Rebel Coffee Table, Daniel D. Brown, Ph.D., 2020

“Rebel Coffee Table” – Star Wars-inspired table

Star Wars-inspired coffee table with mahogany rebel inlay into padauk and bloodwood, with walnut/cherry base, and Tatooine drawer fronts.


This is a little coffee table for our lair, which has also become my “office” when I’m working from home after lab work. My goals were 1) design it with a smaller footprint than my crappy old table. This is a little room. 2) have a slider for quick access and stowing of keyboard/mouse. 3) cover my PC tower, which I wanted more accessible from my futon. I intentionally made it asymmetrical to reduce size, though I can easily move the top to be symmetrical if I want in the future. The left overhang will double as a mount for an adjustable arm/second monitor I can swing out of the way when not working. And 4) have a touch of geek to it, which ended up being more than a touch 😂.


The top is padauk and bloodwood, inlayed by hand with African mahogany Rebel insignia. The legs are walnut firewood I milled myself. The rest of the base is cherry. The drawer fronts were scrollsawed from purpleheart, chakte viga, padauk, bloodwood, and maple.
Pardon the poor pics. It’s a dark basement. And I ain’t hauling this thing upstairs to photograph. lol

TV Console Table

Hand-built TV Console Table


I finally finished our new TV console table! The purpose of this was to replace a beat up old beast of a particle board stand (last pic). Our house and living room is pretty tiny, so a while back @tamarynart requested a much smaller piece to open up the space. She also helped and instructed with the design – she uses this TV more so pleasing her was my only goal.
Constructed from scrap African mahogany from a furniture maker, walnut, and an inlayed bloodwood/Caribbean rosewood/brass flower from @copper_pig_fine_woodworking. Pyrography on the drawer fronts was designed and burned by @tamarynart.

African wood-themed bedside table

African wood-themed bedside table

Bedside table is done!!

@tamarynart told me a couple weeks ago that she wanted a little table to replace the tiny stool that had been next to her side of the bed. It had to fit between the closet door and bed. She picked the padauk for the top (which roughly matches her ginger hair). Since she grew up partially in South Africa (her whole mom’s side is there), and the padauk is African, I decided to do something a little special for the drawer face. The wood is African stinkwood, which I talked about at length in the Jasper Family intarsia post. It’s from a chair my South African mom-in-law @sledv_life_rocks bought in the 70s. The pieces I have are small, so I glued up a couple with a walnut strip in the middle. The pull was hand-carved – intentionally rough and faceted. The base is walnut I got on clearance. The drawer was made from a really old 2×4” I found in our basement when we moved in (probably from the 50s). It will soon be graced with a small Qi-charging/USB lamp

River Coffee Table – Daniel D. Brown, 2018

We finally have a new coffee table! Lombardy poplar (not to be confused with tulip poplar, which isn’t actually a poplar), walnut, epoxy (West System), and blue ocean pigment (Eye Candy). This was definitely a learning experience, with many mistakes and challenges along the way. But in the end, I’m more than happy with how it turned out – and it’s much prettier than our old particle board/veneered table. The top came from a tree cut down across the street from our house. It had been standing mostly dead for several years (like most of the Lombardy poplars in the US). I chainsawed and milled the log myself. This table took me almost exactly a month to build. See my instagram for several posts detailing this build.

     

 

 

 

Tiny River Table Test – Daniel D. Brown, 2018

I cut the edges, sanded, and oiled. This was just practice (will be used as a trivet). I’ve had this little branch set aside for just such a test for ages. @tam_a_ryn thanks wants an epoxy river coffee table for our living room. So hopefully I’ll be doing a real one in the not-too-distant future. I’ve worked with epoxy resin before in sculpting work. But never with wood or mica pigments. There’s a reason these have been so popular in woodworking for the past couple years. They’re fun to make, and pigmented resin almost always makes a beautiful accent to the wood.
They’re also stupid expensive to make.