Cuban mahogany and koa entry table

The parameters for this piece are as follows: Cuban mahogany live edge slab, entry table height (~36"), mitered waterfall leg, and koa for the other leg. Other than that, I was given creative freedom, which is so exciting, and at the same time, a lot of responsibility. I tried to take detailed pictures of the entire process, and while it's a pretty simple table, the design took a lot of effort! I also haven't delivered the piece at the time of this writing, so we're going to have to wait for installed pictures.

Cuban mahogany grows in Hawaii, in addition to its namesake of Cuba (and a few other tropical regions). It is not very easily available, and outside of Hawaii, you would have a very tough time finding a slab like this. Even here, I'd say that finding a piece of Cuban mahogany would be more difficult than koa, and probably around the same price. Regardless, it's a very rare wood, and is prized by instrument makers and cabinet makers. I was fortunate to snap up this slab when I saw it. If it was more readily available, I would certainly use a lot more Cuban mahogany!

Cuban mahogany slab, cut to separate the top and the leg. This cut was made with a Dewalt track saw, which allows a perfectly straight cut.

The goal in this step is to cut both the top edge and the leg at 45*, which when combined will essentially "fold" the slab to create the leg. Ideally, the grain waterfalls down the leg from the top, which is why this style is typically called a waterfall leg.

The next tricky part is gluing the top to the leg. Clamping pieces tight at 90* isn't as simple as it might seem, when the surfaces being clamped want to slide around on each other. I'm trying to think of a non-woodworking analogy to explain this better, but no luck. Anyhow, the way I solved the slippage problem is to clamp the top and the leg to a 90* block, and just squeeze the two pieces together as I tighten the clamps.

This worked well! There was a little piece of tearout from the miter cut, but we'll fix that later. What we're looking at here is a nice, tight seam on the corner connecting the two pieces. I'd say success!

Wood glue is generally extremely strong. If you glue the sides of two boards together, that glue joint will be stronger than the wood itself. The sides of a board I'll call "long grain," because the wood's fibers are running the length of the board. Under stress, a long grain to long grain joint will be stronger than each individual board. However, if you glue the ends of two boards together, you're gluing what we call "end grain." This creates a fairly weak joint, which is why joinery is used.

In this case, we have a 45* joint, which is half end grain and half long grain. It would probably be strong enough to last forever under normal use, but I'd like to reinforce it anyhow just in case. Since the slab I'm using is pretty thin, there isn't much of an opportunity to reinforce it internally. I'll explain how internal reinforcement works in a post soon!

So, I'm using a super old technique called a "spline." A spline is just a thin piece of wood which is glued to both sides of the joint, providing extra long grain surface area. In this case, I chose wenge as an accent wood to contrast the reddish Cuban mahogany.

I cut a little slot, and glue the wenge spline in place. Two of these splines give this joint a huge amount of strength, and the wenge gives a nice contrast in both color and texture.

Okay, that was a bit of technical woodworking. Not super simple, but not crazy complicated either. This part was much harder for me. I needed to design a leg that works with the shape of this piece. The slab has very organic lines from the natural edge, and the waterfall miter gives the piece a more modern look. So, I want the leg to combine the two elements -- modern and organic. I also got it in my head that I want the leg to kind of look like a foot, making this piece more art-like than furniture-like. If that makes any sense. The obvious options were a straight board, a 4x4 style post, or a combination of the two. None of that seemed right. I started experimenting, and my first idea was to bend a koa board. I'm not going to go into how I did this, because this design ended up being scrapped. You can see the first iteration here... it looks big and chunky.

I was stuck. Couldn't figure out how to fix this design dilemma. Luckily, my shop is surrounded by other woodworkers and artists. I asked my friend Chris Reiner (I should do a whole post about him... he's so massively talented and an incredible human) what he thought I should do. His idea was to make a tapered leg, almost dripping down from the top onto the floor. Awesome. In order to make this design, I was going to have to use a lathe, which I barely know how to do. Perfect time for learning.

The first step to turning a piece on a lathe is to make a blank -- basically a rectangular piece which you can then take and remove material to turn it into a curved object. The next set of pictures will show gluing koa up into the leg blank.

Big chunks of koa like this pretty much don't exist, so I had to glue up a bunch of smaller boards. This piece will become the leg's foot.

Remember that bit about end grain gluing? The same thing applies when gluing the stalk of the leg to the foot. So, in between the two, I'm adding another piece of wood called a tenon. It creates a mechanical connector, and also a ton of glue surface area. Super strong joint!

I'm missing a picture of the completed leg blank, but it's not that exciting anyhow. Just looks like a big block foot with a 2x2 coming up out of it. At this step, the leg is on the lathe, and I'm starting to remove material.

This was a ton of work. Koa chips flying everywhere, holding the turning chisel tight and trying to figure out the shape of this leg all at the same time. As I mentioned, I have very little experience turning, and I really didn't want to ruin the koa leg that I had just spent so much time creating. Not to mention that this is probably $150 worth of koa...

This is pretty much the shape that I was going for. I like how delicate the stalk turned out, tapering gently up towards the top and then flaring out at the bottom for stability.

The sanding was actually one of the most brutal parts of this whole process. Apparently, talented turners barely have to do any sanding at all, but I'm not among their ranks. So, there was a lot of sanding involved.

I was so excited to get the leg underneath the table and see what they looked like together. I haven't seen anything quite like it before, and at first I wasn't sure if I even liked it. Over the first few hours of looking at it, the design grew on me. And kept doing so, and now I'm really happy!

This completed the leg assembly. I needed to fasten the leg to the top somehow, and I wanted to make that transition as low profile as possible. To do this, I used a piece of 1/4" aluminum, and attached it to the top of the leg. I then made a cut out (woodworkers call this a mortise) in the bottom of the slab to perfectly fit the aluminum plate. So, when you look at it from the side, the leg looks like it just ends right into the slab.

Here is a little detail of the Cuban mahogany's figure.

This is a good shot of that completed miter with the wenge splines. You can see that the lacquer is wet here -- once it dries it won't have any glossy reflectivity.

Finished entry table! I know that the pictures from the shop aren't that great, but just hang in there and better pictures will come soon!

Okay, that's the build process! There will be pictures once this piece is installed, for sure. Can't wait to deliver it. Hopefully all of that mades some sense, or was at least slightly interesting! If you have questions, call or email!

As always, thanks for reading.

-Danny

Guest UserFebruary 25, 2018furniture, entry table, cuban mahogany, figured, custom, made in hawaii, desing, design, koa1 Comment