The 26' Table is Gone

Well, OK, we finished up the 26' x 9' table on Friday. It took a lot of people and a lot of steps and processes and, when it was done, I was disappointed to find that it almost looked easy ... except when you stop to think about it ... The pieces were made in my shop and then assembled in my garage on temporary bases while the real bases were being fabricated in Steve Holman's shop down the road. I had no place to easily set up either table in my shop while it was pretty easy to clean out my garage ... We did set the 20 foot table up (below) in Steve's shop (after moving two tools and disassembling part of his dust collection system) on its real base to check it and then reassembled it one more time here to check the final fit when we received all the cut granite pieces and fitted the center pieces. Whew .. just writing about his one is a lot of work .... Step by step we go .... click the pictures to enlarge them ..
This is the 20' table ... This previous post is all about that one ... There's a video of Trevor doing a stroll around the table here ...
The base pieces for the 20 foot table in the finishing process ...
Ok ... back at the garage where we disassembled the top of the 26' table from its temporary base,
Swept the floor ...
Brought in the real base parts
Assembled those and leveled them up ..
Added the steel ...
Next, we reinstalled the mdf top pieces and faired the curves and tops of the curved cherry moldings. This assured us that the notches for the steel in the otriggers, and the 56 holes tapped in the 14 piece of steel ( 7 different lengths) lined up with the 56 countersunk holes in the mdf top pieces and that everything would fit and tighten up, and once it gets to its final home, things will go together smoothly. We decided early on that neither table would be assembled after the parts were finished until it reaches its final destination ... As you can see above, there are a LOT of pieces and it's always risky to move things like that around ....
Ready for the granite and panels.. You can see the bolts in this photo. Those bolts were integral to the engineering and support of the cantilevered granite pieces ...
14 of the 18, 2' x 44.6" pieces of granite in place here
All in .. all fitted ... There are 32 places where at least four points come together and line up with other points on the table ... 1 of the 32 places below .. two cherry, two granite and a center panel

By the end of the day Friday ... all the parts that needed veneering and finishing were at Steve's and I was left with a half empty garage and 5 carts with 28 pieces of granite .... party time !!!

There are several other earlier posts so that you can get the whole feel for the process HERE and HERE.

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 ...