Cherry table with a drawer

This is a cherry side table I’ve been working on to replace an ugly table made from veneered particle board that I’ve had since college.

I mostly worked by hand – mortise and tenons all chopped/cut by hand, edge jointing done with a jointer plane. I did use my bandsaw pretty heavily for ripping, resawing, and tapering the legs. Got a lunchbox planer recently too, so that’s been great compared to milling boards by hand like I had been doing! I still touch every surface with a smoothing plane to remove the planer marks.

I did a few things with the table that were new techniques to me, so I had a lot of fun and learned a bunch.

First: cherry is brittle stuff! I split one leg while cutting a dovetail for rail above the drawer (it is attached to the legs with a lapped dovetail).

I also got to use the dowel plate I received from rom my wife as a Christmas gift this year. The trick, I found, was to split pegs from straight grained pieces, then whittle them pretty close to the final dimensions. I could go between the holes that are only 1/16” difference (i.e. 3/8 to 5/16) without additional whittling, but 1/8” (i.e. from the 1/2” hole to the 3/8”) was too much to take off without whittling first.

I only pegged these tenons – I considered drawboring slightly, but again, this cherry (all cherry?) is super brittle, and I only did 1/4” tenons for everything but the tail below the drawer (did 3/8” there).

This was my first experience with drawers as well. I cut the half blind dovetails by hand, and just like my through dovetails, they hold together fine, but there are some pretty big gaps! I decided not to fill them at all. The table is just for my wife and I to use, and I like to think that some day I’ll get better at cutting dovetails, and that I’ll enjoy having something to compare my future work to. Lol.

The only flaw that really still bothers me is that somehow the frame isn’t quite square! Actually had to make the drawer just slightly out of square in order for it to fit! But you can’t really tell by looking at it, except if you look closely at the drawer when it’s open.

The drawer bottom is solid cherry resawn from 4/4 on my bandsaw, and is attached in a pretty clever way, I think. The plans I used recommended it, actually. The bottom can be removed, and is just held in place with a screw in a slot in the back. I added a stop so that my wife doesn’t have to worry about accidentally dropping the drawer on the ground too.

On top of all that new stuff, I also turned the knob myself on a mini lathe received as another Christmas gift!

Finished with shellac, followed by a beeswax polish that I made based on a recipe from the “Darbin orvar” channel on YouTube.