DIY Ash Coffee Table with Custom Legs： Easy Build Tutorial ⧸⧸ Woodworking

In today's episode I'm going to be showing you how to turn these boards into a sleek modern coffee table. And if you'd like to learn how, then follow along this wood story. After purchasing my wood rough sawn, I left it for a few weeks to climatize in my shop and then began the process of joining these very large boards. Now joining means to make one surface of the wood flat so that you can take it to a planer afterwards to make the board flat on both sides. However, I quickly got tired of joining these very large boards so I decided to cut them down to size leaving a few extra inches just in case and then finalizing the preparation process on the joiner and then finally taking it over to the planer to finish it off. The last step to prepare my wood was to cut off the non-straight side and just like that I have a pile of perfectly straight wood ready to be used. This table is going to be approximately three and a half by two feet and about 15 inches tall and I'm going to be using my brand new Jessam doweling jig for a large part of this project. This tool was about $350 Canadian for the master set which includes three different dowel sizes. Now you might wonder did I consider buying the Festool domino jointer instead? Well I did but at a price of $1,500 Canadian I wasn't quite ready to spend that on a not everyday usage tool for myself. I am sure that the domino jointer would have been a lot faster to use but I am really pleased with how easy the Jessam tool was to use and it is clear that it is a quality product and it's made in Canada so you gotta love that. My tabletop will consist of four separate boards that I'm going to glue up in sections of two. You can absolutely glue all four boards together at the same time but because this dowel tool is new to me I wanted to be 100% sure I learned the ins and outs of the process and I figured that if I messed up it would be less work to fix than if I glued all four panels at the same time. Luckily all glue-ups went really well but I am glad I work out every day as I needed a bit more muscle than I originally anticipated. In hindsight I needed to let the clamps do the work for me but I didn't realize that until the end of the first glue-up so lesson learned. Once my glue-up had dried for a good 24 hours I brought it back to the jointer to clean up the edges again. This was only due to my previous usage of extra force which may or may not have involved using a hammer that left some pretty good indents but like I said lesson learned. I then proceeded to round two which was exactly the same as round one meaning I drilled the holes for my dowels and then glued up this section and left it to dry overnight. Once the two sides of the tabletop were done I scraped off the excess glue and then ran both sides through my planer again primarily to save time on sanding later on. I was now left with two complete panels that once again had to be joined. So for the third time and final time I made remarks of where to join the boards, I drilled the dowel holes, I inserted the dowels and glued the boards together and I left them in the clamps to dry overnight. The next step of making this table is to create the table base. This base will consist of tapered legs with a 15 degree angle and a cross board in the middle for added support. I've made a template using my laser and MDF but this could easily have been done using just a regular printer and then transferring the design to MDF and cutting it out with a jigsaw. When you transfer your template to your wood it's important to think about the sides that will be joined because these need to be as accurate as possible to ensure a good fit so that you don't end up with a wobbly table. One trick is to cut the wood that you'll be using down the middle on a table saw which will give you two separate pieces with a straight side on each. Then use this side to line up your template. Another option for getting a nice straight side is to first use a band saw to cut the tracing. Note I used a sharpie to make a nice thick line to ensure that I didn't cut into my actual wood. Then attach the MDF template with double-sided tape and use a templating bit on a router to take away the last little bit. And for the 15 degree mitered corners of the legs I opted to use my miter saw to ensure complete accuracy. Once all of my leg pieces were cut I did a dry fit to ensure the corners connected nice and snug. I will be using the Jessam doweling jig once again for connecting these pieces. You can just make a mark here across approximately in the middle okay just approximately just on both sides here. Then we're going to pull them apart we're going to take our angle here we're going to line it up against the angle that we have here and we're going to find this mark again that we just made and we're going to hold it towards the angle here line it up and then making sure it's perfect we're going to draw down a nice clear line thing on the other side like that make sure that this goes exactly to that mark that we made and then we're going to draw over that line right there and now when we put these two together you'll have a perfectly straight line across and this is where we're going to use our Jessam jig we're going to take our line and then we're going to take the jig and we're going to position it perfectly in the middle of that line just like that and then we're going to clamp it down and we're going to drill the holes and it's going to work perfectly and just for a visual reference I just did a quick mark here but you can see these will line up perfectly once they're actually drilled. Once all the dowel holes were drilled it was time for another gluing session. Luckily I saved my angled off cuts this was a huge help when it came time to clamp the boards together so I highly recommend that you do the same. The last piece to be cut is the bracing piece that will run down the middle of the table underneath. This piece is relatively simple as it's just a straight cut and you may have guessed it but I used the Jessam doweling tool yet again. Hmm maybe I should have reached out to Jessam to have them sponsor this video. Drilling the holes in the board was simple enough but I did have to figure out how to accurately center the holes in the middle of each leg brace and from there it was time to sand the legs. It's much easier to sand these pieces before connecting them all together and then it was time for another gluing session. I want to take a quick moment to say thank you so much for supporting my channel. Your likes and subscription is extremely helpful to my small business and let me know down in the comments if you would like to see this coffee table as a step-by-step easy to print guide. I still had some more trimming to do on my tabletop to get it to its final size. I had one board with an end crack so I had to trim it a bit more than I originally intended but at least this crack didn't carry all the way through the wood and sometimes you have to be ready to amend the design based on the materials you have to work with. I ran over the edge with a round over bit and decided to do this on both sides of the tabletop as I still hadn't 100% decided which side I wanted to use as my top. I also decided to use a round over bit on the outside edges of the table leg. This would have been a lot easier to do before I assembled the legs. From there I was ready to start coating the tabletop and legs. I started by using a pre-stain. This helps the wood absorb the stain much more evenly. I then used a Minwax white gel stain which is similar to a white wash and I do this because I absolutely love the natural light stage of the ash wood but once you start to seal the wood it often gets a few shades darker so to even it out I start with this lightening process and that will help me end up with a similar result. I gave the legs and tabletop about three coats of linseed oil with a full 24 hours of drying between each coat and once it was all fully cured I moved on to routering out the holes for the hardware that I'll be using to attach the tabletop to the legs. These are called figure eight fasteners and are simple to use and they allow for some wood movement which is important to avoid cracks in the wood as the seasons change and the wood expands and contracts. After many weeks of working on this table it was finally done and ready for its grand reveal. I am super pleased with how it turned out the design is clean modern and I love the final light color of the ash. If you enjoyed this wood story and would like to see many more please like and subscribe to my channel and if you would like to see the build plans for this table then please leave a comment below. Thanks for watching!