Round Cherry Breakfast Table

This table is an interim solution for the "where to eat" problem until the dining table is completed and I have a real choice. Up until now I have been forced to either eat while sitting on the recliner or at a white plastic patio table. Unfortunately this table has also been serving as my temporary computer workstation and desk so that solution wasn't attractive.

One other function this project served was to completely finish up my stock of cherry lumber. I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to stock for the top and this lead me to use some moderately mismatched wood. With time and exposure to light (and a bit of luck) the wood in the top should approach the same color. In any case, the three spans that make up the top are balanced and symmetrical so the final effect shouldn't be too jarring. There were also a couple of loose knots in my stock which were filled with black-dyed epoxy resin in the manner often associated with mesquite furniture.

This is my first project that uses curved elements. The four sections that make up the apron are built up of thin slices of cherry just a bit over one sixteenth of an inch in thickness which were sawn from lower-quality cherry which had been filling the scrap barrel. The laminations were glued up in a sandwich between shop-made MDF forms which resulted in extremely rigid quarter-circles of about ¾-inch thickness. The visible layer of the sandwich was sawn from the best cherry. Since the process of cutting tenons on this curved stock was new to me I decided to be cautious and mortised in a bridle-jointed frame between opposite legs to stiffen the assembly. The tenons proved to be as troublesome as I had imagined and the apron-leg joints are not the prettiest imagineable but I did gain some insight on how they could be improved next time. Overall size in inches: 40 X 29½

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