Plywood Nesting Tables

For this Instructable I'll be showing you how you can make some easy nesting plywood tables to use while watching TV or whichever use you can find for them. Lots of the woodworking instructables tend to involve a fair amount of expensive or specialized tools that not everyone has at their disposal, so the idea behind this instructable was to show you how to make something using a couple of ordinary tools and some easy glued joints.

Disclaimer: Measurements posted on this instructable are just a personal suggestion, you may modify them to whichever size you wish.

What we'll need is:

- 1/2 Inch 2' x 4' Plywood Sheet.

- Jigsaw

- Rubber Mallet

- Drill (with a 7/8 inch flat wood drill bit)

- Wood Glue

- Ruler

- Sharp Pencil

- Drawing Compass

- (6) 3 ft long 7/8 inch wooden round sticks.

- 3 C-clamps

- Sandpaper (50, 100 and 150 grit)

Step 1: Drawing Guide Lines

Here we want to trace the guide lines for the top of the tables. I have supplied templates to make the measurements a bit easier to understand, following those templates first we draw a line parallel to the short side of the plywood sheet 26 centimeters apart and repeat 3 more times. Once we have those guides we want to start drawing our triangles, first thing we want to do is make a mark 30 centimeters from the corner on the edge of the plywood sheet, from that mark we make another mark 30 centimeters apart.

On the first line we drew parallel to the edge, we now make our first mark 15 centimeters from the edge following the line and then we draw another mark 30 centimeters apart from that line. On the next line we follow the first mark steps (30 centimeters - 30 centimeters) and so on. Now all we have to do is interconnect our marks to make our triangles.

The next step is to draw the rounded edges, we draw a mark 6 centimeters along the line of the triangles and 6 centimeters along the line on the opposite side. We join those marks and at the middle of the resulting lin we will use our drawing compass with an opening of 1 inch and draw our rounded edges. Because this may be a bit tedious to do on all of our corners. we can draw a template on cardboard, cut it out and make the process faster.

Step 2: Cutting the Plywood

For this step we'll need to take our jigsaw and c-clamps.

On top of a sturdy table, we clamp our marked plywood sheet down to the table and start cutting alone the guidelines we drew.

Step 3: Drilling the Leg Holes

For these tables we only want to make holes on 1 of the triangleswhich will be the bottom side, leaving the top side as it is.

To make the leg holes we will be using the same mark we used to draw our rounded edges. On this mark grab your flat wood drill bit and make the holes on each of the corners.

Step 4: Gluing Both Sides Together

For this step we will need both sides, the one with holes and the one without holes, glue and our c-clamps. Apply glue uniformly on one of the sides of the triangle, in this case I used a piece of cardboard I had laying around to spread it around.

Once you've applied the glue join both sides and use the c-clamps to apply pressure while the glue dries. Make sure there are no spaces in between that remain unglued, because that may affect the final outcome visually.

Step 5: Preparing Legs

While our table tops are being glued together, we will start preparing the legs for our table.

I decided to cut my legs into 2 40 cm long pieces using the jigsaw, but the sticks we are using allow us to cut longer pieces if wanted.

Once we have all of our legs cut we will start sanding them, so we grab our different grit sandpapers starting with the coarsest grit following on to finer grits until we have our legs nice and smooth.

Step 6: Preparing Table Top

At this point our table tops should be glued together already, so we start with the next step.

Same as with our legs we will grab our sandpaper and start sanding the edges down in case they aren't even until we have even edges on all sides. Then we also sand the top and bottom leaving it nice and smooth.

Step 7: Inserting Legs

For the final step, we grab our table top and legs, our mallet and our glue.

On the holes we left prepared for our legs we apply a nice amount of glue and spread it uniformly on the inside with our finger or with a small piece of cardboard.

Then we grab one of our legs and our mallet, and mallet the leg down until it's completely inserted in the hole.

Repeat on all 3 sides.

With this final step the table is ready for whichever finishing we want to give it.

Enjoy!