So, the Silver Fox (fka the War Department) reached something of a milestone birthday this year. But what with the stupid pandemic going on, it was difficult for me to buy something suitably impressive to mark the occasion. After some discussion, we decided that the best thing for her to do was to buy her own present, provided it was something truly special.
And after a trip to a local artist and metalworker, she found exactly what she wanted.
Originally, my contribution to this gift was to be a shelf above the TV in the living room where this glorious piece of art would live. There was only one problem: we hadn't really counted on the sheer size or heft of the thing. (It's a hair under four feet from nose to "reins" and weighs close to 50 pounts.) A shelf capable of holding it would jut WAY out into the room, and would need some pretty substantial supports to bear the load.
After considering a few options and thinking it over, we decided that the best place for it would be right in front of the railing that separates the living room from the dining room and that, instead of a shelf, I could build a table for it.
Given that this was a special piece, I figured that my usual approach of rummaging around in the wood shed for enough scraps that I might be able to cobble into something resembling a table wouldn't work here. So I hied myself off down to the hardwood supplier and picked up a gigantic chunk of sapele:
I promise I didn't spend more than an hour or two admiring it before chopping it into slightly more manageable chunks and then into various parts and components.
(Yes, I made five legs. One for practice, and four for realzies.)
The first things I wanted to focus on were the legs and aprons. I wanted to try sliding dovetails for the joinery, so it made sense to make these pieces at the same time. And after a lot of very careful and finicky setup and lots and lots of practice at the router table:
I had perfectly snug-fitting sliding dovetails:
I'd just like to take a moment to say HOLY CRAP, sapele is the nicest wood to work with! It's dense and every so slightly soft - almost like milling up a giant bar of chocolate. It even smells nice.
The next thing I needed to do was taper the legs, and for this, I needed to build a jig. (Bet you didn't see that coming, eh?) I watched a few YouTube videos to get the idea of what I wanted to build, and then spent a gloriously happy couple of evenings and part of a weekend making what is now one of favorite jigs of all, a tapering jig for the tablesaw:
And yes, I named her Carly because I listened to a LOT of Carly Rae Jepsen while making it. It seemed only fitting. And the best part is that she works like a hot damn:
The next parts I had to make were the stretchers for the bottoms of the legs. I made a couple of minor mistakes here, but nothing outrageous. Really, the only problem was that I probably overthought it a little bit, and could have done the same thing in a much more simple fashion. But wevs! They turned out pretty good.
First I cut the stretchers to length and formed the tenons (using my micro-adjust screw advance tenoning jig - Judy - on the table saw.)
Then I drilled out the bulk of the waste for each mortise at the drill press and chiseled them square by hand.
Then it was just a matter of milling a few of the nicest pieces and gluing them into a nice panel for the top, and all the parts were done:
Time for sanding! But not before carefully putting my mark on the inside of the front apron:
Then came what SHOULD have been a relatively stress-free glue up (more on that later), two coats of Danish oil, and three coats of wipe-on polyurethane.
I added some leveling feet in case the floor in that corner of the living room wasn't level, set it up, and carefully placed Amy's 50th birthday present on top.
Voila. The Horse Table.
Final thoughts...
Man, that could have gone better. The entirely milling and fabrication process was fantastic. All of the parts seemed to come out perfectly. The joints were snug without binding, the bookmatch on the table top was just was I was trying for, and even the stretchers worked out pretty well in the end.
The problem was the sanding and the glue up. See, I though sapele was a little.. tougher, being a hardwood and all. I carefully sanded up through the grits from 150 to 180 to 220, trying hard not to overdo it and still remove all the machine marks (of which there were in truth very very few). But it seems that, despite my caution, I still over-sanded. The sliding dovetails still slide, but now there are big gaps between the shoulders of the dovetails on the aprons and the sides of the legs. And because the stretchers were measured and made based on the original snug fit, they wound being ever so slightly too long, and pushed the bottoms of the legs out a hair's width too far, making the gaps on the aprons smaller at the top.
All of which meant that when I went to glue it all together, I wound up over-clamping it, and making the entire thing askew. It's solid enough (thanks in no small part to the leveling feet) and it's entirely likely that no one would ever notice the tiny gaps or the twist in the frame, but I know it's there, and it really does bug me.
But Amy loves it, and the horse looks great on it, so that's the main thing. All I can do is just keep learning, I suppose.
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