Build a light table with wood8/26/2023 This means, buy wood as thick as possible, so thick you can barely lift it. Because of twist, you lose a LOT of thickness if you want something flat. After taking any twist out the boards (almost guaranteed there will be twist), leave it yet again and come back and check!.In this particular case I left the wood slabs upright indoors in Palo Alto for almost a year before working them. Alternating boards with straight grain will take changes in humidity really well, but gnarly live edge slabs won't. Cut it roughly to size, then let the it acclimatise.I've been buying slabs from him for years, he's the nicest chap and has very good prices in his family business. Jim Baker at Baker Hardwoods knows his trade incredibly well. This means that it's been purchased from a really good lumber yard, kiln dried, by someone who does a lot of work with live edge slabs and knows how long these things take. Make sure the moisture content of the wood is even.So what are the things that we can do to avoid this? Avoiding cupping is particularly difficult, as discovered by my builder friend Pete in London. The wood tends to be much thicker and the grain runs all over the place in all sorts of directions. We choose planks with nice straight grain and alternate the growth rings up and down with each adjacent plank so that if there's a moisture imbalance, the top will stay level overall and not cup or sag. Traditionally when we build table tops out of wood, we use multiple timber planks that are jointed (using a jointer plane, naturally, not a machine!) down the edges and glued together. The shaded area is an additional piece of skirting Pitfalls of working with live edge slabs The green bits are the pegs that would securely push the stretcher against the frame and keep the table rigid. These rather naff sketches show the layout (the original was done in my Windows95 VM which won't launch on the M1 Mac): I decided to go one step further and hold together the ends and the stretcher with wooden pegs so just one tap with a mallet would allow the table to be pulled apart. The great thing about trestle tables is that people can put their legs and feet underneath without hitting a lot of table structure, and a well built trestle table can be dismantled and put back together easily. A trestle table has a couple of ends held together by a stretcher in the middle. Designīecause of the need for flat packing and the high cost of wood, I opted to build a modified "trestle" table. Documented here are a number of the steps and the outcome. However it was an incredibly rewarding projects that has earned many complements. The damn thing ended up being so heavy that I needed help to move it around the house, turn it upside down and put it together. I think wood slab tables with metal legs look really ugly and have little skill involved in building them - take slab, whack through planer, sand, varnish, screw legs on. It would also be a personal challenge to build a thick, 9+ foot table single handedly and move it around. I would build using a 'slab' of wood, because such things look really cool and are very popular.The table must be built using traditional woodworking techniques with no metal fasteners showing and no use of fancy metal brackets.The table needs to be able to be 'flat packed' Ikea-style, so I could ship it from the USA to UK without consuming too much volume. ![]() I love working with walnut, so chose this as the base wood. The table would consist of natural wood slabs, using hardwood common in this part of the world to reflect its American heritage.The table top was so large that many steps had to be completed outdoors. ![]() Since work is always so busy and occupies the vast majority of one's time, the table was built over an approximately 12 month period working occasionally in the evenings and weekends. The dining table would be built in my woodworking shop room in Palo Alto, primarily with hand tools and largely traditional techniques. I wanted to design and build a new dining table for my flat in London, which was lacking such furnishings.
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