TABL ES & C HAIRSTABLES & CHAIRS^110303
Productive Method for Plugs
With 64 square plugs to make for the table base, I didn’t want to
lay out the location of every hole. So I made a template the width
and height of the legs and marked out the center points of each
of the plugs, drilling a^1 ⁄ 8 "-diameter hole at each of these points.
I marked all of the legs by sticking my awl through each hole and
into the face of the leg.
With a^3 ⁄ 8 "-diameter Forstner bit in my drill press, set to bore
(^1) ⁄ 4 " deep, I drilled a hole for each of the square plugs. I could
have made these holes with the mortiser, but with some of the
squares offset^1 ⁄ 8 " from the others, I didn’t want to set up the
mortiser fence three times. With the center points marked from
the template, I saved time.
To make the holes square, I took a worn out^3 ⁄ 8 " chisel from
the mortiser, ground the points off the end, and with a conical
bit in a Dremel tool, sharpened the back of each corner of the
chisel. I clamped a scrap of plywood to the face of each leg with
its edge tangent to each row of holes as shown below right. This
kept the chisel square to the edge of the legs, and with a few
smacks of the hammer the round holes were now square. I could
have used a standard chisel and made four cuts on each hole,
but this would have taken four times as long.
The bottoms of the legs were radiused with a 2"-radius round-
over bit. I set up the bit in the router table, so that the radius
ended^3 ⁄ 4 " up from the bottom of each leg and^1 ⁄ 4 " in. Using a
thick block of wood to back up the legs, I moved each edge of
the leg bottoms across the bit as seen on page 105.
Before finish sanding all the parts to #220 grit, I used a roun-
dover bit in my router to ease all of the edges to a^3 ⁄ 16 " radius on
the legs, and a^1 ⁄ 8 " radius on the rails and edges of the tabletop.
Not Ebony, but Ebonized
In original Greene and Greene furniture the square plugs were
made of ebony, but I decided to use walnut, ebonizing them with
With the template and the leg held in the vise, the fence on the router
places the cut laterally, and the block hits the template to locate the ends
of the mortises. Using this method allowed me to mill all 32 mortises
quickly and precisely, without doing any layout work on the legs.
The Greene & Greene Virtual Archives
The University of Southern California hosts an amazing
online collection of original drawings, photographs, corre-
spondence and other documents from the work of Charles
Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene. You can fi nd
it online at: usc.edu/dept/architecture/greeneandgreene/
index.html.
The database of digital images can be searched by
project name or by type of object. Once a document has
been found, you can zoom in and pan around on individual
drawings and photographs. Background information and
other reference material is also available.
I was able to fi nd an original black and white photograph
of the table featured in this article, and while drawings
for this table don’t exist, I looked at working drawings for
other furniture from the same house, as well as a fi nish
formula from the William Thorsen house.
This material served as the basis for how I made the
details of this table. The shape and projection of the square
plugs and splines on the breadboard ends, the treatment of
the edges of the legs and top, and the fi nish color were all
completed by following the details shown in these original
documents.
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