Perhaps the most interesting piece that I have made so far is a padouk and mahogany dining table. The piece is interesting not so much for its design, which is essentially mission style, and which was borrowed from the book Making Contemporary Wooden Tables by Thomas Stender, but because of the starting material that went into it. The top was made from a padouk board that was 10 feet long, 28 inches wide and 1 3/4 inches thick, purchased from Yukon Lumber in Norfolk, Virginia (the staff there remarked that in more than 20 years in business, they had not seen boards like this). This board included sapwood at both edges, which was retained in the table. To bring the top to the `standard' dining-table width of 42 inches, two other padouk boards were attached to the larger board, with the sapwood forming a natural, irregularly shaped inlay on the completed table top.
The base of the table was made of mahogany, with padouk slats. The finish on the base is a burnished oil finish, with three coats of Danish oil, burnished after the third coat, and waxed. The top was treated in much the same way, but it received four coats of Danish oil. The remaining challenge here is to design and fabricate a large number of chairs (and for me, 1 would be a large number, but 10 will be needed) to go with this table.
| Padouk Dining Table: boards for the table top. |