Rebuilding a Table
Last year I accomplished a personal goal of mine: build a nice dining room table. It was the culmination of a ton of projects I’ve done over the years, and this showcased a lot of skills I’ve picked up in 4 or so years of woodworking.
One of the most challenging parts was the legs, which I decided should be 1.75” dowels. These dowels were not only a huge pain in the ass to make, but they ended up being the source of structural problem that bugged me for months.
Turns out, those dowels were either too thin, or the way they were connected to the apron was too slight, that the (very heavy) top could easily shift the weight around. It wasn’t that the table wobbled so much as it could twist in place:
This drove me nuts.
So a couple weeks ago I decided to rebuild just the legs of the table, and while I’m at it make some matching benches too. This would hopefully address my issues with the table moving around.
I started by building the bench legs to get the process down, and then built the table frame.
The bench legs felt great, but I think the table legs were too big for this design. I noticed it didnt twist, but it did “rack” side to side. I think forces on the frame were just too much at that size. Just to double check, I attached the top to the new legs just to see if that would help – it didn’t.
I was pretty disappointed.
I was trying to keep the design of this table as minimalist as possible, but I think I just hit some hard limits with what’s possible. I scrambled and put in some cross braces with the scrap I had left, and the frame is now rock solid.
As annoying as this whole thing was, I think this table and benches turned out great.
Cute cat!