How do you make a dining room table? It’s not something for an amateur who has never worked with wood. The process requires a craftsman who is intimate with the wood and what it means to take a living, organic product into something that it wants to be as much as the one who is shaping it. Think of it as teamwork.
The most important part of making a dining room table is to understand the nature of wood. Tables are rarely made from wood strips wider than three inches because the wood itself has natural stresses built into it. Wider strips have more stress adding up across their width. Walnut and cherry for dining tables also has to be long, meaning that old growth trees are most desirable. Wood from windbreaks that have lived out their life is always the best.
Usually, a table needs to be what we call “6/4” or an inch and a half minimum at the start. Thick pieces like this have more stress than most, so the highest quality cherry or walnut is pre-selected for a dining room table.
The first step is to dry wood in a kiln at temperatures above 250F for a week to make it as stable as possible, and then select the pieces that emerge straight. That way, the wood is relaxed and close to being stable. The walnut or cherry to be used in making a dining room table can then be hand selected.
The walnut or cherry hardwood is then glued together with a natural adhesive in alternating layers so that each has natural stress in opposite directions. This technique is a centuries old way of making dining room tables and doors so that they stay straight for years. It can then be sanded smooth as if it were one piece of wood.
The next difficulty is supporting the tremendous weight of this big expanse of hardwood. A base that can do it is not something to experiment with. A gear operated mechanism that opens both sides equally, to stay in balance, is also essential. This is the engineering part of making a dinging room table that requires a lot of experience.
In the end, what makes the difference when making a dining room table is a unique understanding of hardwoods. The skills take a lot of time to learn, like any craft. The engineering and tradition also have to be learned, but they are always second to the wood itself.
