A mid century Danish coffee table

We have a mid century tiled Danish coffee table which has been overpainted. The following picture shows this rather grim finish.

We think that it can be revived close to its former splendour. And so we’ve started removing paint using a cabinet scraper.

Here is a component stripped next to a few yet to be processed.

It is exacting work as paint gets into small pockets and needs teasing out. See and compare the next two photos. A before and after on the same part.

As you’ll be able to just see in the first photograph there’s a slatted magazine rack below the main table top. This has two slats missing so new replacements need to be made. We have some similar timber in stock so this will be worked to match the required size. On the left of the next photo we have an original slat, in the centre a piece of stock yet to be worked and on the right a final dimensioned piece.

Planing thin stock is a challenge because it’s difficult to hold. So we made & improvised ourselves a planing stop on our work table. The planing stop prevents the workpiece being shoved around the bench as the stick is being worked on.

We use a plane with a long sole which, when nice ’n’ sharp gives accurate cuts. The first operation is to reduce the stick to thickness. For those that really need to know we use a Stanley no.7.

After which we use a shoot board to square the edges and get the stick to width. You’ll see that the shoot board allows us to use the plane on its side. Jigs are, we feel, much underrated devices because they take time to make. However the time spent making jigs really makes the final piece of work easier to do, and produces more accurate components.

In the foreground are the original slats plus the new replacements with other cleaned up table components.

And that’s as far as we’ve got. There’ll be more to follow.