Dining Table Shows Off Its Joinery
Exposed joinery, echoed shapes, and elegant curves are on display on this cherry table.
Synopsis: The stretchers on Tim Coleman’s dining table are low to the floor, so he decided to make their structure a focal point of the piece. Pretty much all the visible areas on the table are curved, which adds a bit of complication to the straightforward dowel and mortise-and-tenon joinery. The key was to preserve flat reference faces on all the parts before cutting the joints. The stretcher assembly adds an attractive detail with its four identical, curved pieces that each come to a point and are nested together at the center.
Well-executed joinery is at the heart of every piece of furniture I make, but it’s often hidden. However, when designing this cherry table, with its stretchers so low to the floor—and therefore quite visible—I made the stretchers’ central joinery a focal point by exposing it.
The overall lines of the table came first: the…
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Comments
looks like a piece out of the barnsley playbook. beautiful.
I immediately fell in love with the stretcher detail when I received my copy of the magazine last week. It is a perfect cover shot and is by far one of the most elegant details I've ever seen. Simply gorgeous.
I really love this design as well. Has anyone created and templates for the stretchers that they might be willing to share?
To "user-6987257", those patterns should be pretty easy to layout full size on plywood or MDF. Or you could draw them in something like SketchUp and print them out full sized like I did here: https://flic.kr/p/25dXTcr
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