looks pretty easy to do. You can see the angled supports down lower, so the back is just riding on the rails. I’d make flip down legs if I were to build this, and use Unistrut instead of extrusion.
I like your design Ryan! I think I will try to build this table out of 1/2" MDF (3/4" for the top), using my circular saw and rip fence to cut the ribs. How did you plan to attach everything together? Glue and screw, countersinking on top?
I was also planning to install threaded inserts in the top for workholding.
Okay, screws and glue are a huge pain in the butt.
The alignment cuts work perfectly with a couple endmills as location pins.
I am stopping halfway through to redo this with a brad nailer and glue. Again, proving a fancy table is a lot more work that just slapping together a table and surfacing it.
I made my LR torsion box with dimensional lumber, and it’s not great for flatness. It is assembled with screws and glue though. I did not surface the spoilboard. It extends outside of the LR cut area, which is why I want to re-do the table.
I am (of course) tempted to expand from a 40.5" addressable X to a 49" addressable X, but this isn’t really a priority, nor is 49" Y. 36" is plenty for every project that I’ve even drafted up, but the current 5’ length isn’t quite enough for the arcade cabinet I’d like. (Well, it will probably end up as a bar-top anyway.)
Transporting full sheets to my home is a problem, so I get them cut down at the store.
The local lumber place has 3/4" C2 birch ply on for a really good price, so I am going to buy a couple sheets to make a new table with. I have been playing with this model and @DougJoseph 's table. Now that you’re actually building it, I have fewer reserves about my own build.
I like the interlocking design too, though. Well, it’s not like this is Ikea furniture, the whole reason I got a CNC is to be able to do things differently if I want to.
Oh yeah, I hope mine just serves as a jump off point. I made it so it can be made with basic tools, or made easier with a CNC. Now that I am actually building it. The CNC part is really not that vital, just some alignment. For me it is still faster to do it this way than get out a tablesaw and chop saw and put them away.
I have most the parts cut for the new build. Once I get that top part built, I am going to take a harder look at the bottom. I don’t like the way it looks in CAD but the two ends that hang over are great places for me to store scrap material. So I think I might build it as show, then put the Vac and some other stuff in the middle.
I don’t know what you mean by “dimensional lumber” - if you mean normal tree wood dimensioned, then it’s exactly wrong for a torsion box or even for a table top you want to keep level.
Manufactured products like MDF, plywood, or what we call “LVL” (Laminated Veneer Lumber) are dimensionally stable. As you have no doubt noticed, every stick of real wood twists and moves at a different rate to it’s neighbour - that’s not a problem in normal furniture design, we’ve been accounting for that for more than a few centuries, but it will never give you a dimensionally stable top in the long term.
That is not to say you can’t build using it (and I’d use a really thick mdf top) because I reckon 90% of tables out there have been built like that and are successfully in use, but zero manufactured CNC tables have!
I can say, based on my fun with table skin this morning, that that’s not a patch on glue and no screws!
I am preparing myself to go and visit my table top shortly and expect to be horribly disappointed with what I see!
I prefer lapped joints because: no screws in construction and it’s all held together by the skins anyway - doors and Ikea around the world happily rely on paper honeycomb and barely enough of it to do the job, so big lumps of timber are a bit of a waste (depending on the span of course).
My original LR2 table was a basic “work bench” made out of basically a 2x4 stud wall on its side with a single 3/4" sheet of plywood on top. Then I put a 3/4" sheet of melamine on top of that. Had 2x4s down the side that the skate wheels rolled on. No wonder that thing was never flat LOL
The torsion box will stay as I built it for a very long time. That is the beauty of a torsion box. The problem is that the lumber was not perfectly straight when I built it, so the table isn’t perfectly flat. Commercially built tables won’t be built that way because building them flat would be too difficult, whereas engineered product can be built within tolerances more easily and cheaply.
A 2×4 warps easily, and drywall will flex under its own weight, but 2×4 stud walls don’t move over time unless something puts a LOT of force on them, like the foundations of the house settling. (Otherwise, we would all be patching cracks in the walls every season change.)
So no. The 1×3 lumber wasn’t the best choice for making a flat table, but I’m confident that it doesn’t change where it’s warped from when I built it.
Anyway, now that I can buy that C2 Birch ply for less than 1/3 the cost it was when I originally built the table for the LR2, I want to do it over, this time with the use of the CNC.
So far so good! Are you using polyurethane glue? (the kind that foams up?)
Even if you aren’t I’d strongly recommend against it for anyone who isn’t confident of achieving perfect joints. This isn’t such a problem with CNC cut furniture parts, but many a boat builder has discovered that the lovely filling properties if the joint doesn’t fit have the structural capacity of something less than beetroot.
I’m happy with straight yellow PVA (Titebond II or similar) which is still stronger than the timber.
Weren’t you going to do something tricky with the vac?
No super old regular wood glue. I actually tested the joints on the previous attempt and the MDF tore apart and the joints held.
Yeah there is not as much room for that as I thought. So I have not planned this out any further than getting a top on this to give it a try. After that, there might be a V2. So far no major complaints other than a regular 2x3 table I have always made is clearly easier…so this is hopefully better.