Craftsman-style furniture is always easy to recognize. That’s because it’s based on a well-established design philosophy. In a nutshell, the basic principles are that furniture should be simple in design, highly practical, and built to pass down from generation to generation. This type of furniture often used quartersawn white oak as the primary material. On table legs, that means that only two faces have the distinctive ray flecks. the other two will show distracting flatsawn grain patterns. For this table, I used a traditional Craftsman technique to make leg blanks that show quartersawn figure on all four faces with no noticeable joint lines. You can apply the technique to other projects.
To begin, you’ll need to make the four, stout, 3"-square legs. As you can imagine, this requires gluing up blanks from thinner stock. But this also gives you the opportunity to make a better-looking leg. The simple process is laid out in this drawing. You’re going to glue up a two-piece blank and then “skin” the joined sides with thin facings. The result is definitely worth the extra effort.
After gluing up an extra-wide blank from 1 1⁄2"-thick quartersawn stock, rip and then joint the blank down to 23⁄4" wide. Now you’ll need to resaw veneers from quartersawn stock. They should be slightly over width and over thickness. Next, I planed the veneers to 1⁄8" thick by attaching them to a carrier board with double-sided tape.
You can glue the veneers to the joined edges using the workbench to distribute the clamping pressure.
To complete the legs, trim the veneers flush with the blanks and then rout a 1⁄8" roundover on all the long edges
