Popular Woodworking 2007-12 № 166, страница 25

n 1898, Gustav Stickley took a working vacation. With more than 20 years of experience as a furniture maker, he was ready to change direction, and he headed across the Atlantic Ocean for inspiration. The Arts & Crafts movement was strong in England, while in France the latest thing was L'Art Nouveau.

In 1900 Stickley debuted several new designs marketed as "New Furniture" by the Tobey company of Chicago. This table was one of the most striking of those pieces, heavily influenced by Art Nouveau and a far cry from the rectilinear designs of the Craftsman style furniture he would become best known for.

There is a hint of things to come, however. The edges of the top, shelf and legs are all sinuous curves, but the surfaces are essentially flat, and the corners are just barely broken. It also presents an interesting engineering problem. Beneath the carved surfaces and waving edges, the table is based on a pentagon, so the angles between the stretchers, shelf and five legs are at 72°, not 90°.

This "Poppy Table" has been on my to-do list for a long time, and when I came across some good photos from an auction, I decided that the time was right to go ahead.

Engineering First

When I began working on the design, my first concern was the shape of the pieces. I soon realized that this project would also be a structural challenge. In the original, face-grain plugs are visible on the outside of the legs, centered on the shelf. Usually this means a screw is beneath the plug, but it seemed to me that these joints needed more than a mechanical fastener.

I don't really know how the original is held together at the intersection of the leg and shelf. Loose tenons seem the obvious solution to us today, but at the time a dowel or two flanking the screw would have been more likely. I decided to use Festool Dominos for loose tenons, along with a screw to pull the assembly together. It's hard to clamp a pentagon.

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Following the plan. A full-size layout aids in making the parts and the joints accurately. As the table was assembled, I compared the actual pieces to the lines on the drawing.

At the top of the legs, stretchers seemed necessary, but it was a puzzle deciding how to connect them to the legs. There isn't any structure visible in the photo I was working from, so my solution is a best guess. I used a lapped dovetail at each end of the 2"-wide stretchers, and in the center made a five-sided hub piece that holds them all together.

Together Twice to Make it Nice

All the parts for this table came from a single plank of mahogany about 14" wide and 12' long. I made all the joints and dry-assembled the entire table before doing any of the decorative work.

The hub is the piece I worried most about. It is like a keystone that affects the location of the other joints. Any variations in this piece and the legs would twist and throw off the joints at the shelf. Because it was too small to safely cut on the table saw or miter saw, I cut it on the band saw. I then made a small shooting board, shown in the photo below, and trimmed the hub to size with a low-angle block plane.

I made a full-size printout of my drawing (you can purchase one for download online at popularwoodworking.com/dec07 for $3, or create one yourself using the scale drawings on page 39) and used that to check the parts

The hub is the keystone. All of the structural parts of the table radiate from this small piece, so it needs to be precise. This shooting jig lets me trim it down in tiny increments.

Hidden lapped dovetails. The stretchers connect to the hub and the leg with V2 "-thick lapped dovetails. They are wide at the hub end and 1" wide at the leg.

lead photo by al parrish; illustrations by the author

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