Schoolproject: Table (2006/ 2007)

For starters: Do not look at the date of this post. First of I'd like to share some of my old projects from my Portfolio. Starting off with my school assignments.

Finished product of the Lion table

My first assignment was the task to think of new wood connections.
After several drafts, one of them was chosen to use in a (side) table design.

My connection was this one:

3-way dowel for a 45 degree joint

It's a basic dowel joint, but in a three-way. Meaning that a big one is drilled through the side. Through that one, another dowel hole is drilled through the front and the smallest is drilled from above, locking all three dowels in place. In my design the pieces of wood are in a 45 degree angle; yet the upper peace is slightly higher than the one connecting.

Perspective of the table without the tabletop

Full 3D AutoCAD drawing showing the
complete design of the table

Then is was time to create a table design.

I immediately knew I wanted to do something with lion legs and something with inlaid wood. 

Because of the lion legs, for me it was logic to search/make a lion head design for the table top.

I had found a picture on the internet which I found interesting and used this for the design of my table.

A 3D drawing with silver manes. I later chose to leave it wood color,
the silver just didn't look good.

The table is mainly made of plywood because it was my first project and plywood is cheap.

The legs however are made out of beech wood. The choice for beech was because beech wood is much easier and nicer to carve than plywood, since plywood will splinter a lot.

The lion head was made using a big piece of cardboard on which I could draw a 1:1 scale drawing of the design.

Then I conveyed the drawing onto a wooden plate (3 mm) using a raster as a guidance.
The pieces the had to go out were sawn out with a basic jigsaw.
The wood was then placed on smaller pieces of wood with the grain direction 90 degrees turned. Now I could trace the sawn out parts to create new fitting parts for my lionhead (the light parts on the picture).

The manes of the lion are glued to a thick piece of plywood.

The (dark) outer layer was then glued to a new thicker piece of plywood. With a wood router a circle was grinded.

Everything that was going to be dark was glued together and painted with dark walnut stain. The light pieces aren't stained, but only finished with some varnish (as was everything else). Before varnishing they obviously got glued into place first.

 And the finished result:

TopView

Front View

Perspective view