The Magic Flute Coffee Table build

[David B. Morris]

I call it the Magic Flute Coffee Table, because I designed it during some downtime in the dressing room when I was in that opera last year. (Yep: a singing woodworker). I was inspired to build it by the chess set my parents passed along now that they are starting to get rid of things in their old age. My mom bought it for my dad in Heidelberg in the early 1950s while they were courting. They were married in the castle and then brought it to the States with them, and it's the set my dad taught me the game on. The right-hand drawer holds the chess set.
Here's a view of how the legs and carcass go together:

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[David B. Morris]

This was my first time making mortise and tenon joints (and there were a lot of them) and also the first time building anything with legs and aprons. Overall I'm pleased with the result, as is my little girl. This is a highly visible piece we use every day in our living room, where we formerly had to contend with a piece of Ikea.
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Edited to add the chess set now in its new home:

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Build pics to follow...

[David B. Morris]

This might have to be thrown into the Neander Valley, for I used handtools for everything except rough dimensioning of stock. The engineering of this coffee table with two drawers was based on Will Neptune's article in FWW #130, June 1, 1998. The design is based on the chess-set requirement and the existing furniture in our house. It's probably over-engineered, but this table must contend with daily around-the-couch-TV-watching and gangly adolescents with unpredictable movements of their extremities.
The first step after fine-tuning the non tapered portion of the legs was to mortise them. Derek Cohen's thread on his site was my guide. I didn't fiddle with boring holes and the like (and who wants to fiddle with those?), but just used Ray Iles' pig slaughterers to do the job. My problem was staying perpendicular to the face, but after a couple of practice runs and using a visual guide for square (as Derek recommends) I was off and making bacon.
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You'll see these are haunched mortises (again, those gangly adolescents), and a horn is still at the top of the leg to avoid blowout/splitting. Derek's treatise on M&T I think is as close to definitive as one can get.

[David B. Morris]

Next come the tenons in the aprons. No pictures of the ripping here, which I did with an LN 16" tapered (after some hesitation I ended up really appreciating the length and weight of this saw for this application). But below you'll see the crosscuts (courtesy Ron Bontz and his sweet saw), router-planing to the gauge line, truing with shoulder plane, etc. Again, Derek's site was the guide here. (I recently took a class with Jeff Miller, who said, "there are probably only 4 or 5 people in the country who can cut tenons off the saw." He meant perfectly fitting ones, of course. I tend to agree.)
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[David B. Morris]

In addition to the mortises for the right and left aprons, the front legs require twin mortises for the tusk tenons in the lower drawer blade plus a dovetail socket on top to receive the upper drawer blade. This was all completely new territory for me. Because of the reveals and offsets of these parts in the final design, I had to set up my cutting gauge separately for the mortises and their corresponding tenons. A double blade gauge like the Kinshiro (which I also learned about from, yes, that guy in Perth) was a big help in this, but in future I will probably make a spacer to attach to the fence of the gauge that corresponds to my desired offset. How do others handle this problem, so common in leg-and-apron construction?
My main task was to focus like a laser on my shoulder-to-shoulder dimensions to ensure squareness across the carcass, but the differing depths of some of the tenons and all the offsets made that tricky. Here is the lower drawer blade with its tusk tenons and the tenon that goes into the apron spacer.
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And here's work on the leg dovetail socket:

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[David B. Morris]

After the tricky joints in the front legs came the comparatively simple task of tapering all the legs on two faces and rounding them over on their outside corners. For tapering I immediately thought of a table saw jig like I had used in junior high shop class. Actually, our teacher used it for us because it was so dangerous. I thought of buying a safer version: too expensive. I thought of making one of my own: too time-consuming (plus the safety factor). So I marked out the taper, cut it rough on the band saw, brought near to the line with the joiner, and finished with the venerable LN low-angle jack. It was tricky keeping the line between the the taper and the square portion of the leg crisp, but I was happy. I love handplaning for the precision it allows you to command. These all turned out dead accurate and square.

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Rounding over the corners was easy with my old Stanley skew rabbet followed by a mill file and sandpaper.
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Despite my initial fear over tapering the legs, this work was pleasurable and relaxing after the fussy joinery.

[Joe A Faulkner]

Beautiful job on the table. I love the tapered edge on the top. Very well done.

[Brian Holcombe]

Nice work David!

[David B. Morris]

Brian and Joe, thank you for your kind comments!

The center partition is housed in a dado with a dovetail out front, kind of an abbreviated sliding dovetail. It turned out OK, but I let myself get a bit sloppy.

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[David B. Morris]

After all the joinery on the show parts was completed, I turned to the many M&T and other joints that make up the heavily engineered guts of the carcass. These were in maple and less aesthetically exacting, but they had to be dead accurate if I was to end up with square drawer openings.
The drawer runners and kickers were tenoned into the front drawer blades...

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...then lapped into the ledger in the rear of the carcass:

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Overall I was pleased with my accuracy, but I still needed to get in there with a shoulder plane to square up the openings before I even thought of building the drawers.

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[David B. Morris]

Drawers: I am not an expert at them, but even for those who are, making an imperfect dovetailed box fit snugly into another imperfect box contains innumerable chances to get things wrong. Here is where handwork comes into its own. Once I got a good grip on the basic joinery, the fine tuning afforded by a sharp handplane to adjust the imperfect box to its imperfect mate was a revelation.
For learners like me I'd like to point out a few sources that helped me design and make relatively snug and crisp drawers. My drawer bible is Alan Peters' article, "Fitting a Drawer" in Woodworking Techniques (Taunton, 2000), which probably is a reprint of an FWW article somewhere. The design Peters used in this article to illustrate his techniques was the basis for the first piece I made, a jewelry box for my daughter, when I got back into this craft a few years ago. Following his guidance taught me things I never thought of being able to do. Peters also wrote the chapter on making and fitting drawers in the latest edition of another bible, Ernest Joyce's Encyclopedia of Furniture Making (Sterling, 2000).
For designing and engineering a drawer, Rob Porcaro's series on "high-end drawers" on his website was invaluable, especially on the point of fully dovetailed drawers.
Despite all this theory, I still need a lot of practice, but I'm happy with how they turned out. Above all they fit beautifully and make you want to open and close them just for the sake of doing so. And who wouldn't want that done to their drawers?

I got some nice QS white oak and with the cherry it's a classic look. I have to work on my tail baselines, though. Do you let a sliver of daylight through when marking the pins, or close that gap? The rear joints are a bit funky, but I actually like the look. Whatever that means.
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In any case, I'm proud of my fit, and the case is slightly proud of its drawer, which is fitting.

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Some pigskin to line the bottoms...

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...and pulls made from ebony and cherry:

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[Christopher Charles]

Great work for an inspiring story. Woodworking and singing is an impressive combination. I too am a singing woodworker, but the only place i'm allowed to sing is in the woodshop

Any plans for a board to go with it?

Cheers,
C

[David B. Morris]

Thank you Christopher! I never sing in the shop, but the lowly shower is always good, especially while getting walnut dust out of your bronchi. My family marvels at the noises I make.
I wanted to make a board and inset it on one side of the tabletop, and then be able to flip the table top to the chess side and secure it with cleats and threaded inserts, blah, blah, blah--a silly and unforgiving design.
My mother bought a board along with the set in the 1950s. It's a pretty standard walnut and maple veneer affair, probably made in Spain, as many good veneered boards still are. But it is now irretrievably dished--not just cupped but dished, sagging in the center. It was built into a table in which it was suspended only along its perimeter, then various people of course were pounding on it for 50 years trying to checkmate one another. It's really a lesson in how wood moves and sometimes will never come back.

[Brian Holcombe]

Awesome work! Thank you for following with the detail photos of work in progress.

[David B. Morris]

Thank you Brian--high praise considering the beauty of your own work that I've seen here.