Cherry Coffee Table

This is my first instructable and I will try to explain step by step how I made coffee table from cherry wood. These are the dimensions: 1x0,6m (3,3 x 2 ft). To achieve that you will need:

Tools :

• Circular saw
• Table saw
• Drill/Driver
• Orbital Sander
• Router
• Woolcraft Jig and Dovels
• Measuring devices and square.
• Brushes
• Spray Gun
• Hand plane
• Planer
• Thicknesser

Other stuff:

• Drill bits
• Polyurethane base coat 0.5L
• Polyurethane finish coat 0.5L
• Dovels
• Router fillet bit (roundover)
• Glue

Costs (without machines):

• Cherry wood - 30$
• 12-Piece Router Bit Set - 30$
• Polyurethane base/finish - 25$
• Dovels - 3$
• Sand paper - 10$

I use the custom Makita 5704R mounted on MDF 1000x1100x25mm, maximum cutting height is 47mm (1.9inch), it is little thick because of that 25mm MDF. Table was made out of 100x100mm (4x4inch) pine for legs and support is 80x50mm (3x2inch). For routing I use Maktec MT362, also create table for that one and insert plate, table top for routing is also MDF 25mm. Planer/Thicknesser is Metabo 260HC the maximum width is 260mm and 250mm height in Thicknesser mode.

My first step was to buy cherry wood. After that I left the wood sit in the workshop for a few days to see if it's going to warp or twist, because you never know if the wood is dry enough. After that I cut everything roughly to size.

After the cutting roughly to size I had to trim the live edge off, and put the boards on the planer to see what board will be used for the inner and what for outer face. Maybe you don't have enough space for this long coffee table so this stuff need to be adapted.

In my case:

top: 100x60cm (3,3x2ft),
left and right side: 55cm hieght and 50cm width
bottom: 80x50cm

So my opinion is if you create something by yourself, you lose more time but create something strong and durable. So I drilled 4 holes on every board for dovels (8mm dovels) to prevent some warp in boards in long term. You will need some sort of a jig or doveling pins to transfer holes. I think the best way to do this with Wolcraft doveling jig, it's around 15-25$ and it's accurate even it is plastic with metal pins inside.

So I mark the boards and start drilling.

I will put the Youtube video of Wolcraft dovel master just to see how fast you can build stuff.

So it's time to glue everything together, you need 4 clamps at least for this table top, more the better. I use the Kleiberit 303 D3 glue and for my purpose of use I am pretty happy with it. I just want to point out that you will need also the smaller clamps so that you don't warp out the board, if you have some scrap piece laying around just clamp it, from the bottom side of the Cherry wood that I glueing it's MDF that is flat.

This is step where I enjoy a lot. We need to switch from electric tools to hand tools. I don't have enough width on my planer/thicnesser so I just set my hand plane thin as possible just to gently touch the wood, only to get the smooth finish and remove the glue that's left after the squeeze.

Now is time to cut everything to final size, someone has a miter gauge, crosscut sled or something, but I built myself sliding carriage since I have no money for real machine, so I built something similar. You can see in the video how it works. I have capacity of 80cm sliding carriage, with 4 open linear ball bearings, the aluminium plate is 23x80cm and 4cm thick.

Because I don't now if the wood is dry completely I put hardwood strips in table top, but only on shorter sides of table top. I also put in the side panels, but only on bottom side, because we need to drill dovel holes on upper side. You can see the process on images.

The biggest problem in this process is to transfer the measures from bottom part to the table top...if you don't measure carefully, you can get a table that is not square. So I assembly only the bottom part without table top and wrote down the total length of table. On the table top I found the middle spot to have equal space from each side. After that it was easy just to place one side of "sides" and transfer the holes to the table top.

And here you can see how it looks in the room :)

This is part of the tools that I needed to create a coffee table.