Adrienne asked me for a side table to fit over the arm of our couch, so you can set a drink or a laptop down without reaching over to the coffee table.

I did a design in Fusion. I had 1” square and 3” x 1” rectangular tube leftover from previous projects, so I designed around those.

I built the base in Asmbly’s metal shop:

I knew that I was going to have a problem keeping the frame square. I tried to clamp it and counterpose my welds to minimize that, but that wasn’t enough. The arms supporting the top were noticeably bowed outwards. To fix that, I had to add a strap across the open side of the top frame to hold those parts together.

The top is a piece of pre-prepared (glued up, brought to exact dimensions) walnut that I got at Asmbly. After cutting it to size, I stained it and applied several coats of polyurethane. Of course, one of the cats took a flying leap at it while it was drying, so I got to sand and add one more coat of poly than I’d expected, but such is life with cats.

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