My daughter recently bought a nice new to her home and needed a proper dining room table. My brother lives in Savannah and has a container full of rough cut exotic hardwoods; massive stuff over 2 inches thick, 8 to 14 inches wide and 10 to 12 ft long most of it. We had tossed around the idea of using some of it to build her a table.
Finally, the schedules worked out and I packed my working clothes and headed to Savannah for a week to get it done. Seven days later working 10 hours a day it was ready to bring to her house where I could spend another week working on the finish.
We chose African Mahogany since he had plenty of it and I liked the color. Six boards for the top each weighing about forty pounds:
We cut them to rough length and ran them through his joiner on one edge and side and used the straight edge to trim the opposite side on the table saw:
We layed out the top boards to see which way made the best fit, then doweled and clamped the two halves one day, putting the halves together the next day:
Delivered it to her house and set it up in her garage to start the finish process: four coats of clear polyurethane buffed with 4/0 steel wool in between coats:
Man, so jealous. I’m a woodturner/worker and love working with wood. That table is absolutely beautiful! Finding good wood to work with these days is getting tough, especially exotic stuff.
That thing will last forever and is so much nicer than anything you can buy in most furniture stores.
Incredible job! Thank you for sharing that with us!
I’ve built a dining room table from 150+ year old wood recovered from my wife’s families printing press. My work does not come close to yours, but I can certainly appreciate the time and effort that was put into that. Made by hand furniture holds a special place for me.
Your daughter sure is lucky to have such a great dad.
Thank you 23. My brother is the true craftsman, I am just a first class flunky. However, good flunkies are hard to find these days. He has even made some guitars out of some of his stash, Zebrano I think. Two for Annie Allman and one for Billy Greer the Kansas bass guitarist.
