Alder Dining Table
Our most recent project is a simple dining table built from Alder for a client in Sun Valley, ID. The client currently has a 30″ x 30″ table made from rustic pine that seats four people and wants to replace it with a table that will seat six.
The dimensions are fairly straight forward. 30″ tall, 30″ wide, and 64″ long with legs that are 2.5″ square. The only part of this project that is unusual, is the lower stringer. With a dining table like this a lower stringer is not structurally necessary. The legs are connected to the upper stringers with mortise and tenon joinery, which makes them plenty sturdy on their own. But, the previous table had a lower stringer that the clients liked, so this one would also.
By using SketchUp, we were able to fiddle with the spacing and figure out the perfect dimensions. If the triangular pieces were angled too far inward, the people sitting on the side would hit their legs. If the angle was to shallow, the people sitting on the end would hit theirs. Once the stringer was designed, we isolated each part, and dimensioned the lengths and angles, ensuring everything would come out perfectly the first time.
We began with 6/4 rough Alder and milled six board down to the final 1.25″ thickness. The table top’s look needed to mimic that of a rough plank top, meaning the joints between the boards needed to be a bit rough and uneven. This was achieved by running a card scraper along the edges with varying pressure.
The five pieces that made up the lower stringer were connected together at the joints using a loose tenon that extended all the way through. Using the angles derived from the SketchUp drawing, we made the cuts with the table saw and a tenoning jig. We assembled the lower stringer pieces by clamping them down to a nice, flat table top, allowing us to measure widths and spacings.
Once we had milled, mortised, tenonned, and distressed the legs and stringers, it was time to glue and clamp all the pieces together.
After all the surfaces were sanded with 220 grit sandpaper, we applied the nice medium brown Old Masters “Provincial” stain, sprayed on two coats of lacquer, wiped on a dark glaze, and sprayed on the final two coats of lacquer.
Here is a close-up shot of the triangular joint on the lower stringer with the through vertical tenon.
Here is what the table top looks like after we applied the one coat of stain and glaze and four coats of lacquer. The glaze is black in color, so after we wipe it away, any glaze that settles in a depression or a groove, such as the seams between the boards, remains dark because the glaze is left behind, thereby accentuating the distressing marks.
The final product, which turned out beautifully!
February 28th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
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