Sunday, April 18, 2010

The Biggest Table Yet ...(For us) ... 9' x 26'

I just cut and pasted the info from the previous post below rather than rewrite the whole introduction ... Click the pictures to enlarge them ...
Well, so far, for a refreshing change, it's been a pretty busy month ... Last week, we finished what I thought at the time was a pretty big claro walnut slab table, 3' x 10'. Turns out, it's not so big. We'll be able to put four of them, with chairs, on one of the tables we are designing and building with my neighbor, Steve Holman of Holman Studios ... The first of two tables in this commission is getting under way below and will be 26' x 9'. Then we have another slightly smaller one to build that will be only 8' x 20'. Steve's shop is just down the road from ours and we often collaborate on projects like these tables and like this project we did last year.

Here's the cad drawing ... The top is divided into seven sections with a 2" cherry border on the outside edges, around a 24" band of black granite, with veneered curly maple center sections. There will be a bunch of flip up power and data ports in the center sections. As you can see from the drawing, there will be some engineering involved to support the cantilevered stone. The base will break down into about 10 separate boxes for shipping and assembly on site. We've opted to use 1.5" x 2.5" rectangular steel tubing with 1/4" walls to support the granite. We'd probably prefer to use something taller, like 4", but than we get into a bump your knees issue. We wouldn't want that, for sure. Anyway, we've done a couple of tests and we think it will be ok. We'll know more when we get the actual steel from Melanson's next week. We can't cut the steep angles easily with either of our saws.
The steel has to be cut on a 67.5 degree angle like the timberstrand in the temporary working base above that we set up in the driveway ... It's hard to see, but the lengths of the steel pieces follow the curve of the table top. That's the base for half of the table you see above ...
Trevor and Sam sitting at the end section ... you can see about half of the 44.5" wide second section in this photo too ... It's seven feet across the narrow end where they are sitting and curves out to 9' in the middle ...
Here we've assembled two of the middle sections on the table saws to check Trevor's routing for the Norse connectors and some plywood butterflies we'll use to level the surfaces of the table where they butt together ...
There are a lot of operations to get this thing into shape ... Plus, only one section is less then 8' so we have to index the pieces, cut one end, and then shift them 18" to cut the other end on the cnc. That, actually, worked really slick.
Here's the view of the boys from the halfway point ... The raised sections are templates for the granite cutter ...
This is the drawing for the second table in the commission, a somewhat smaller 8' x 20', 5 piece table ... same deal, different dimensions ...

3 comments:

Jeff Branch said...

That is one massive table! How much of it are you going to have to assemble out doors?

Peggy Farabaugh said...

Can't wait to see the finished product! It's going to be a show-stopper.

Unknown said...

Please share your updated table's photo. I am willing to see that photo. I must say that you've did great task and I really appreciate it.

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