DIY Coffee Table from 2x3's | 15

Hi everyone, I'm Zach and today I'm going to try to cut out a little bit of the boredom in your day. Today I'm going to be making a fake box joint style coffee table. Now this design is not totally my own, it is something that Mike over at Modern Builds built in the form of a bench a long time ago that I actually ended up building for my apartment as well. Now my friend ended up seeing that project on my blog and thought it would be a really cool idea for a coffee table, so that is what we are going to tackle today, so stick around. This project is a ton of fun to create. It not only looks really striking when you see the final result, but it is incredibly modular in terms of how long and how wide you want to make it based on your needs, whether it's a table, or a desk, or a bench, or a coffee table. The first step is to remove the rounded edges from your framing lumber. This can be done most efficiently on a table saw, but to be honest mine is totally underpowered and I don't have a splitter, which makes the entire process kind of sketchy and unsafe. So an alternative is using a thickness planer and making heavy passes on the wood. I also cleaned up my surfaces that I would be gluing up. Not totally necessary, but if you have a planer I recommend doing it. And without dust collection it made an absolute mess. Whatever. Next step was to make all of my cuts. So I took some time to sort my lumber to find the cleanest looking surfaces that would later become my tabletop. I felt this was the most important surface to have be as free of imperfections as you'd see it most often. Now because these tables are so modular based on what you want your length and width to be, as well as what type of table you're building, I won't go into too much detail on my measurements. But if you do want to make this exact table, you can check out the additional written article in my description for extreme detail on cuts and design methods. In short, you'll cut two tabletop piece lengths and two leg lengths that will be fitted together to form the box joint. All of which are going to be determined based on how wide you want your table to be, how tall you want it to be, and how thick you plane your wood material down to. In my case it was around 2.2 inches. And if you're like me and you want to include a bottom shelf, you'll also want to cut a set of bottom shelf pieces. Now here are all of my cuts laid out for reference. The top left cuts are my two tabletop lengths, the two bottom left sets are my leg strips, and the top right will become my bottom shelf. Next was gluing up, all of which was done upside down to help create the most flat surface. The first step was just to alternate my tabletop strips. A big thing to note is that based on how I built my table, I wasn't going to be gluing up my last two outside sets of pieces. Since my design was 15 strips wide, this meant only gluing up my middle 13 strips at this moment. More on that later. Now having done this before, I learned a good method for keeping glue-ups flat. Using this $20 Kreg clamp, I'd apply glue to my piece and spread it evenly, squeeze the two pieces together, and make sure that the two strips were lined up properly using a scrap leg piece. Clamp them in place so that the top and bottom surfaces were flush on each side. Shoot in a two-inch finish nail, and then unclamp and repeat the same process on the other side. This helped ensure a near totally flat glue-up without the fear of things slipping later on when I clamped everything up. Then I just repeated the process one row at a time for the rest of the top. Then I could clamp everything up and wipe away any squeeze-out with a wet rag, which makes cleanup so much easier later on. While the pieces were clamped, I could tackle my leg glue-ups one side at a time using the same technique, with the addition of a mallet to hammer the longer pieces into place while also double-checking everything was square. And I glued up my bottom shelf. Same technique. Once everything dried, I could begin finishing the table. First was belt sanding at 60 grit. Now I did cut my longer tabletop pieces a half-inch longer to give me wiggle room in the glue-up, so I needed to take down that extra half-inch length to flush everything up. This can be done in many ways. A flush trim saw, a belt sander. I used my turbo plane and a flap disc as it was what I had on hand and it made for quick and clean work. Then I followed it up with orbital sanding at 120 grit. I also took this opportunity to square up the bottoms using a t-square and a circular saw. And because my saw didn't cut all the way through, I can make one pass, flip the table over, and then make a pass on the other side. Simple enough. Next I installed my bottom shelf. Now this shelf can be done many ways. For my table, I wanted to experiment with dado cuts and my plunge router. I marked out a space using my t-square, the width of which was equal to the thickness of my bottom shelf. And then using my rafter square to square up my straight edge clamp, I can make multiple passes with my router to hollow out the legs until I had a nice dado groove cut. Double-checking to make sure everything fits. Now you can see why my shelf pieces were cut one inch longer than my shorter tabletop pieces. As with the dados cut on each side, you could slide in the shelf quite easily and square things up everywhere. Now remember how I hadn't glued up my outside pieces yet? Since I now have my bottom shelf installed and it fits snugly, I could install my final outside legs, tabletop, and bottom shelf components, which locked everything into place and left a clean exterior look for the table. Now since this was my first time routing dados, they were not totally perfect. I ended up using a few small angle brackets on the underside of my bottom shelf to secure them in place so that they'd always rest flush to the top edge of the dado. Then one more round of sanding. For staining, I applied multiple coats of Minwax's dark walnut finish that I eventually let cure overnight. And since I know watching me apply clear coats would be super boring, I will instead tell you about my final finishing process while juggling. So for this project, I used Minwax's clear satin polyurethane finish. It's an oil-based finish. I applied four liberal coats using a brush and I sanded in between with wet 220 grit sandpaper, which left me with a really nice looking clear hard finish. And to cap it off, I could install some adjustable leveling feet on the outside four legs of the table. And then I was done and very happy with how everything came out. This whole fake box joint look is actually really visually striking and having done a similar project once before, I was super happy with the progression that I had made in terms of my own craftsmanship. Thanks so much for watching this vid. If you did enjoy it, you should definitely check out the other projects that I've worked on as well as stick around for future builds by subscribing to the channel. Thanks again and I'll see you guys next time on the cutting board.