Bespoke Dining Table - III - Base Joinery

This is a short series following the creation of a bespoke dining table all the way through the making process, from selecting the timber to delivery to the client.

Each table base is made up of 6 identical (save the profiling of the outside edges) tapering trapezoid profiles.  Due to the scale of the table being made, the staves are laminated up from 2” boards giving a total thickness of over 90mm - maximising the saw blade height of our huge Altendorf saw in the workshop.

Each piece tapers on a compound angle.  In these circumstances it’s worth spending a little extra time to make sure the joinery can be perfect first time.  Several jigs were made to hold each blank correctly - the skew of the jig accounted for the tapering across the length - the tilt of the saw blade cutting the bevel so that each blank mates perfectly to the next.  The combination of a vice-tight jig and newly sharpened rip blade meant that the surfaces were good enough to glue straight off the saw - a massive relief as hand or machine planing at this stage would almost certainly introduce inaccuracies, and therefore compromise strength.

As both the inside and outside faces would receive a profiled face before glue up, I machined a shallow groove into each of the glue faces.  This adds nothing to the strength of the joint, as one might often associate with timber splines on for example a mitre joint.  The large amount of face grain to face grain contact in the joint means that no additional strength is required.  Moreover, these grooves are used to locate one stave perfectly against its neighbour, meaning minimal cleanup is needed when the profiled components are glued together.

The resultant structure resembles a wigwam, wider at the bottom tapering to a near point at the top.  Due to the nature of the design, the radii of the curves on the inside and outside of each profile change as you move along the length of the staves.  In this situation, its impractical to carve these manually therefore the profiles were CNC machined to give perfect repetition of the design.