Oak End Table with Stained Glass Inlay
There are lots of different joinery techniques when it comes to woodworking. Some of them are very inelegant like broad-headed nails while others are the complete opposite and the joinery is one of the nicest features of the piece, like hand cut dovetails.
I am certainly no expert on joinery, although I have tried a number of techniques.
On this end table with the stained glass inlay I used two kinds of joinery. To assemble the table legs to the aprons I used the biscuit joiner my brother gave me (thanks Scott!). I also used the biscuit joiner to join the table top together. The biscuit joiner is an easy form of joinery, but creates strong joints, plus they are invisible which makes for nice clean pieces.
If you’ll notice in the pictures of the table, the aprons have a slight recess from the table legs. This element adds a bit of shadow and gives the piece some additional character versus just having the aprons flush with the legs. To achieve the recess is simply a matter of offsetting the biscuit joints on the legs and the aprons by the amount of the desired recess, in this case I believe I did 1/8 inch. That means the holes for the biscuits on the legs are 1/8 inch further from the edge of the wood on the legs than on the aprons.
Oak End Table with Stained Glass Inlay
The other type of joinery I used on this piece was to join the table top to the leg assembly. In wood working one thing you need to account for is wood movement in opposite directions. The stress movement creates can split joints apart. In this case it wasn’t much of a concern because the table top itself is small and also because the table top isn’t comprised of a single slab of wood. Still it’s better to be cautious than to have a piece not hold together, so I used glue blocks. I took small pieces of oak (less than 1 inch in length) and glued them to the underside of the table top and the inside of the aprons. I also pined them in place with brads so they’d stay in position until the glue dried. Again this is a fairly simple type of joinery but it’s invisible (unless you are looking at the table from underneath) and will allow for wood movement if that were to become an issue.
By the way, the glass top on this table (not the stained glass inlay, which I made) but the single piece glass top, was very expensive. It cost as much as all of the rest of the materials combined, I had to have it custom made. If anyone knows of a good source for glass with finished edges please let me know. Thanks!
