Sofa Table Complete

Over the course of the past year I built this cherry sofa table based on a design by Scott Gibson in Fine Woodworking’s “Furniture” book.

All frame joinery is mortise and tenon, while the drawers use doweled rabbit joints. The finish is boiled linseed oil topped with 3 coats of Minwax wiping varnish.

Building this table was quite a learning experience as just about every part required techniques that I hadn’t used before. Mortise and tenon joinery, biscuits to align the table top during glue-up, doweled joints fort the drawers, quartersawn veneers for the legs, breadboard-ends, and varnish; all of these were new to me and required a bit of trial and error to get right.

This project certainly had its share of “oops” moments, but nothing that couldn’t be repaired or worked-around. I cut the bottom shelf stretcher one inch too short, but was able to cut it in half and splice in a section with a small mortise and tenon in the middle. Later, I made the hipped-tenons on which the breadboard-ends of the top sit too thin. This was repaired with the addition of some 5-minute epoxy to thicken the tenon.

All that remains now is to choose and install drawer-pull hardware.