Friday, November 13, 2009

Matching A Table Leaf


Surprisingly, we've got a lot going on right now ... We're about to start a large entertainment center that has required some intensive design work, we're finishing up a couple of other small projects, doing some repairs , switching from tennis to paddle tennis season, and chopping the last of the firewood for the winter. One of our smaller projects was to make a new leaf for a table we made about 5 years ago ... Our client has two houses and he decided to switch dining tables, moving the larger table to his main house. He bought the table below back when I had piecess in a local gallery and that table had only one leaf. In it's new spot, two leaves would be more useful so he had us duplicate the original leaf. Click the photos to enlarge them ...

The room before the switch

The original table in that room

With the 'new' table ..
When we did this 'house full of furniture' project in 2003, I was just discovering the work of Charles and Henry Greene. While never one to make slavish reproductions, I found their work interesting, challenging and inspiring on many levels. Still do .... So, this particular room has mostly G&G inspired detailing, but surprisingly, when I switched out the tables, the new table did not feel completely out of place ... The hanging lantern over the table is still one of our favorite pieces. The whole room though is in the middle of the house and is IMPOSSIBLE to photgraph effectively. Someday, I might have to call in the professionals ...

Testing the fit and pin locations of the new leaf, seen on the right with the first coat of finish ..

This picture shows the understructure of the table that allows te table to expand to 8' with only a single pedestal ... We've made other central pedestal tables like this using this Hafele hardware and we're always surprised what you can get a way with ... Biggest one so far with a single pedestal opens to almost 10' ...

We did the routing for the original inlay by hand, but Trevor did the new leaf on the cnc ... beautiful tool pathing ...

The burl inlay itself is a series of equal triangles, cut and fitted to lines drawn on the wood below .. Faster than using the cnc ...

He then lined it up with the old leaf, put masking tape on the old leaf to mark the pin centers and drilled for the pins with our old doweling jig ...

It lined up really well and at this point we took it for the prefit ... I've got some detail photos of other furniture in the room and I'll post them later ...

Looking up into the lantern

3 comments:

Jeff Branch said...

You guys seem to really crank out the projects. On average, how many projects do you have going at a time?

Dorset Custom Furniture said...

see the post above Jeff ... Thanks for the inspiration ...dan

Izzy said...

Those tables are beautiful, I occupy a table for my room, which is small, is to put my lamp and my generic viagra, and my TV control, these things are so important in my room!