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A few weeks before our class begun (for past entries about my class read part 1, 2, 3, 4) I emailed my prospective students and suggest to them to look out for free furniture on the side of the road or near the trash bags on garbage eve (the night when trash is put outside.) I said that some nifty nice stuff can be “harvested” from abandoned or broken furniture, elements which can be incorporated into new projects. Items such as legs, handles, drawers and doors can be salvaged and then reconfigured to provide parts (in our case) for a new live edge furniture. Lisa followed my advice and found four free legs which she brought to our class.
First, she had to re-turn the legs to fit her new design, including making a round tenon at their top. Then she cut four circles from a piece of cherry that she found in the shop’s scrap bin.
We planned to screw the round plates to the underside of the table and anchor the leg into them. After drilling four mounting screw holes in the plates, we proceeded to drill the central mortise in each of the plate. We made a makeshift angled ramp to ensure that our mortise holes’ angle will be consistent on each of the plates. Lisa screw each plate to the ramp and drilled the mortise hole.
Since two of her round leg tenons ended up a tad skinny, we decided to wage them into the mortises, an act that expanded their diameter.
After gluing all the tenons into the round plates we staged a few installation configurations until we found the one that appealed to us the most. We used double sided tape to temporarily affix the leg base to the underside of the table, then step aside, look at the composition and decide if we like it. If we weren’t sure, we disconnected the temporary bond and moved the leg to a new location. Once we were happy with the composition, we screwed the round plates to the top.
A few weeks after we finished our class, Lisa emailed me some pictures of the finished table. Lisa’s cherry wood table brought raw nature into her home and will warm up her living room throughout the winter months that are ahead of us.
– Yoav Liberman
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There is something about that table – it’s so charming!