a round expanding walnut dining table

all done ... 1/23/12 .. off to new york city in the morning ... great project with local designer amy thebault ... a little hard to photograph, but you get the idea ... nice walnut; crotch figure inlay in the center of the top, continuing on to the leaves ... pretty wild, and we love it ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
with the 2-22" leaves ... 64 x 108 when fully extended ...
with the leaves in ..
center inlay ... photos below are 'in process' ... all for now ...

i see i have been a little lazy here with my writing at the start of the new year ... all those holidays i guess and getting organized again now that they are over ... had some people out sick ... on and on, you know ... anyway, we did start an interesting table this week. it's american black walnut; it's round; 64" in diameter, with two 22" leaves and some fancy crotch walnut inlay in the center. it looks like it's going to be a nice one. click the photos to enlarge them ...
the general idea came from one of my designer clients, amy thebault, of thebault design, inc. down the road a piece in manchester depot. we added or touches and changed a few things and now it's starting to take shape. we started, as usual, with some irion lumber walnut. nice big wide boards makes our life easy. after we glued up the halves, trevor cut them to shape and routed for the inlays. i have some video footage somewhere of that and i'll try to get it up here soon.
he also cut the slightly darker peruvian walnut borders and set them in before fitting up the shop made veneer inlays.
again with the nails for the first step. if you've been reading for a while, you've seen all this before ...
below though is the after cuts from trevors cutting of the main blanks that we then resawed into the .1" thick veneers.
he thought he had it all planned out so that all the triangles would be the same or half of that same triangle but ...
he didn't ... design aliens invaded his programming and caused a malfunction. luckily he discovered it before he cut all of the leaf inlays and there was no harm done, except to his pride.
we glued them all into the table pieces in the veneer bag, and then, for a special treat we took them a mile down the road to our neighbor steve holman's shop and ran them through his brandy newly refurbished sandingmaster 37" wide, wide belt sander ... a wonderful experience ...
that saved some planing and scraping time ... it's nice to have a new machine on the block.
here it is, on the base with the runners, but without the aprons, which are finished but for some reason, didn't make the photo ..
interesting design, but not a lot of structure for when the leaves are in so we're planning to add either some 'aprons' which will run from 'leg' to 'leg' and stiffen the structure somewhat, or add some drop down legs for when the table is fully expended.
we'll know more what we have to do once the base is final sanded and glued up and everything is firmly attached. 108" is a big table on a +/- 40" x 40" base ... stay tuned ... more later this week ...