It seems like it’s taken forever, but I’m finally ready to start a furniture project in my new shop. It will be a coffee table, something that’s been on “the list” for a very long time.

Like many of my designs, it will be based on a frame built with mortise-and-tenon joints, and will include 1/4″ panels. There will also be two drawers. The primary wood will be black walnut (despite its high cost at the moment), with a secondary contrast wood to be announced at a later time.

I have already cut and milled down enough of the wood to make the entire frame, and chosen the orientation and arrangement of the legs and stretchers. And here are the first two joints:

Those are haunched tenons; the ends directly below the top will not be visible when the project is complete. These joints give you a little more resistance to twist and a little more flexibility when making long tenons. I guess they’re also supposed to look cool or something.

As is my custom, I already screwed up. I referenced from the wrong side when marking the mortise on the right, yielding an incorrect offset from the front when I cut the tenon. So I sawed off the tenon, then made a new tenon using a compensating shim when marking. I suppose that I’m lucky that I made this error at this stage, because if I’d done that on a stretcher that already had a tenon on the opposing end, it’d be kind of unfortunate.