Small Hall Table – The Base

For a project that I thought was going to an easy knock it out quick project, it has turned into a frustrating little project.

In my last post I showed some of the problems I had with the apron and the tapers on the legs.  I have remade the apron and it came out much better.  I have the new leg stock milled up, but I haven’t tapered them yet.  More about the tapering process later.

My plan was to use sliding dovetails, to connect the apron to the back legs.  Although that turned into another disaster.  I’ve lost track on how many that is now!


The dovetails on the apron were pretty easy to make, using my dovetail plane I got from Philly Planes.  I have to say Phil makes a really nice plane.

Cutting the sockets on the legs is where the disaster took place.  I was pretty frustrated with the results, I didn’t even take any pictures.  Needless to say the joints were so loose, they were beyond being structural.  I had to decide if I wanted to have another go at the dovetail sockets, or to use some other joinery.

The project had already caused me enough heartaches, I decided to try something else.  My choice was to use loose tenons.  I felt this approach was the safest and easiest.


I whacked off the top of the legs, now the table is about a 1.5” shorter.  I also had to cut off the dovetails on the apron, but that wasn’t a big deal either.  I then used my new router, and cut the mortises in the legs and apron.  Overall I’m pretty happy with these results.  I think I could have gone a little deeper with mortises, but I think I have enough glue surface for this small table to hold together

The next challenge was how to improve the cutting of the tapers on the legs.  I felt I needed a better jig, than the one I used before.  I found some plans for nice jig over at Fine Woodworking.  So, last weekend I started to build the new jig.  I only have a few things to finish on it.  I should be able knock that out tomorrow, and test it out.  If all goes well I think I can finish the table this weekend.  Look for an upcoming post on the tapering jig and how it works.