Coffee table - Limbert style
Introduction
The year end was near, and it was decreed that a coffee table shall be brought forth... What kind of table enquired the humble carpenter? It should be easy enough to nail one of those together, if we could agree on a design!
Eventually after looking at lots, it was decided that one featured in the Dec 2010 cover of Fine Woodworking magazine should fit the bill nicely... This is the story of its creation.
Design
Nice thing about this one is that its already been done for you. They will even sell you a complete set of plans either printed, or as a digital download. If you can find a copy of the magazine article about, then there is also just about enough information in that to do the build.
Materials
This project really cried out for some real Oak. Some enquiries of local merchants eventually found a decent source from EO Burton in Brentwood. There was even a choice of American White Oak and European Oak. Since the American version was significantly cheaper (£95 vs £160), and we don't really need the extra durability of English Oak, this is what I went for.
Partly to keep costs down, and partly to see how successfully I could build from sawn kiln dried timber without buying it already machined, I thought it would be fin to buy rough lumber and machine it myself prior to use.
Preparation - Legs
The legs were made from a single 2.1m board of around 6x2" cross section. This was a nice straight board, but it did exhibit some cupping as you can see from the photo below:
To prep these, I ran the cupped side over the surface planer / jointer first, to get a flat reference face, and then used this against the fence of the planer to get a perpendicular edge. With this edge against the table saw fence it was then sawn to slightly over its final 4" width. Then using the planer to finish the other edge and bring it to final width. The second bowed face was then removed by the planer thicknesser when the bard was brought down to its final thickness of around 1 and 1/8th inch.
Preparation - Main table top
The table top was specced at 3/4" thickness, The boards I had for this were at least 8" wide, and typically around 1" thickness. Alas my jointer planer is only 6" wide, which meant either ripping each board in half to allow them to be accurately machined on the surface planer first, (and then going with a more complicated glue up), or taking a chance on "skip" planing. In the end I opted for the latter having selected a couple of nice untwisted boards to make the table top from. These were surfaced on both sides using the planer thicknesser. This only really works on boards that are not twisted, since the thicknesser does not have the capability to remove twist easily - basically it just makes sure one face is flat relative to another! These were then edge planed on the surface planer, and glued up into a wide table top:
Some solid softwood cauls were used to make sure the top surface was kept as near as possible flat. The contact surface of the cauls was covered with PVC packing tape to make sure they did not get glued to the table! Since there was a slight variation in panel twist, the glue up was don in three three goes - width middle two boards first, and then the outer two added on after.
Preparation - thinner boards
The majority of the rest of the timber required was only 5/8th of an inch thick. To plane this all down from 1" stock seemed rather wasteful given that the primary stages of machining had already generated 2 dustbin loads worth or planer shavings! So with these boards it was decided to stick with a maximum width of