Introduction

In the 1970’s, my family sold the cherry orchard in Weber County that had belonged to my great grandfather Hubert Adams Macfarlane. My dad and his brother collaborated to haul away and rough mill a fair amount of the wood from the trees in that orchard. This wood sat in my grandmother’s garage for 20 years, and then in my parents’ garage for about 30 years, too valuable to discard but without a lot of attention paid to what might happen to it. I took some at one point and made a butcher block cutting board for my parents, and my uncle made a mantle for his fireplace, but that was about it.

A few years ago I was depressed for a number of reasons and started watching woodworking videos on YouTube; I found the videos of people with saws and chisels and routers and planes making beautiful things soothing. I was interested in woodworking (cf. the butcher block) but lacked the skill or tools or workshop to really get started on it, but the idea came to my mind to eventually make a dining table out of grandpa Bert’s wood. And if there was enough wood, maybe a bench for the table as well.

Table base

In Fall 2022 I had finalized my divorce and decided that this task would help me get ready for whatever happened in my life next. I signed up to take a welding class through UVU continuing adult education, and got access to the Provo High School metals shop. The project I chose for this class was the base for my dining table.

I invited Jenny Ostraff — a good friend from high school — to take the welding class with me. I think we had a great time.

The design wasn’t going to be terribly complex, but I hoped it would be modern and distinctive. I dusted off my old drafting skills and downloaded Fusion 360 through my academic license. The design (shown in Figure 2) would be a solid slab of wood supported by two trapezoidal steel frames welded at the corners.

Figure 2: Table and bench design in Autodesk Fusion 360.

On the pillars of these frames, I used the shop’s plasma cutter to cut a pattern into the steel (see Figure 3 (a)). Jenny is an artist and helped select and transform a good one. A little organic, but very modern. I am a professional civil engineer and I took a class in structural steel design, which helped me know that I needed to potentially worry about how much material I took out of the steel. At the same time, I’m not the right kind of engineer to do this myself. I talked to my colleague Johnn Judd, who helped me determine that the critical buckling load of my table legs is at least 1200 lbs, which I think provides enough of a safety factor over even the most robust feast.

I finished the table base in Spring 2023, and it spent the next couple of years in my parent’s garage while I:

Moved into an apartment without a workspace or enough space for a dining table
Got married to Jenny
Bought a house with a garage and a dining area

Once we had the house, I took the bases to a local metal fabricator who powdercoated it. I was pretty happy with how it all turned out, as seen in Figure 3 (b).

Table Top

Having purchased a house that Jenny and I intend to stay in for a while, we had the necessary space and parameters to finish our table. I worked with my good friend Ben Ward at the BYU carpentry shop to mill the rough boards into something that would be more suitable to work with.

But I didn’t want the table to be my first serious project, given the sentimental (and financial) value of the wood I was going to use. I needed open shelving for my newly remodeled kitchen, and so I bought a bit of cherry wood to use as a warmup.

Doing this little shelving project was also useful in that the leftover wood from that project was what I needed to finish the layout for the table with dimensions that would work for our space. I joined the boards with glue and biscuits into two separate pieces, and then went back to BYU and had Ben help me plane the two pieces into something smooth and nice. The final glue up required a small amount of extra clamping to compensate for bends in the boards (see the back of Figure 6 (b)).

I mounted the table to the base with 1/4 20 carriage bolts, using holes I had drilled into the tops of the bases and threaded brass inserts embedded underneath the table. The bottom of the bases uses leveling feet secured with nuts and finished with acorn nuts. I finished the surface with three coats of oil-based polyurethane to really make the grain of the heritage cherry wood shine.

Wobble

I noticed some vibration in the steel frames as I moved them around the shop, but figured the weight of the table would dampen the vibration. Instead, it turned the table into a pendulum: bumping the top would cause the whole table to shake for several seconds. So I went back to Johnn to talk about how I didn’t understand structural vibrations either. He gave me some ideas, and I decided to use high-strength tensioning cable and turnbuckles to cross-brace the frame. I was prepared to do a full \(X\)-shape, but one diagonal in each frame seems to sufficiently increase the stiffness. Orienting them in the same direction keeps rotational forces from starting vibrations as well.

The cable makes it hard to store chairs at the heads of the table, and it interferes modestly with the person sitting there, but it’s not terrible. And it’s better than wobbling.

Conclusion

I think it looks good. The bench means we can seat either two adults or a battery of nieces.

It was fun to do this project with Jenny who started her involvement as a friend I was talking to about this wild idea I had, and who has seen it to completion as the partner who is thrilled to have it in her dining room forever.