This project has had a long gestation period, longer than
just about anything I have built. Many,
many months ago while visiting my son he mentioned that his dining room table
was in sad shape and he had been looking at replacing it with a nice combination
game/dining room table. Later that year
he sent me a couple of links that to places that sold them and asked my
opinion. Toward the end of the year when I asked him what
he would like for Christmas he said he really did not need anything but
mentioned the game/dining room table as something on his wish list.
At that time, I really had nothing in the que for
projects in the shop and decided to see what I could come up with as a
design. If I could generate a good
design, then we would talk about building.
As you might guess we did get a good design and I agreed
to build the piece. However, rather than
jumping into the construction of this project I am going to take some time to
go through the design process. I started
by sending my son a lot of different photos of various styles. These are not all but give an idea of span of
styles we looked at.
Through discussion of what he liked and wanted in the
piece we narrowed it down to four general styles. A dining surface and a hidden gaming table
below drove the general dimensions. That
left the legs and top apron as areas that were open for variations. I did four drawings with different leg styles
all set up as a gaming table. One of the
early criteria was to have thin pull out trays as a place to hold a drink,
cards, chips, playing pieces and the like.
Here are the renderings with the trays closed.
Here they are with the trays pulled out. Additional
discussion narrowed it down to one style, the square leg with some trim. As we had not made any decision on what to make
the table out of I had shown Oak as the primary wood with a lighter color trim
such as curly maple.
There are two other constraints in this project. One was that the top needed to protect the
game surface below from spills when it was in place and second, for delivery,
the whole piece needs to be able to be broken down to fit inside our 2007 Toyota Camry. Nothing like adding a little bit
extra to the design parameters. The need
to have a top that would protect the game surface, would be removable and not weigh a ton was probably the hardest problem to resolve. The typical solution of individual boards
dropped into an inset just did not meet the requirements. What I finally came up with is a top that
overlays the table and is in two pieces.
It uses a notch in the table to hold it in place, alignment pins where
the two pieces meet plus a gasket. The
overlay will allow spills to sheet off the top and the gasket will prevent or
at least slow down a spill migrating through to the game surface. At least that’s the plan. Here is what the table looked like at this
point. By now the table material had
morphed into a darker oak with oak trim.
The exact stain mix was still to be determined.
This point in the design coincided with the build of the
Photo Club Cabinet and I felt we had a workable plan so I decided to take the
hour’s drive to the hardwood supplier and get material for both projects. Here is the part breakdown for the table as
it was at that time.
Additional discussion and some experimentation of the
size of the game playing surface needed brought about a concern regarding being
able to reach across the tray and the gaming surface. The initial option was to eliminate the tray
leaving only the cup holders.
More study on the size of the playing surface produced
two more changes. First was to eliminate
any pull out tray including the cup holders.
Second was to change the playing surface width to a true 42” which added
about 8” to the width. There were some
other small changes like the addition of a chamfer on the legs to get rid of
the sharp edge and structural changes to allow everything to fit in the car for
transportation. Here is a rendering
before adding the 8” in width and after.
Part way through the design process my son made the
decision to get new dining chairs so we decided to stop the stain color
discussions until he had received them.
We could then work toward a final stain mix. Once he had the chairs I started mixing
various dyes to come up with a recipe that would either match or compliment the
chairs. Fortunately, the store where he
bought the chairs has an outlet here that had the same chair. Some 10 or 12 iterations later I came up with
a couple of recipes that looked to be really close. I cut some thin oak sample pieces, applied stain, sprayed on three coats of lacquer and mailed them off so he could compare them to the actual chairs. I also sent a rendering that had the
stain color matched pretty close to the samples. This sure would be easier if we did not live
a thousand miles apart. One caveat, the
photos of the samples here are pretty close in color to what I sent but don’t
match up exactly. In addition, different
monitors will show colors different, so please keep that in mind as you look at
them.
By now I felt the stain needed just some minor tweaking
to get a match so turned my attention to a final review of the table
itself. While doing that I noticed a
disconnect in edge treatment. While
working on the original design of the legs and trim I clipped the edges at a
45-degree angle to make them a little friendlier to legs and other body parts
when bumping into them. For the dining
top and playing rail I softened the edges with radius. That meant I had two conflicting edge
treatments. After some discussion we
decided to go with a radius to soften the edges. Subsequent to this drawing I also radiused
the trim pieces.
You know how a manufacture says “actual pieces may vary
in color” well that’s what happened when my son got the samples and compared
them against his chairs. The sample that
matched the chair here did not match the chairs at his house. After more discussion on the difference I
generated a couple more samples and ended up going the wrong direction in
correction. More discussion and a video
call created 3 more samples plus an option for trim color. One of these proved to be a color match but a
little too light. For now, I will call
it good but do another darker sample set using cutoffs from the actual table
material.
As the piece had gone through a lot of iterations I
generated a plan with critical dimensions for a final check before
starting. Tweaks now are easy to do
compared to when it shows up for installation, think of the boat built in the
basement that won’t fit out the door.
Of course there were some small edits or at least they
sound like small edits. Most driven by
the new chairs. They have slightly
different dimensions than his old ones so the piece was lengthened by 3/4”, the
legs were made ½” narrower and their height was reduced by 1¾”. I know it does not sound like much but when I
got done there only a few, make that very few pieces that did not change in
size.
If you carefully look at the playing surface it changed
from blue to red. The red goes better
with the new chairs and the rest of the room.
As I did some searching for the actual playing surface I found that we
had pretty much two choices. Solid
colors and a print of the card suits repeated in a ¾” block. However, there are some places that will
print whatever graphic you provide them with onto the surface. I sent him a couple of choices to think
about. One a simple two color pattern
and one a little more exotic.
Next Up – Exploded View, Wood Selection, Layout &
Initial Milling
No comments:
Post a Comment