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  Making an Oak & Ebony Demi-Lune Table     

 © John Bullar 2003   

The Demi-Lune table was designed to stand in front of the wall-mirror in an entrance-hall.

Cover Photo by Ben Daniels

 A rounded ebony bead underlines the oak rails and echoes the barrel-shaped edge on the oak tabletop above. The square ebony feet repeat the pattern of black marble squares in the owner’s floor where the table now stands. 

The use of African ebony (diospyrus crassiflora) in combination with quartersawn native oak (quercus robur) is a tradition for English furniture dating back to the early sixteen hundreds when the East India Company first imported ebony. The Arts and Crafts movement revived it some three centuries later.

So that the boards could be cut without including any sapwood or the central pith, the table top needed an edge joint to make it wide enough. I arranged the joint between edges from the outside of the tree so the front and back edges would be of the hardest heartwood from the centre of the tree. This makes them a bit more durable and they also cut cleaner.

Semi-ellipses are easy to mark out with a pencil stretching a slack string, which is secured between two map-pins. By increasing the distance between the pins you can elongate the major axis and reduce the minor axis while increasing the amount of slack in the string increases both the major and minor axis. 

Cut the shapes of the top pieces oversize with a jigsaw. After surface planing and thicknessing, edge joint them as near invisibly as possible then the completed piece can be bandsawn accurately up to the curved edge line ready for hand-planing. Paring the elliptical edge with a compass plane is fairly straightforward if you tackle it as a series of small arcs, continuously adjusting the radius control on the plane sole as you move round to the next arc.

Having established a true and smooth elliptical edge with the compass plane I gave the curve a second dimension (a barrel edge) using a convex spokeshave.

I chose to place the legs in line with where they would appear on a six legged circular table hoping the semi-elliptical table and its mirror image would give the illusion of a larger circular table. 

Each leg has a sturdy bracing member to support it. This is provided by a 20mm thick rail across the back of the table tennoned into each back leg and two radial rails tennoned into each of the front legs. Together the three concealed straight rails provide most of the table’s rigidity while the curved laminated front rails perform a secondary role from a structural point of view.  

Each curved front rail is laminated to its own shape to make up part of the semi-ellipse. The shape of the rails is marked out on the underside of the tabletop 30 mm from the edge using a pencil marker gauge. This is used as a guide to the shape of the formers for shaping the laminated rail sections while they set. Two sets of male and female formers are needed, one symmetrical set for the front and the other asymmetrical set serves for both sides. They are bandsawn from sheets of MDF then glued together and the contact surfaces smoothed to prevent them marking the oak.  There is a moderate amount of tension trapped in laminated woodwork so it tends to open out slightly when it is released (though far less than with steam bending). This means the formers need a marginally tighter curvature than you plan for the finished product.

Once the formers and laminations have been pulled loosely together with a couple of cramps, grab as many cramps as will fit to apply even firm pressure all over.

With three curved oak rails formed, the edges planed and tennons cut on the ends the next stage - running a curved ebony beading around the lower rail edges - calls for a bit of micro-laminating. The finished bead is 5mm wide by 3 mm deep. Ebony is a brilliant material to work with tools, but it does not take kindly to being bent, so the beading is built up of three 1mm thick laminations before shaping. These laminations, unlike the rails, would show any gluelines rather badly so they must have good flat faces for gluing.  I bought proprietary manufactured ebony stringing 5mm wide by 1mm thick then prepared it by clamping down one end and running along the surface with a finely set blockplane.

Having prepared and cut three lengths of stringing for each piece of bead (nine in total) progressively glue them onto the curved lower edge of each piece of rail, clamping in place continuously as you work along.

A scratch stock tool is used to shape the round edge on the bead after the glue has set.

Ebony responds well to scraping and if the tool edge is fine, the ebony surface will cut to a sheen straight from the blade. Patience is a virtue in using this type of tool, many light passes are best - sneak up on the required shape rather than trying to force it. A touch of beeswax on the tool helps keep it moving with a light touch and no judder (I find myself using beeswax with nearly every handtool, but so lightly that a block of it seems to last forever).  Use a dry brush and vacuum to remove fine ebony scrapings as you go along so they don’t find their way into the open oak pores. 

By hand-planing all the components with a fine set blade before assembly very little is needed in the way of sanding to give the surfaces a silky touch. I particularly wanted to avoid contaminating the open pores of the oak grain with ebony dust - I felt certain that ebony would not benefit from sanding so I hand sanded the oak lightly with fine grades of paper, being careful to stop at the ebony.

Although the table design is undeniably borrowed from a classical pattern, the simple clean lines and contrasts of textures and colours – open grained, pale oak against amorphous, black ebony - give it a contemporary freshness, which has caught some admiring looks.