opening the cherry dining table

i wrote a pretty long blog post about this table a couple of weeks ago, but i never detailed how the runners worked. we had to do a little creative engineering to get the pedestal to open at the right moment, but, in the end, it all worked slick.

this just in from the table's owner ...
there is a you tube video showing the opening and closing the table at this link here
here's how it worked ... click the photos to enlarge them ... above, you can see the channels we routed in the top of the column base. the purpose of those was to stop the first set of runners that the table top halves are attached to after they open far enough to insert only the first leaf. with more than one leaf, we wanted the base to open so the center leg could support the four foot span required for all three leaves.
we added little aluminum pieces to the bottom of the runners and those stop the first two runners after about 9" of travel. you can hear the stops engage in the video. the second runners were screwed to the base top itself and engage to open the pedestal once everyhting seen below is unlocked.
there is a central locking device which sam fabricated in the metal shop to secure the base of the pedestal when it's closed ...
this shows the two halves opened to the 'one leaf' position
as usual, we burned through some mdf mockups figuring the whole thing out but, as usual, it was worth it ... great client .. great project ...

hangin' with eero

one of my designer clients sent me this eero saarinen table base and asked us to make a wood top for it with a 'chalky' flat finish. she chose quartered white oak and we all thought it was a cool form when it went out the door today ... i'm not sure exactly where she found the base, but they are out there somewhere, and, it appears from this link, they can be purchased at a very reasonable price sometimes. since we fixed some danish modern couches and chairs a while back, i have become 're-interested' in the style, which i find simple, yet practical and elegant in an understated way. i kind of think of those danish and swedish guys as 1960's and 70's shakers, without the religion. use what you need, and as little of it as you need, to get the job done.
simple detailing
simple construction
it was originally going to be a walnut top, but that was too dark ....

below is the danish stuff we redoweled and reglued back in february ... some of it was just loose, but we replaced all the dowels anyway, and one piece came to us in a cardboard box. the owner got it from her parents and had never seen is assembled. it wasn't too hard to figure it out, and the stuff was cool and comfortable when we finished with it ...

we refinished it naturally with dark 'danish oil' from watco ... perfect ...
straightforward joinery and minimalist design. badly repaired several times in the past ... we plugged all the holes and replaced the short 3/8ths dowels with 3" 7/16ths dowels ... should be good for another 50 ... i even bought the book, which i have enjoyed
check it out ... great stuff and some interesting design ideas there ...

inspiration's where you find it ...

i was in my outdoor shower the other morning, and was struck by the pattern the sun made coming through the canvas surround ... great inlay pattern, or great veneer patten for a pair of doors (above) on a cabinet, or as you can see below, it might make a great fabric or wall covering. inspiration's where you find it ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
fabric
stratton mountain in the far distance, from inside the shower ...
where the pattern originated ...

transforming a big claro wlanut slab ... into a coffee table

well, the verdict is in ... the slab i wrote about back in april is now a coffee table ... on its way to aspen, colorado this week sometime ... it was almost a desk, and then it was almost a dining table. but this client came up with the both the idea and the bucks and now it is his coffee table ... looks great and i hope he has a big couch ...
4/29 ... on the wall ... waiting to be something ... +/- 50" x 108"
top view
seated view

first step in sam making the legs .. cap the open bottoms of the 3.5" pipe and tap it for adjustable levelers ... then he added the plates that attach them to the table top and painted them black. simple, direct, cost effective and they look great ..
desk concept with slab below before it was finished ...
table concept ... this client switched to and elm slab .... which was also nice ..
the finished elm slab ... arrived in chicago yesterday ...
more slabs, ready to go ... get em while they're hot ...

4/29/11
i bought a nice claro walnut slab last year about this time and the client i bought it for changed her mind to english elm at the last minute ... it's been gathering dust in the finish room for the last year and this week we decided it would be easier to sell if folks could see what it actually looks like ... duh ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
the photo above is from a post about a claro walnut slab table last summer. it shows me and my trustly (25 years), puny 3.5" makita power planer that we use as a first step to quickly remove the rough stuff and flatten it out ... just like a hand plane only louder and less tiring ...
the next step after the power planing is to scrape away the 'tracks' . in the video clip here, you can see the progress will and trevor make on removing the power plane tracks in the 21 seconds of the clip. it's why we don't much believe in belt sanders for table tops and panels. they probably spent about 5 minutes total, including short breaks, to completely prepare the slab for final sanding with our porter cable 505 sander. typically after scraping we start with 150 and finish with 180 ... i have written briefly about the two handled scraper in the past and i still think it is one of the essential tools a furniture maker should master ... with the grain, across the, against the grain ... if it's sharp, it doesn't care ... it leaves a most pleasing hand smoothed, 'ripply' surface similar to a fine antique ... try it !
you probably already have one of these gathering dust somewhere ... learn how to tune it up and get it working. you'll be glad you did ... in this photo, trevor lays out cuts that could straighten the slab somewhat to show a potential client it's 'mellower' shape .. inside the tape it measures +/- 48 x 102.
first coat of finish yesterday .. open studio is coming, and for that, the slab will be hung on the wall using temporary french cleats as on the bed we finished recently ... as i mentioned in this previous post, it is hard for a client to visualize the finished look of a slab in the rough ... more photos later next week ...

an expanding cherry card/dining table

pull up a chair ... this is going to be a long one ... i had started out to write a general discussion of expanding tables since we've had a run of them lately. but, once i looked through the pictures for the table we (mostly) finished last friday afternoon, i decided to write just about that one. we have still got a little fine tuning to do and i may do a few more formal photos if i have the time ... we'll see. i have a lot of pictures of this one already, but it was a really interesting project ... click on the photos to enlarge them ... here we go ..
one of the leaves and the center pedestal leg ...
my client started by combining two of our more interesting and challenging table designs. for the top, he chose the center and edge inlay patterns from this table we made in about 2001 or 2002.
and then he changed the pedestal to this one from our walnut and gilded tooled leather poker table ... here's the cad drawing of the combined design
ahhh ... where did we start? ... with the column i guess
octagonal glue up with 'eased' corners, precut on the table saw before gluing to eliminate the 'points of the octagon so it will just swing over the bed of the lathe ...
i had to demo this technique as will had never turned with the floor mounted tool rest ... i'm a little rusty, but still willing and mostly able ... while will and i were turning the center column, trevor cut three pieces of 3/4 ply, stacked them up and veneered the edges....then he made and glued up the top and bottom veneers and popped them into the veneer bag ... the buttresses are three glued up 3/4 pieces of cherry stacked and fitted to the round column .. by this time, we had already cut the column in half using a variation of our cylinder cutting jig from this post ...
we added some glued up tops to the half columns and six saucer feet to the bottom and at the point below, it was ready for the runners and the top ... note the grooves ... more on them later.the wood for the top was a spectacular matched set of curly cherry boards from irion lumber
trevor cut the 31 x 62" halves on the cnc, and at the same time routed the pockets for the center inlays. he made the borders in a block and sawed them up into 1/10th" thick strips for the center inlay border.those are installed with brads and tape all around the central recesses
and on the leaves too ...
by this time, will had started the blocks for the edge inlay ... we needed about 25 lineal feet of it total ..
it's a fussy one ... you don't get to level up the center block except for a little hand sanding so every piece has got to be dead on for thickness before you glue up the cores of the blocks ...
not quite good enough ...
here's a stack of completed 'cores' awaiting the addition of the .1" thick walnut borders. you get 5 or 6 slices per inch of block ...
once they're applied, the edge is routed and the .07" thick slices of the blocks are installed into the routed grooves with masking tape and flushed up with the table edge when the glue is dry the next day ..
and then it was back to the center inlay. we started with the block of big leaf male burl i bought on my last trip to berkshire products ... they had a ton of maple burl there.
trevor first cut thick, slightly oversize triangles and then sliced them into .1" veneers which he could then bookmatch as he fitted them up ... not counting the edge strips there are 40 triangles of burl in the two halves of the top and the 3 leaves ..
looks hard ... is. kind of, and time consuminghere's the pattern
the curved aprons were glued up a half at a time with big jorgensen band clamps around an mdf 'form' that trevor cut from an old spoilboard from the cnc.then we milkpainted the aprons and saucer feet, black over barn red, sponged and steel wooled and paper toweled them and put the whole thing back together ...

any questions?

actually, there is another subtle complication that almost stumped us but we finally got it and i have to detail that in a separate post later so i don't forget how we did it .. ... like i said, it almost stumped us. it has to do with making the runners open the table base with the little aluminum strips we added to these stock moin runners and the slots in the top of the base that you see in one of the photos above ....
but really, that's enough for now ... 45 minutes of blog writing is my mucho max ...