Bespoke Dining Table - VII - Crafting the Table Top Surface

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.

With the frame complete, attention turned to the tabletop. The boards were chosen at the timber yard for their dimensional stability and grain match, and were still in boule - meaning that, stacked together, they still formed the shape of the unsawn trunk, layered in sequence. The central board (the one containing the pith at the centre of the tree) was rejected for excessive splitting, and the first board on either side of it was chosen for the top - still showing some splits, very common in central boards, but with grain that's almost perfectly quarter sawn, giving a pleasing pattern and very little predilection to cup once flattened.

The unstable central section of each board was removed, leaving four planks to make a 1.2m-wide top. As with every other component on this table, there were countless ways to arrange them, so I spent a good deal of time flipping and rotating the boards until the joins would all but disappear.

Once glued up, the top was left to set vertically so it wouldn't sag under its own weight - this also made it easy to spot any gaps between the clamps and the surface, guaranteeing a completely flat top once released.

The top was scraped to remove tiny areas of breakout from the thicknesser, then sanded to a uniform texture. The shape was cut on the CNC - a template router could have managed the outline, but the large rounded undercut specified in the design didn't exist as an off-the-shelf cutter, and manoeuvring the tabletop around a spindle moulder cutter by hand would have needed several people and very steady hands to get a clean result. The CNC let me cut the outline and the profile in a single process.