Splay-Legged Mahogany Table by Bob McKee

Tom Shirley — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:41:03 GMT

Building a new front entrance for my home required milling several 8/4 boards of sub-premium mahogany for the structure. Most of the cutoff pieces were about two feet long, which I gave to friends for small projects. But the grain pattern of one piece caught my eye so I resawed it. The book-matched pattern and chatoyance of the opened board were stunning. I decided they would make a great top for a small splay-legged table I’d seen in an article by Garrett Hack a few years ago. A 3-foot long 8/4 board of furniture grade mahogany provided the wood for the aprons and legs on the table.

This small table combines some uncommon features that make it interesting. The legs are tapered on all four sides rather than just two. Instead of being straight the legs splay outward a few degrees, giving the table a “stance” that adds visual interest. Finally, the apron has cock beading along the lower edge, a nice detail that also conceals any gap in the tenons.

I should have done a better job of photographing the process while building, but making splayed legs tapered on all four sides was a new challenge that kept me fully engaged. I will give an overview of the process here and would be happy to send a PDF of Garrett Hack’s original article to anyone who wants more details about the build.

The first step was making a full sized three-dimensional pattern from which to lay out the legs. I cut it a little oversize on the bandsaw, then jointed two adjacent sides and finished the other two sides with a hand plane.

The leg pattern made it easy to lay out the four tapered legs adjacent to one another, alternating tops and bottoms of the legs on a single board to save wood. (Actually, I cut five legs anticipating errors which for once did not materialize. So now I have an extra leg hanging on the wall like real cabinetmakers!)After cutting the marked legs on my bandsaw and then jointing the cuts, I used the pattern leg again as a tapering jig for the other two sides of each leg, which made the time spent making the pattern seem very worthwhile.

Mr. Hack used a four degree splay (94 degree angle), which I reduced to 93 degrees, even though my table is wider than his original. This makes the splay somewhat subtle, which is how I like to go the first time. If I did another table the legs would have more splay.

Naturally the aprons and their tenons had to be cut at the same angle, which I did on the table saw with my seldom-used tenoning jig. The mortices were mainly cut with the dado cutter on the table saw with the bottom edges squared up by hand.

This was a fun project that included some learning and proved to me that using scrap does not mean the final product has to look like…scrap.

Storage Ottoman by James Goodwin

Tom Shirley — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:06:54 GMT

Storage Ottoman

Featured Piece of the Month May 2026

James Goodwin

Back in 2022 I built a blanket rack to store and display the lovely blankets my beautiful and talented wife had spun and woven. We don’t super heat our house and so in the winter I like to have a blanket while we’re watching TV. The rack worked fine for making them available and displaying them.

However, we have two evil tabby cats who think that nice woolen blankets are something that they should claw and eat. This is not good. Finally, we had to hide the blankets away in a closet to prevent further damage to them or the cats. Shortly after that we came up with an idea for a storage ottoman that would keep them handy and safe. Also, my wife uses the ottoman to sit on when she is threading her loom and so something that moved around easily would also be great. I also wanted to make the ottoman only partly upholstered to limit evil tabby claw damage.

This is the design I came up with:

I designed a 19” x 24” x 24” ottoman on casters. It would be slightly larger than the original ottoman and use fabric that was left over from when we had our couch re-upholstered. I had a bunch of left over Sapele lumber from the new Fire Table Chairs so I only had to pick up some nice 1/4” Sapele veneer plywood that was veneered on both sides since I would be finishing the inside as well as the outside.

Because this would be seating as well as storage, I made the corner posts actual 2” x 2” wide and all of the frame members were 1” x 2”. I used my new jointer/planer to dimension all of the parts exactly and to remove all of the saw marks.

Once I milled all of the frame and seat frame parts to size I cut all of the mortices in the corner posts. I deliberately offset the tenons so that there would be extra material at the top and bottom of the posts to help give the frame extra support. I also centered them in the posts for the same reason. I made them 1” deep which would require notching the tenons so they wouldn’t collide.

Then I switched my SawStop table saw to dado mode, the first time I’ve done this, it turned out to be much faster and easier than I imagined. I used the dado stack and my table saw sled (modified for dado usage) to cut all of the tenons.

After that I cleaned up and dry fitted all of the mortices and tenons.

Then I reset the dado stack to 1/4” and cut the panel grooves in the corner posts. I cut the panels to size and did a dry fit of the whole body of the ottoman.

I also made up the frame for the seat which was also joined by mortice and tenon and fitted that to the body. I added an inside cleat to support the seat and a 1/8” alignment edge that extended below the seat to make sure the top lid wouldn’t shift around when someone sat on it.

I then sanded everything from 120 grit to 220 grit (trying something new to see if it had a good effect on the Hard Wax Oil finish with hardener).

I suspended my sander and vacuum hose from the ceiling with a bungee to reduce sanding fatigue.

Then I glued everything up and installed the bottom of the box on cleats that I attached around the inside of the bottom frame. I countersunk and pre-drilled all the holes from the bottom of the seat to attach the seat to the top frame and mounted the heavy-duty hinges (really passage door hinges) and chains to hold the top open when getting things in and out of the interior.

At the next step I took all the hardware off and put finish on everything including the interior.

Finally, I upholstered the lid gluing two layers of high quality 1 1/2” furniture foam onto a 3/8” thick plywood backing. After shaping the top so it had a curved profile around the top, I covered the seat with upholstery fabric which matches our couch. My wife kindly helped by stitching a large remnant into a square that was just the right size to cover the seat cushion.

Then it was just the final assembly and adding the casters and it was ready to deploy.

Eastern Massachusetts Guild of Woodworkers Featured Piece of the Month Articles

Splay-Legged Mahogany Table by Bob McKee

Storage Ottoman by James Goodwin