Thread: Dining table build

It's been April since I last posted an update, but I've been working away on weekends and school breaks; 2 hours here, an hour there and have made a bit of progress.

Some of the thing that have been done since the last post:

23 shooting board.jpg

Some of the chevron pieces were out by a degree or so, which mightn't seem much, but over the length of the table it made it impossible to get the pattern to fit. So I made a shooting board to trim them to the correct angle. "Them" being all 160 ends.

24 trim glueup.jpg

Before glueing the chevrons into place I glued the edge trim on to give a reference to butt the chevrons against. There were a few interesting problems and solutions in getting the edge square internally and externally and in exactly the right place on each half so they line up properly with each other.

25 chevron layout.jpg

The dry fitout - some pieces go better with others, so getting the correct layout was very important. Numbering was my way of trying to avoid unnecessary stuffups (necessary ones are fine however). It seemed to work ok.

26 first half glueup.jpg

And the glue-up of the first half of the top complete. It took just on 2 hours to get all the pieces down. Doing it on a day that was only 12 degrees meant I had plenty of time to shift and 'finesse' things before the glue set.

27 second half chevrons.jpg
Chevrons being sorted for the second half of the top.

28 top together.jpg

And here's the complete top all glued up. Care and too much time taken in sorting out the trim means that the ends do line up perfectly and the chevrons on each half line up almost perfectly (out less than 1/2 cm over 2.4m). It looks patchy because I ran the plane over to roughly level out each half. Still to do on the finish of the edge trim moulding, fill the gaps/holes etc... in the top with epoxy, flatten both halves together, and finish/polish it. But I won't do that until I have built the base and attached it. The garage floor where I'm building it is not what you would call even, and the two old sawhorses are so warped and crooked, they could be politicians.

29 dressing the legs.jpg

So I started planing the joists from the old house to make the legs/base. It's taking about 3/4 of an hour to an hour to get each one DAR, but since I enjoy planing, that's okay.

Finally, 1 year and 8 months since starting, I've found the time to finish the dining table (a mere 9 months since I last worked on it).

The base looks something like this:
base.jpg

Once I built it I could move the whole table from my in-laws into our garage (which has a much flatter floor), so I could flatten and finish the top.

I coated it with danish oil;
oiling the top.jpg

pulled it all apart and moved it into the dining room for reassembly:
ready for assembly.jpg

And this is how it looks all together:
finished light.jpg finished dark.jpg

It will fit 12 people around it. Here it is with 6 chairs around half of it. We had dinner around it tonight and there's plenty of room with this spacing.
with chairs.jpg

So there it is, my first (and possibly last) dining table build. I'm pretty happy with it and, more importantly, my wife is very happy with it.

Wow! That's one good-looking table.