An ongoing personal project to craft a dining table is finally taking shape. My first foray into welding was to create a base that would play nicely in a mid century modern styled home and support a beefy wood slab of a top. The result is a trapezoidal base of 1x3 steel tube buffed to a satin finish. There were a lot of subtle angles that ended up adding a bit of complexity to cutting and connecting it all together, but in the end came out really nice.
(*Note: that object in the background is a firewood rack that my wife Deirdre built. Turned out great and she had it powder coated black. I'll post a pic of the finished product soon, firewood and all.)
Deirdre and I hauled the table base up to our house in the Puget Sound and tossed a solid core door on it in the meantime as we search for the ultimate top. The door is actually a pretty decent stand in and we like the light tone of it in the context of the darker woods on the floor and cabinets, which has influenced our thinking about what types of wood species we'd consider.
Up until yesterday we thought we were looking for a live-edge slab when out of nowhere a new possibly came our way thanks to (but sadly) the demise of Hollywood Bowl, one of Portland's long-time bowling alleys. Having been a bowling aficionado all my life and "coach" of an advertising league bowling/drinking team it feels like fate. And having bowled at Hollywood many times over the years, there's at least a good possibility that I have in the past actually rolled some frames on what will soon be our dinner table. Now that I think of it, I rolled my first 200+ game at Hollywood (244!). Now how cool would that be?
This chunk of lane is the head portion made of hard maple with inlaid walnut marks. It also has the occasional ding of many a launched/dropped house ball that add to it's authenticity. The slab was 12' long so I cut it down for transport to roughly the size of what the final top will be, which leaves a smaller 4x5 foot piece for yet another project. Even cut down, this thing weighs a ton (not literally, but still freaking heavy). I knew I was in trouble when it got loaded on my truck with a forklift but was going to have to unload it by hand when I got back to the shop. Deirdre and I enlisted the help of our scrappy 14-year-old daughter and got it done, but we may be in some pain tomorrow morning.