered edges.
Next, I cleared out the waste with a chisel and taped the spline in place. After the glue has a minute, I came back through with a flush saw and cut things flat.
The piece is sort of a cacophony of smooth and sharp lines. The inside of the handle was cleared out with a round and the outside with a rasp.
The drawer is made of poplar – its always such a dream to cut dovetails in poplar.
Ruffles looked on to make sure that the table placement doesn’t interfere with his sleeping nook. He likes to stretch out! Also, a photo from his perspective!
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