this is a flip top coffee table and to make it I cut up a very expensive slab screwed a motor to it had an existential crisis and then became a seamstress let me show you how I got here I want a new coffee table I'd like a new ottoman but we have this Chez correction you have the shares I have discomfort but coffee tables are nicer ottomans are comfier coffee table ottoman coffee table ottoman so I think I've come up with the solution that uh might make us both happy but I have no idea if I can pull it off as it turned out pulling it off would be far more challenging than I ever thought and the payoff was nearly a complete disaster almost a year ago I picked up the slab of white oak along with a couple of smaller pieces from my friend Suman down South of the Border he has a problem he has a crazy amount of lumber so I came here to help him out and to do that I'm just stealing it I've been saving these for a special project like this but there was a problem these slabs I believe were cut with a chainsaw not an Alaskan chainsaw Mill just a chainsaw free hand because they are all sorts of rustic and the Big Slab that I'm going to use for the top well whoever sumon got them from decided to put finish on not a big deal except for they only put finish on one side which caused the entire thing to turn in to a giant Pringle just because you have a slab doesn't mean that you need to keep the Live Edge I love the look of a tabletop that doesn't have any seams between boards glued together and I like that look enough to justify the added expense that a huge slab costs you're probably thinking two things right now one what the heck Scott you got this slab for free and two you're removing the character and to that I say first yes I know and second of all the adjectives in woodworking I find the word character is one of the most misused character and good design are not the same thing character is built over a lifetime of use not something you can force into a design I'm looking at you overpriced faux distressed and weather table from Pottery Barn now I could grab a router and a router sled to flatten these but I feel like they're so far off of being flat that it might take eons with a router so instead I have something faster but maybe slightly more crude in mind yep that's a power plane I honestly didn't know if this was going to take less time and effort than using a router sled but I also don't have a router sled anymore since I had thrown away my old one quite some time ago so I wanted to see if I could get away without making another one I don't know about you folks but I get in my head about a lot of things when it comes to making decisions on what's the best way to do a task in woodworking I can dwell on it for far too long weighing the pros and cons when I could have just made a quick decision and got it started already this is exacerbated by the fact that I can potentially have hundreds of thousands of people questioning my decisions I think someone more optimistic than I would call this being a perfectionist and while I believe I'm generally a very positive person I don't think that being a perfectionist is always a good thing I can spend two months laboring over the details of this seemingly simple coffee table While others will be on their fourth piece of furniture by now that being said I am proud to say that in this instance I made a snap decision grab the power plane and got to work right away with lots of energy and enthusiasm and without questioning my decision well that was exhausting and I'm questioning whether the power plane was more or less effort than a router sled would be in the end and after all that I think I'm going to have to make a router sled to take it down to final thickness now don't get me wrong the slab is very close to being flat but overnight it developed a slight twist to it and I'm worried that if I attack it with the power plant again I could make a misstep and put a gouge into it pretty easily I could also use a hand plane to take it down to final thickness but this is White Oak it's very hard and I am not built for such strenuous activities at any rate the slab didn't seem to be stable so I wanted to leave it as is to see if it wanted to move anymore before flattening it to final thickness but for some reason I'm getting the tracks wait what are you doing now is a good time to show you the design I had been brewing ignore this relic of the 70s I want a coffee table that has a top that can flip over to the underside where there will be an upholstered cushion and I wanted to do it automatically with the push of a button so I said about drawing something up and I went through many iterations some were way too complicated and some were just plain grody at this point I didn't know if I could make the flip top mechanism work and I still needed to figure out how to make it look like a piece of Fine Furniture since my boss is pretty stringent but I had to push forward it's time to begin the Basin I'm going to start out with the legs of my coffee table now the design I drew up is not the most straightforward but anything with multiple curves usually starts out as something that is flat and square to begin with so I'm going to need some 4 inch square leg blanks to get what I'm after [Music] this project is a great example of why sometimes a table saw isn't the most important tool in your shop I think I used it maybe three times in this whole build of course this entirely depends on what you're building but if you get interested in making things less straight square and boxy the table saw can take a back seat to the bandsaw this isn't me saying that I'll be ditching my table saw anytime soon although my second hand industrially abused imported Taiwanese 25 year old table saw does deserve to be chucked off a cliff I don't own a CNC nor do I have the room for one but I do have a 3D printer so I asked it to make me templates the printer bed isn't large enough so I designed one that can be clicked together with a bit of CA glue foreign have you ever pet a cat before sometimes it's easier said than done moreover have you ever pet a cat in Reverse by that I mean starting at the butt and ending at the neck it's a great way to end up injured similarly going against the grain when pattern routing can also land you in the emergency room there was no way around it I was gonna go severely Against the Grain while trimming half of the legs I've wanted this router bit for probably years at this point and I'm happy I bought it because it had no problems going against the grain and while you can't buy a safer cat you can buy a safer router bit even if it also looks like a little Menace oh and 3D printed templates not such a good idea because the table saw didn't get used much in this project I found myself using my super high end Boutique bandsaw a lot more it would have been the MVP of the build if it didn't fight me at every single possible moment like when the ti
