Project Wood Working

a reclaimed chestnut table with self storing leaves

sometimes you start out headed for one place and end up in another. this is one of those times. this table with the self storing pull out leaves on the ends grew from a design we created with another client, in another place, a table with round ends, and without the leaves ... you can see it in the photo below, and loyal readers may remember it from this blog post from may of last year. my current client liked that design but wanted a rectangular table ... no problem i thought ... or almost no problem in the end ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
basically, i thought i would just cut off the ends and add the pull out leaves, which i did in the drawing below, and we agreed it was great ... off we went ...
until we arrived here, where i noticed that sitting at the end of the table would not work, as you can see below, unless the leaves were pulled out. so we discussed this situation ... 3 chairs per side for six, pull out the leaves for 8 or more ...
not so good we decided in the end ... fortunately, since the table was made from reclaimed lumber and already had a few patches, after considering some reconfiguration options, we decided to remove the lower, mostly decorative understructure entirely, giving our client the seating flexibility she desired ... our previous design for pull out leaves was fussy to fabricate and sometimes confusing for the clients to operate, so using another table as a model as well as a nicely written fine woodworking article by tage frid from the 70s, we decided we would improve upon our design. will made a 1/4 size mockup using the math in the article, and we decided this was the way to go ... it works slicker than our old design and by applying the large areas of felt you can see on the bottom of the top below, it works really smoothly and the leaves are protected from scrathcing. you can see a very short you tube video of the opening and closing process at this link.
the top is not actually attached to the base but rather floats up and down via a pair of steel pins in holes in the center of the center frame. you can see that in the video. in the picture above, the leaves are in the closed position but you can see the little guides that will made that are attached to that center frame and keep the leaves square as they open and close. a little shellac and wax on the runners and guides and they slide like a dream.
we routed a half inch wide channel, an 1/8th inch deep, around the felt area so we could staple the felt and not just glue it ... ta dah .. 88" closed to 132" open ... thank you again fine woodworking website ... the online access is the best $15.00 you can spend ...