My family needed a breakfast table to fit in a small space. Many people think the ideal form of a table is the rectangle, but they are wrong. Rectangles are too simple, too boring, and the corners stab you in the gut. So round the corners, you say? But then you have to live with eight abrupt changes in continuity.
The ideal shape for a breakfast table is the superellipse. It’s the oblong cousin of the infamous squircle, which will be familiar to you if you’ve stared at a sea of look-alike iOS app icons for long enough. It’s rectangle-ish, but mercifully free of any flat sides. Every spot along the table’s edge is at least a little bit curved. You won’t hurt yourself on this table.
I built the frame out of maple in the traditional way, using a mortise-and-tenon apron. I cut the tenons the old-fashioned way: with a saw. I put little slots in the apron for metal tabletop clamps.
The table top is 1 inch maple plywood. I routed the perimeter shape with my Shaper Origin to a depth of about 3/8", then jigsawed it out of the panel and flush-trimmed the remaining thickness on the router table with a pattern bit. The Shaper is incredibly versatile but it ain’t fast or powerful, and sometimes you have to move things along.
I used a specialized router bit to put a 7ยบ under-bevel on the table edge as well. It looks nice, though I didn’t anticipate that the bevel would interfere with adding a small roundover to both sides. That was fun to sort out.
Finally, I used the Shaper to engrave a note to my future self on the bottom of the table: the equation describing the table top. So future generations can reproduce it exactly.
I don’t currently have access to a laser cutter so I tried out a new technique: engraving through Oramask 813 film and hitting it with brown spraypaint. Worked great! I’ve used Oramask 813 on the vinyl cutter many times before but I was pleased to see it works fine with a rotary cutter as well.
The finish is my current standard for furniture, Osmo Polyx-Oil 3043.
