Tree Table Project

[yetloh]

Ply ribs glued into grooves in the legs above the maple trunk block seemed the best solution to the bendiness problem. Quite thin and simple, “low-rise” ribs, glued into routed grooves in the legs would have done the job, but this seemed like an opportunity to do something a bit more dramatic which would further enhance the view through the glass panel in the tabletop. To that end, it seemed natural to use a contrasting material for them – bandsawn American black walnut veneer on 9mm birch ply. The shape settled upon was one that rose from its lowest point about 75 mm above the “trunk” block to a point flush with the tabletop and just outboard of the glass panel. A solid walnut addition to the ply enabled the formation of satisfying curves on the edge which would be visible through the glass. While, in this view, the rib appears somewhat heavy and bulky, this is not apparent when they are seen, as intended, through the glass panel in the tabletop.

The first step was to create templates for the shape of the curves needed to fit accurately into the legs onto white faced hardboard. A separate template was need for each leg to accommodate small differences in curvature between each leg. As can be seen from the photograph, the legs were already prefinished ready for final assembly and glue-up at this stage, so the need to stiffen them was quite a major setback to progress.

With the curvature of the leg surface traced, the inner curve, where it would fit into the groove, was created by marking a parallel line 12 mm inside it for the section to fit into the groove of that depth. These brass discs in various thicknesses (bought as a set from Axminster) were perfect for this and have been invaluable over the years for setting depth stops and jobs like this – much easier than trying to mark from a 6” rule.

Routing the 12mm grooves in the completed legs was rather more exciting than I would ideally have liked given the amount of time and effort already invested in them.

Careful hand shaping was needed rebate the tip of the rib so that it overlapped the groove and merged seamlessly into the curve of the leg. The fiinished detail can be seen inthe photo at the top of this post – I love this sort of stuff!

Here are the four top ribs showing the solid walnut blocks, Domino jointed onto the ply ribs, before shaping.

These concerns about excessive flexibility in the upper part of the legs led me to decide to create further ribs to prevent flexing in the lower section of the legs – the last thing I wanted was to get the whole thing glued up and then find there was still a problem. Without the need for a clear section in the centre, the lower ribs could be simplified by making those for opposing legs in one piece with a cross halving joint in the centre; these can be seen at the back in the photograph. An added benefit of the bottom ribs is that they further the tree inspiration by blocking the view through the legs (roots) without adding visual bulk. Of course, they also eliminated the need for the stainless stays, but I decided to keep them anyway.

One of the lower ribs with halving joint cut.

Glue-up next time.

Jim

 

[sawtooth-9]

What a lovely piece. Useful and beautiful, and so worth the work.
There is some real skill involved here - more than I have, so I will just "drool"

 

[MF1000]

interesting lateral thinking approach

 

[yetloh]

What a lovely piece. Useful and beautiful, and so worth the work.
There is some real skill involved here - more than I have, so I will just "drool"

Thanks Sawtooth, I am looking forward to getting to the creation of the table-top, which is in some ways less conventional than the pedestal although that is not obvious from the photo at the top of the thread, and posed some problems needing very careful planning.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

interesting lateral thinking approach

Thanks MF100, quite a lot of that was needed with the table-top which I will get to soon.

Jim

 

[baldkev]

Hi Jim,
How long do you think the table took to make ? in the initial post you said a lot was done on 5 day courses ( i guess they have all the kit you could want ) so I'm thinking you must have spent 5 days making, then planning / problem solving inbetween the courses?
Fantastic work

 

[yetloh]

Hi Jim,
How long do you think the table took to make ? in the initial post you said a lot was done on 5 day courses ( i guess they have all the kit you could want ) so I'm thinking you must have spent 5 days making, then planning / problem solving inbetween the courses?
Fantastic work

Hi Kev,

It was a very expensive table in terms of 5 day courses! Took me 3 years overall, very much part-time but I have no clue as to how many hours.

Many, many hours thinking and planning before I even started and, as you surmise, lots more in between courses - thinking and doing. You are quite right about them having all the kit but help from fellow students was an important factor, especially for the steam bending. That help was very much reciprocated, particularly when it came to their glue-ups. Our tutor was firmly of the view that a glue-up should be done in one hit on the basis that staged glue ups can result in small cumulative errors which can leave you in real trouble because they cannot be fixed. It makes for a more frantic process but careful planning and lots of hands can be a real help and careful measuring at the end will identify any discrepanncies which can be corrected by judicious adjustment of clamps. I have stuck with this approach and it has served me well.

Jim

 

[xy mosian]

Thanks Clogs. I think my daughter is pleased with it. What skills I have I must credit to my good friend and West Dean tutor, Bernard Allen. He has always encouraged me and I have never once seen him suggest or imply to a student that something might be beyond them. I am sure that this is part of the reason why I have never been put off doing something becayse I have,'t done it before. I have had plenty of disasters but always just got on and started again if necessary. The downside is that I am painfully slow so could never have made a living from furniture.

Jim

This is a tremendous write up .. and end result.
I am sure, as you say above, that the most valuable thing to give anyone is knowledgeable encouragement. The drip, drip, drip of the oposite can drain anyone for life.
Geoff.

 

[yetloh]

Thanks Geoff, I am really glad that you are enjoying my meanderings. It is often hard to know how much to say, so I try not to overthink it and just go with my instincts.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

Glue-up time.

This was a long and complicated process, the details of which I recalI only hazily. Suffice it to say that there was no full dry run, not least because we knew that it would be very much trial and error, the chances of remembering it in detail would be small and we had a Plan B.

The keen eyed may have spotted that, in this photograph, the pedestal is actually upside down. Rather than a full dry run we had an early afternoon “dry” session to get our heads round the glue-up process and experiment to see what might work best. You might also have spotted the bottle of PVA glue but that is not what we used. We used Titebond Liquid Hide Glue, which has two big advantages for this sort of job; first, it has a very long open time – at least an hour – and second it is reversible with water and heat, so if the worst came to the worst, we could take it all apart and start again (Plan B).

Like a lot of West Dean glue-ups, this one took place after our evening meal when, if you want them, there are a couple of hours quiet time for a considered process before the workshops are locked up for the night. The glue-up was partly bench and partly floor based and this was the initial set up which was gradually tweaked.

Back on the bench, the lower clamps were found to be not doing a lot after the initial squeeze-in of the lower leg braces, so were dispensed with. It may be that the, apparently unnecessary, stainless steel tie bars played a part in this.

A bird’s nest of clamps.

It was a real pleasure to come in to the workshop before breakfast the next morning, remove all the clamps and find that everything had gone to plan; the fruition of a huge amount of planning and work and a result that, to my eyes, was even better than I had originally envisaged.

The next major step was the table-top but before we get to that, some unfinished business. If you have been with me from the beginning, you may recall that a problem to be addressed later was the variation in overall height of the steam bent legs. Every piece of wood is unique, so it is unsurprising that each piece will spring back by a different amount after it is bent and dried. Although I had selected the most closely matched leg blanks, there were still significant differences in the height of the legs in the assembled pedestal – up to 15mm. Such variations are not a problem where the curve is constrained at each end, as in the bow of a Windsor chair, but were definitely a problem here. During assembly I had taken care to ensure that the discrepancies would be at table-top rather than floor level. My solution was to glue ash pads to the top surface and blend them in as unobtrusively as possible.

This is the thickest of the pads. Fortunately, they are hidden just under the tabletop, so are hardly conspicuous.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

The tabletop

The table-top design was to be an important part of the overall tree inspiration of the piece from the outset. The furniture design world is littered with round tables with circular inlay made up of radial plain or burr veneers segments; some of these are very beautiful but, for me they do not convey the essence of a tree’s canopy. I wanted to create a stylised representation of a tree canopy viewed from above with veneers suggesting the leaves on branches, with lower shaded branches suggested by outer segments in a darker veneer. Given that a real tree’s branches vary in size and orientation, the canopy outline will be randomly irregular. To suggest this, I planned to have radial segments varying in both width and the radius of their outer curve. Additionally, some segments have the centre point of this curve on the centre line of the segment while, on others, it is offset. All this randomness was, of course, carefully planned using TurboCad.

Of course, realising this vision was highly dependent on veneer choice and, to this end, my wife and I drove to drove to east London on a dull winter’s day to visit Capital Crispin Veneer’s Stratford warehouse (since demolished to make way for the Olympic Park). There we spent most of a freezing cold morning exploring there amazing stock of beautiful veneers. After much deliberation it was clear that this wonderful burry maple, where the burr areas are connected by a quilted effect, was the only one would create just the effect that I wanted. I bought significantly more than I thought I would need, plus some burr elm for the small “shaded” segments. We emerged satisfied but having spent what, even now, seems like a large some of money.

The finished table-top.

Next time we will start on what was a lengthy process of realising this vision.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

The starting point for the table-top was a five-sided core of 19mm birch ply. To this were glued and biscuited mitred sections of 21mm sycamore, mounted centrally onto the ply edges to create a 1mm recess on either side to accommodate the veneers. If I were doing this now, I would use Domino joints to achieve very accurate central placing but, at the time I had only a biscuit jointer which I have never found to be so precise, and the outcome was small variations in the depth of the recess which I had to remedy later.

With the basic top made, the first step was to make it circular. The approximate shape was cut out with two people feeding it through the bandsaw – a rather hairy experience given its 1200 mm diameter and the need to keep it square to the blade, but we managed it. The edge was then tidied up with a router and long trammel.

This left me with the desired outside shape but with a five sided veneer recess on both sides which needed to be extended into the sycamore edging. Forming the edge of the recess was straightforward on the underside where the ash veneer is arranged in a simple circle of similar segments, using the same trammel/router combination as for the outside edge of the top.

The upper surface was another matter altogether with all those intersecting arcs of different radii and varied centres.

This is a full size print-out of the table top CAD drawing. I have manipulated the photo for maximum contrast and if you zoom in you should be able to see that each arc is shown with its radius and centre point. Each radius is numbered in pencil with arcs with common radii having the same number. The drawing was taped to the table top and each centre point marked through, and drilled with a 3 mm drill to a depth of about 10mm, and the information relating to that arc transferred to the table top underneath. This gave me the starting point for forming the veneer recess.

Creating the inlay recesses in the upper surface of the sycamore was more complicated. The CAD drawing of the tabletop design shows the centre point of every veneer segment and the radius of its curve. A local printshop was able to print this out full size so that I could tape it to the top and drill a 3mm hole at each of the centre points including the centre of the top itself. The print was then removed and the radius to be routed from each drilled point pencilled onto the top.

However, creating the recesses is only half the story. To cut veneer segments to fit those curved recesses exactly I needed to make accurate MDF templates around which I could run my scalpel. Inner and outer curves like these are most easily created using a router and trammel allowing the router and its cutter to be rotated around the centre point.

This is a CAD drawing of my jig. The difficulty is that cutting matching internal and external curves demands a trammel jig which allows the pivot point for each radius to be moved by exactly the diameter of the router cutter with complete reliability. This jig does that, with fixed pivot holes for each radius required. The jig has two main plates. The upper plate has a pivot hole for each radius. This plate is fixed directly to the router and was used on its own to rout the internal curves in the lipping. For this operation, the small bridging plate close to the cutter, which prevents the router from tipping when the lower plate is in use, is removed.

The complete jig fitted to the router.

A detail shot of the pivot and mounting arrangement.

To create the external curves on the veneer cutting templates the (lower) offset plate is attached to the top plate via the screw through the long slot and the upper plate’s trammel point for the desired radius – just visible in the photo. The cut is then made using the offset plate’s trammel point as the pivot. The accuracy of the distance between the two holes in the lower plate (the diameter of the router cutter) is critical to obtaining precisely matching curves which ensure that the veneer fits its recess perfectly.

The complete set-up on my big DeWalt DW625 – a great workhorse of a router. Note that the plunge grips have been removed and replaced by Woodrat plunge bars. Designed for use when the router is mounted in the Woodrat they also work very well for general use, allowing a much more progressive and controlled plunge simply by squeezing the two bars together. When the desired depth of cut is achieved this can easily be held with one hand while the plunge is locked off with the other.

Next time, planning done, some actual routing .

Jim

 

[akirk]

That is amazing and very clever, but as I read it I was wondering whether a cricut or laser to cut it might have been easier?

 

[yetloh]

That is amazing and very clever, but as I read it I was wondering whether a cricut or laser to cut it might have been easier?

Thank you, a good point, it was a few yeaars ago but I'm laser veneer cutting was available then. It never occurred to me and while the basic design was done in CAD which would have worked well for laser cutting, the original design lacked the glass panel and and the modifications to accommodate it and the small segments around it were very much done on the hoof with the aid of a paint tin (!) as will become apparent in a later post.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

Thought In had posted this a week or more ago, but evidently not so belatedly, here is the next instalment.

For long term stability it is normally important that a veneered surface is balanced by corresponding veneers on the underside. This is not an iron rule because a rigid cabinet can be veneered only on the outside and historically this would often be the case, but this tabletop is essentially unrestrained and veneer on one side only could easily cause it to go out of flat. So, on the basis that it was sensible to start with the easier part, I decided to start by making the recess for the balancing veneer on the underside, where the recess required was just a simple circle. The initial cut into the sycamore was simple enough using a trammel pivoting on the centre point of the table-top with the router running on the sycamore edging and a 1mm cutter projection to define the extent of the recess to be veneered.

The next step was routing out the sycamore inboard of the recess edge ring already cut. For this I used a two-rail jig which spanned the tabletop resting on the sycamore edging. the router rested on this while traversing the area removing the waste material. I don’t have any pictures of this jig but I hope you get the idea. The next step was routing out the sycamore inboard of the recess edge ring already cut. For this I used a two-rail jig which spanned the tabletop resting on the sycamore edging. the router rested on this while traversing the area removing the waste material. I don’t have any pictures of this jig but I hope you get the idea. The jig was fitted with stop fences to prevent the router travelling past one of the rails and tipping the cutter into the work.

The fully levelled recess. As can be seen the process has also taken care of some irregularities between edging and the ply core. The result wasn’t perfect but was easily cleaned up with a block plane here and there.

The 12mm flat bottomed cutter produced a lovely crisp recess edge all the way round.

Now for the upper side. By this stage a lot of time had already been invested in the table top and I was getting paranoid about a mistake sending me back to the beginning. Although I had trammel pivot holes for every arc, each accompanied by a note of the arc’s radius, I decided to draw on to the surface every arc and the line of every segment joint.

As further insurance against brain fade I drew additional lines 12mm inside the intended recess edge to represent the area to be routed out with the trammel jig and used a maer pen to highlight the remaining areas of sycamore which would be routed out freehand with the twin rail flattening jig used on the underside.

In a departure from the process used on the underside, I did the freehand routing first, then used the trammel jig to cut the outer arcs at their designated radii.

Lastly, a word about trammel pins. Some years ago, I bought a box of these 40 x 3mm hardened steel masonry nails. They're not great for their intended purpose because the smooth surface doesn't grip that well in masonry. But they make excellent trammel pins, having very sharp points and being an actual very consistent 3.16 mm thick which makes for a nice tight fit in a 3mm hole.

Veneering next time.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

As supplied, the burry maple veneers (top) were anything but benign, looking like relief maps of the South Downs. The elm (above) wasn’t much better with many more, but smaller lumps and bumps than is evident from the photo. Even worse, the maple in particular was rather brittle, so cutting it to fit perfectly and then gluing the segments exactly in register would have been tricky to put it mildly. There are various recipes for taming veneers, many consisting of little more than water combined with pressing. Bearing in mind that I envisaged the process taking more than a day or two I couldn’t see how this would ensure they remained flat for long and would do nothing to counter their brittleness once they started to dry. So I decided to use this rather weird and wonderful recipe from the late William Lincoln’s book The Complete Manual of Wood Veneering.

Cascamite urea formaldehyde glue 2 measures
Plain wheat flour 1 measure
Water 3 measures
Glycerine 1.5 measures
Methylated spirit 1 measure

Stirred thoroughly and used cold. The potion is placed in a shallow tray through which the veneer is passed and then hung up to dry.

But it would have been impractical to treat each whole veneer leaf. So first, the areas of veneer appropriate for each segment had to be selected so as to form a coherent overall design and then cut out a little oversize. This was done very carefully with scissors and gave pieces of a manageable size for treatment.

The West Dean workshops are used for a wide variety of courses various including woodcut making and printing to various fabric treatment techniques, so the washing line and pegs available proved very handy – probably the first and last time they were used for a furniture course.

Lincoln recommends that the treated veneers are pressed lightly and then firmly to flatten them gradually. But after a successful trial in the Airpress I elected to use this approach throughout . The veneer segments were interleaved with polythene sheet in small groups with 18mm birch ply cauls on top and then placed in the Airpress bag for a couple of hours pressing. The cauls were rounded over on each edge to aid air evacuation on the underside and to prevent sharp edges on the upper side from puncturing the vacuum bag.

The result was very much easier to work; much flatter and, in terms of flexibility and resistance to breakage, more like leather than fragile commercial veneer. I have little idea of the function of each ingredient but suspect the glycerine is important to the treated veneer’s workability. It is worth noting that Lincoln also suggests treatment with wallpaper paste as a simpler alternative, but I would be surprised if it produced a result with quite the same combination of flatness, flexibility and robust workability which is maintained over time.

Next time, shaping and gluing the veneers.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

Bit of a break since my last post, but here is another instalment.

The first stage in veneering the upper face of the table top was to get in the small outer segments of burr elm. As with all the segments the curves where they abut the sycamore lipping were cut with a scalpel around an MDF template of the predetermined radius.

Having masked off the pre-drawn shape of the finished segment to minimise subsequent clean-up, Cascamite UF glue was applied with a roller…

… covered with a piece of plastic sheet and clamped in place with a piece of MDF as a pressure plate.

When cured the oversize inserts were routed back using the trammel jig, creating continuous curves to accommodate the large adjacent burr maple segments.

The over-sized burr maple segment blanks were reduced to exact size, again starting with the curve, using a scalpel and the template of the appropriate radius.

The long edges were then trimmed to fit . A normal shooting board is unsuitable for this because the veneer needs to be held very accurately and completely flat. So I made this simple but effective version consisting, like most shooting boards, of two overlapping pieces of sheet material (MDF here). In place of the usual end stop, it has a clamping bar which whose bottom face is curved along its length. When tightened down at each end it clamps securely along the whole veneer edge….

… allowing the edge to be shot very precisely, for which I used my only Lie Nielsen tool, the sadly now discontinued No.9 iron mitre plane, which is a real joy to use for this sort of thing.

Gluing of the large burr maple segments was carried out in stages, starting with a single large segment. From there, the segments either side of the first were fitted and pressed, and so on until all pieces apart from at the centre were complete. All of this was accomplished with roller spread Cascamite and the Airpress using a pair of rounded-over MDF cauls in the vacuum bag. As can be seen from the photograph, the end result of all this gluing and pressing was an irregular unveneered section in the centre. Because the glass panel was unplanned, the CAD drawing did not take account of it so, for the centre, it was a case of making it up as I went along, which I will describe in a later post.

The veneering process was generally very successful with all the curves and straight edges meeting perfectly, but there were a few glitches. Applying glue with a roller is an excellent technique but has its own problems. The main one is the difficulty of judging the adequacy of the glue film created. Here there is a balance to be struck. The glue film needs to thick enough for good adhesion but not so thick as to result in bleed through to the show face of the veneer, where it can create uneven colour when finish is applied. If the film is too thin, glue starvation can result in bubbles appearing in the finished surface. I did have a few of these and, again, will describe how I dealt with them in a later post.

Jim

 

[yetloh]

Last Instalment.

I used the dummy MDF tabletop in this rather fuzzy photo to visualise the overall impact of the viewing panel and in terms of the view through it. This led me to decide that its actual size should be a bit smaller.

With this decision made, an actual hole needed to be routed in the tabletop. But first, I fancied some arcs of burr elm around it and they would need to go in before the hole was created so as to create a continuous circular hole i the overall veneer design. These elm arcs wouldn’t really fit in with the tree canopy inspiration but I thought they would visually enhance it and I don’t believe in getting too hung up on sticking to the purity of an idea. I’ll leave you to decide if I was right about this.

Not being part of the CAD drawing, the arcs had to be created the old-fashioned way, with the aid of a scalpel and suitably sized paint tin to cut the recesses and the matching but oversized pieces of veneer.

Making the hole was straightforward with the aid of a trammel and a bar fixed underneath to retain the central piece of ply that would be released in the middle. Straightforward, but rather nerve racking given the investment of time already made in the tabletop and the risk of ruining the veneers, but all went well.

Having made the hole, it needed a sycamore lipping (in keeping with the outer edge of the tabletop) with a rebate to support the glass. The starting point was these four pieces which were glued together and routed to a circle to fit the hole.

The only slight fly in the ointment was that my offset trammel jig wasn’t designed to accommodate matching inner and outer circles this small. This meant the trammel adjustment to account for the diameter of the cutter for inner and outer cuts had to be made by measurement. The result was that the insert turned out to be smaller than the hole by something less than 1mm.

Fortunately, some judiciously sanded down black walnut veneer filled the gap perfectly, creating a dark string line and turning an error into a nice detail – just visible on the photo above.

All that then remained was to rout a 6mm deep groove in the sycamore so that the glass toughened glass would sit flush with the table surface, followed by an overlapping circle all the way through to create the finished viewing aperture.

Finishing

The underframe is finished with shellac which was applied to all components before assembly, with gluing areas masked off. For the tabletop, I wanted a hard-wearing surface and to add as little colour to the sycamore as possible. For this reason, I chose spray applied pre-catalysed melamine lacquer which is completely clear and colourless and does not yellow with age.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to carve a sycamore leaf that had fallen from the canopy and come to rest in the crook of the branches below. Never having done any serious carving before I did a weekend carving course locally to learn the basics.

Carved in lime, the edges are thinned back to make it look more leaf-like from above. It is mounted on piece of dowel to raise it a little off the top of the pedestal’s central maple block.

You may have noticed that, in the photograph, the leaf stalk is missing - it broke off in transit to the photographic venue (the then art gallery at West Dean College, now a tapestry weaving studio) but now has a replacement reinforced with a stainless-steel pin. In case you are wondering, the table does not have under-top lighting; this shot was achieved with four A4 sheets of white paper taped to the underside of the top and an Anglepoise lamp – simple but very effective. I should note that the credit for this photograph and all the other images of the completed table in this thread should go to my daughter, Helen.

Well, that’s almost all folks. I hope you have enjoyed the journey.

I will be taking some time off from major posts to catch up on a long overdue writing job for a very good friend . However, there could be. a sequel to this saga. The Tree Table was intended to be a one-off project but, to put right a major crime against aesthetics, it turned out to be followed by an even longer project in the form of four chairs.

If there is sufficient interest I may be persuaded to post a thread about them.

JIm

 

[Fred48]

Last Instalment.

View attachment 156935

I used the dummy MDF tabletop in this rather fuzzy photo to visualise the overall impact of the viewing panel and in terms of the view through it. This led me to decide that its actual size should be a bit smaller.

With this decision made, an actual hole needed to be routed in the tabletop. But first, I fancied some arcs of burr elm around it and they would need to go in before the hole was created so as to create a continuous circular hole i the overall veneer design. These elm arcs wouldn’t really fit in with the tree canopy inspiration but I thought they would visually enhance it and I don’t believe in getting too hung up on sticking to the purity of an idea. I’ll leave you to decide if I was right about this.

View attachment 156936

Not being part of the CAD drawing, the arcs had to be created the old-fashioned way, with the aid of a scalpel and suitably sized paint tin to cut the recesses and the matching but oversized pieces of veneer.

Making the hole was straightforward with the aid of a trammel and a bar fixed underneath to retain the central piece of ply that would be released in the middle. Straightforward, but rather nerve racking given the investment of time already made in the tabletop and the risk of ruining the veneers, but all went well.

View attachment 156937

Having made the hole, it needed a sycamore lipping (in keeping with the outer edge of the tabletop) with a rebate to support the glass. The starting point was these four pieces which were glued together and routed to a circle to fit the hole.

View attachment 156938

The only slight fly in the ointment was that my offset trammel jig wasn’t designed to accommodate matching inner and outer circles this small. This meant the trammel adjustment to account for the diameter of the cutter for inner and outer cuts had to be made by measurement. The result was that the insert turned out to be smaller than the hole by something less than 1mm.

Fortunately, some judiciously sanded down black walnut veneer filled the gap perfectly, creating a dark string line and turning an error into a nice detail – just visible on the photo above.

View attachment 156939

All that then remained was to rout a 6mm deep groove in the sycamore so that the glass toughened glass would sit flush with the table surface, followed by an overlapping circle all the way through to create the finished viewing aperture.

Finishing

The underframe is finished with shellac which was applied to all components before assembly, with gluing areas masked off. For the tabletop, I wanted a hard-wearing surface and to add as little colour to the sycamore as possible. For this reason, I chose spray applied pre-catalysed melamine lacquer which is completely clear and colourless and does not yellow with age.

View attachment 156940

I couldn’t resist the temptation to carve a sycamore leaf that had fallen from the canopy and come to rest in the crook of the branches below. Never having done any serious carving before I did a weekend carving course locally to learn the basics.

View attachment 156941

Carved in lime, the edges are thinned back to make it look more leaf-like from above. It is mounted on piece of dowel to raise it a little off the top of the pedestal’s central maple block.

View attachment 156942

You may have noticed that, in the photograph, the leaf stalk is missing - it broke off in transit to the photographic venue (the then art gallery at West Dean College, now a tapestry weaving studio) but now has a replacement reinforced with a stainless-steel pin. In case you are wondering, the table does not have under-top lighting; this shot was achieved with four A4 sheets of white paper taped to the underside of the top and an Anglepoise lamp – simple but very effective. I should note that the credit for this photograph and all the other images of the completed table in this thread should go to my daughter, Helen.

Well, that’s almost all folks. I hope you have enjoyed the journey.

I will be taking some time off from major posts to catch up on a long overdue writing job for a very good friend . However, there could be. a sequel to this saga. The Tree Table was intended to be a one-off project but, to put right a major crime against aesthetics, it turned out to be followed by an even longer project in the form of four chairs.

View attachment 156943

View attachment 156944

If there is sufficient interest I may be persuaded to post a thread about them.

JIm

Stunning design and craftsmanship. Hope you post a thread on the chairs.
Thanks for sharing
Fred

 

[foxbat]

Great job and the chairslook even better! Thanks for sharing