Queen Anne Pedestal Tables

I have made quite a few of these Queen Anne pedestal tables over the years - probably more than a dozen total. Most have been made from cherry (right, above), with one made from black walnut, a couple from mahogany, and one from rosewood (center, above). On a couple I inset a round marble top (left, above). The top is about 12" in diameter, and the height is about 24". Plans were from Measured Drawings of Early American Furniture, by B. N. Osburn and B. B. Osburn. The three legs are dovetailed into the pedestal, which has small flats to match the shoulders of the full-length dovetails.

These tables require a lot of handtool work, primarily in the legs (shaped mostly with spokeshaves), and the dovetails (drilling and chiseling). The tops and pedestals are turned on a lathe. After I made a few, and got the routine down, I kept track of how long it took to completely build and finish one table - about 7 hours. Figuring you might be able to sell these for around $100 each means that in terms of making a living doing this, you might not starve, but you sure wouldn't get rich.

Records from cabinetmakers of 100-200 years ago show that a single worker could make a typical piece of furniture in 3-5 days, depending on the complexity of the piece. All work would be done using handtools, of course, including stock preparation and smoothing. We aren't talking about high-end blockfronts and highboys here, just ordinary tables, chests, and beds that middle class families would buy. Scaling this work effort up to todays' costs, with an assumed average income of $35,000 a year, implies that a piece of furniture of this type should cost about $700 if made totally by hand. Thus, although the use of machine tools has made furniture much more affordable for the average family, it has all but eliminated the economic viability of making furniture by hand.