Coffee Tables

Most coffee tables are ill-equipped to handle the stresses of modern-day life. Company is coming, and your living room is strewn with books, woodworking catalogs and your spouse’s catalogs. Most coffee tables offer you only a puny shelf to help you tidy up in a hurry. This coffee table does double-duty by giving you a shelf for books and two drawers that are big enough to handle all but the biggest magazines and catalogs. And oh yes, you can serve coffee on it, too.

Construction is simple but sturdy. You build the bottom case that holds the drawers out of plywood and biscuits. Then you screw the solid maple legs onto the case and cover all the plywood edges with moulding and veneer tape. Finally, you screw the top to the legs using figure-eight fasteners and build some quick drawers. And this project won’t cost you a heck of a lot, either. You need about one-third of a sheet of maple plywood (birch will do just fine, too), about four board feet of 8/4 maple and about 10 board feet of 5/4 maple. You’ll also need a little Baltic birch ply and a small amount of 1/4" ply for the drawer bottoms.

Start at the Top
When you’re at the lumberyard, be sure to pick through the racks of soft maple for this project. Soft maple (Acer rubrum) is a little cheaper than hard maple (Acer saccharum) and is more likely to have some curl or other figure. After you plane your maple down to 1" thickness, get ready to glue up your top. I like to cut a few biscuit slots in the mating edges of the top pieces. This doesn’t add to the strength of this long-grain joint, but it sure helps keep your boards in line when gluing up your panels. Clamp up your top and set it aside for the glue to dry.

Simple and Sweet Lower Case

The case that holds the drawers goes together really fast. Cut out the parts you need according to the Schedule of Materials. Then cut the biscuit slots to attach the sides, back and divider between the top and bottom pieces. Take some care when locating the center divider to save yourself a headache when making the drawers. See the step photo on the right for the trick to cutting biscuit slots in the middle of a panel.

Now put glue and biscuits in all the biscuit slots and clamp up the lower case. When the glue is dry, sand the case to 150 grit and turn your attention to the legs. To make attaching the legs to the case easier, go ahead and cut some clearance holes in the case’s sides where the case will be joined to the back legs. This is easier to do from the outside before the legs go on.

Eight Screws and You’ve Got a Table

Here’s how to attach the legs: Mark on the leg where the case should meet the leg. Clamp the leg into place on the lower case and then drill pilot holes and clearance holes for #8 screws (I used a bit that drills both holes simultaneously). The holes s...

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