I started this at the beginning of November. A while back I stumbled on someone’s ad selling off sections of old bowling lanes and decided to come up with a few projects to make good use of the material. I bought 22’ worth of 2" thick pine bowling lanes @ $10/linear foot, 42" wide. Not bad for what is basically butcher block.
Decided I could use a dining room table first since I had a few parties planned and needed to actually give them a place to eat.
Starting to strip the original top coat. I had an entire garbage bag filled with the dust of this shit.
All stripped, adding 1x3 mahogany sides to cap off the rough sides.
M’hogany.
Slight problem when trimming the ends to make them straight. As I went across (incredibly slowly) the saw caught a nail and sent a chunk of wood flying. I decided I’d just leave it because ‘character’ or something…
Here’s the underside. The table was super sturdy along it’s length, but was flexing slightly across the width so I needed to add something to make it a little more rigid or else the poly would crack later on. The thing that kept it as straight as it was is the angle iron in the middle.
5/8" Aluminum bar square stock with a hole drilled for every single piece of pine it will hold.
The whole thing.
I used a router to channel out the bottom of the table so that the aluminum wasn’t sticking down into people’s legs. (Can’t take credit for the idea. I saw another project that did this and it makes perfect sense.)
Time to pick a stain. I have cherry stained chairs already for my pub table, so I decided to just try and match that. I like the color anyhow and was already planning to do something a little darker. This fit the bill.
Just stain on the right, starting to put the polyurethane on the left.
Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the leg material itself. I knew I wanted 4" square tubing in a rectangle on the ends of the table, but @BREETIME helped decide the exact method to make them. (:tup: to Jay. He got this done crazy fast for me and these things can hold up my damn house if I needed them to.) Here they are tack welded and acid washed.
Test fit from earlier on.
And here’s how she looks now. I just need to take the legs back off and clear coat them. I’m still deciding on the exact finish I want to achieve, but it has to be somewhat repeatable so that the next projects can match this one.
Weldy Shmeldy.
Hey, here’s a dog.
And that’s that. I have a bunch more of this stuff so the plan was to build a matching desk and coffee table, but we’ll see if I stick with that path. I’m currently a plastic folding table as a computer desk, so that should probably happen before the coffee table. I have another long section that I’ll probably use as a work bench top in the garage, but that can just get bolted to something as is.