This post continues my documentation of my EC&I 831 Learning Project, where I am making my own coffee table.
Now that everything was pretty much cut and prepared for the table, it was time to start putting it together.
I’ve put together a lot of Ikea furniture in the past, and I noticed they used a lot of dowels to stick everything together. I decided to investigate how I could use dowels to hold my table together.
Turns out you can even make your own dowelling, as shown in the video below. I opted for the store bought dowels since combining two power tools together at this point in my woodworking career seemed like a pretty risky move.
My basic idea was to use 4 dowels and dowel holes to connect the top part of the frame together. This video (first 5 minutes or so) gave some good instruction on how to go about this.
Unfortunately, I did not have a dowel jig, so my dowel holes were a little rough – as you’ll see in the pictures below. Here are the pictures I was able to take during this process. I did not do a great job of documenting this.
In this step, I struggled with not having the proper tools for the job. I think investing in a dowelling jig would have made this go much more smoothly. However, at this point I was getting a little over confident and figured I could just do it. Ultimately it worked out well and the table frame is solid, but I spent way more time doing this than I probably would have otherwise.
