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Glowforge CEO, Wharton Research Fellow, Robot Turtles creator, Proud Dad

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You got your slate in my coffee table, Part I

Part I in a 3-or-so part post describing how I made our coffee table.
Part II is here.
Part III is here.
Part IV (with pictures) is here.
Here are the blueprints for my first major furniture project, our living room coffee table. This will be broken out over several posts. Yes, my drawings are horrible. The profs who taught me proper GD&T will kick my ass when they see it. Still, it was good enough to print out, scatter copies of around the shop, spill shellac on, and ultimately produce a table from.
Later posts will talk about construction, assembly, and finishing.
Note that you’re free to use this, share it, and produce tables for use or for sale from it. But you can’t sell or modify the plans without getting permission from me first. See the license for more details:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.


(Yeah, I’m being uptight about the license thing. I’ve seen too many people have their free work relabeled and resold for me to act otherwise.)
(This was done in TurboCAD v8, a great software package I’ll post more information about soon.)

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Completely random and unrelated posts:

Comments

2 responses to “You got your slate in my coffee table, Part I”

  1. Interested to see how this is made, I have an
    old coffee table and the inset is badly damaged
    and was wondering if your technique would work
    for my table.

    Louise Avatar
    Louise

    •

  2. In Part III (https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/archives/2004_05.html) I talk about how I actually attached the slate–basically, with caulk. I also deliberately left an air gap under the tiles by only fastening them at a few points so that it would break more easily if I wanted to replace it. I suspect that your inserts are flush with the surface underneath, the adhesive is stronger than silicone, and spread across the entire bottom of the insert–all of which will make it more difficult to remove. Still, with enough time with cold chisel you should be able to remove it completely. Just be sure not to damage the rest of the table while you’re going at it. Once that’s accomplished, I would definitely recommend the silicone approach for the replacement tile.

    Dan Avatar
    Dan

    •

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