Dining Room Suite

[Joe Leigh]

A few years back my wife asked me to make her a dining room set. I wasn't sure if I had the skills to take on such a large job as my shop is small and I'm not blessed with a lot of professional grade powertools. Luckily for me her favorite style is Shaker so the pieces would not be ornate but would require many hand cut dovetails and mortise and tenons. I did quite a bit of reading and research on the Shaker style and noted that they used quite a bit of figured wood, including curly maple and birds eye maple. Two of my favorites.
Now I don't claim that these pieces are "reproductions" or even "representations", or even that they are proportionatly perfect, they are just pieces that appeal to me.
The first piece I made was a server, or sideboard. The curly figure is fairly light. The piece is made almost entirely out of solid maple including the interior carcass pieces, kickers, runners, doublers, etc. There is no veneer. The drawer sides and backs are made from 1/2" mahogany (not historically correct) with half blind DT's at the front and sliding dovetails at the back. The drawer bottoms are made of 5/8" poplar with raised panels.
I used a water soluable dye to help accent the figure. After some light sanding to remove most of the dye, the piece was finished with BLO and several coats of blonde shellac.

Comments and criticisms are always welcome...

[Adan Madrid]

Joe,

Nice job! who cares if it's historically correct. It appeals to me too! Your wife must be very happy.

[John Keeton]

Nice wood, excellent design and great dovetails!! Well done. BTW, the "period" furniture wasn't historically correct when it was done either.

[Jacob Mac]

I think it is great, and you are being unduly harsh on yourself. The DTs are beatiful. Nice work.

[John Thompson]

I'm not personally into reproducing by the numbers, Joe. It leaves no room for personal creativity IMO. What I see is a very clean design.. well executed from what I do see.. functional and quite attractive to look at. If your wife is thinking on the same lines you can consider your labor a major success.

Well done...

[Brad Wood]

very nice work, great wood.... looks great.

[Joe Leigh]

The second piece I made was the table. It's a trestle table modeled after one that Norm made, but with some modifications.
It starts with a 4 hour trip to the Lancaster Pa area to pick out some highly figured 8/4 Curly maple for the top. I wanted the top to be special so I did some research and found a few places that specialized in figured woods. I settled on a place called Sandy Pond Hardwoods. The folks there were great. They opened up for a few hours on a Saturday for me and helped me hand pick through dozens of boards
I pulled each piece out into the sunlight to try and get the most figure and the best match. These guys had some beautiful pieces there as they sold Tiger Maple to companies like Gibson and Les Paul.

First off I had never attempted something on this scale so I was concerned about handling and machining the large pieces that make up the top. I have a modest table saw and a small 4" jointer so it was very time consuming getting the edges perfect for gluing up the top. Also once the top was glued up I spent a lot of hours hand planning and scraping the top. I was afraid to run the pieces through the planer because they were so highly figured i was afraid of tearout.

I used Norms design on the base complete with his Tusk Tenon and locking wedge design. It's amazing how strong this joint is. It makes the entire base rock solid. All the base pieces are made from clear maple so as not to distract from the focal point which is the top. One of the changes I made in the table dimensions was the length. I wanted to add removable leaves to lengthen the table to seat ten. This required some modifications to the ends of the table. I designed a clear maple banding to edge the top and frame the figured wood. I also added a clear sliding end section that completed the edge banding when closed, and also opened to accept the leaves.

Here are some pics of the table..

[David Gendron]

Nice, realy nice!

[Michael Sobik]

Very clean. Very nice work.

[Joe Leigh]

The last piece of the set I made was the hutch. I patterned the lower section after the sideboard but with heavier shorter legs. The carcass construction on both pieces followed the construction methods of Will Neptune in FWW issue #130, May/June 1998.
There are a few things that my wife asked that I try to include in the design. First was a dedicated drawer to store the table leaves. That's the lower drawer in the pictures. The second design element was two upper drawers that double as removable trays. The trays were fairly narrow so I chose a single dovetail joint for the fronts. The tray bottoms were solid 3/8" Birdseye Maple. The top of the base is also solid 5/4 Birdseye with a clear maple frame on three sides that copies the dining table top. There are several birdseye accent pieces incorporated in the face. The door fronts are birdseye maple with raised panles on the inside. Most Shaker designs I studied use this method.
The upper section is a simple design made from curly maple with two olarge glass doors. The upper 3 piece crown moulding was made to match the crown moulding in the room.
Thanks for looking..