I’m getting ready to build a game table for our dining room. It features a sunken vault so that you can leave the game in place and put table leaves overtop and use it as a regular dining table in-between game session. So far I’ve designed it out in Sketchup, but once the rain calms down I’m going to get some wood and get to work!
Some research images for the table. I try to compile these when I’m starting a new project that’s similar to something that already exists. In the case of this table, there was a company that built them for a couple of years, and then went out of business. Another guy picked up on the style and starting selling them through his company. He has a couple of blog posts detailing what goes into building them, and I found a blog post from another person that bought one, showing the process of assembly once it got to his house.
I also found some details, like how the legs are attached the top:
And the build in progess:
My truck is in the shop so I haven’t been able to pick up any wood for the project, but in the meantime I’m making a bunch of updates to the shop to get ready. For the longest time I didn’t have dust collection running to my table saw (just the jointer and planer, which makes tons of woodchips, and basically require dust collection from day one). I got some more ducting and added a drop down this weekend. I wish I could have moved it farther forward, but I need to leave room for the garage door to open. I’ve also got a remote starter coming so that I can start/stop the dust collector from the table saw and not have to go across the room to flip a switch.
I’m hopefully getting my truck back this week, so I can actually pick up some wood! In the meantime I’ve been thinking about the order of operations for the table: what to build in what order. In most projects there’s generally a “best” order to build things in order to make assembly easier (or even possible, in some cases). Building the whole project in Sketchup really helps with this process because you can see how everything will actually fit. You can then show and hide various parts, which makes for a nice simulation of assembling the table in the real world.
I’ve been thinking about the “base” (the big, flat bottom layer of the table) and right now I’m planning on assembling it like so:
A main panel of plywood, 42” x 72”, with the corners cut out for legs to be inserted, and a slot cut along the entire perimeter that accepts a spline, and then a frame of sapele wrapped around, 6” wide:
The dozens of holes you see in the frame won’t actually be there yet: they will be drilled at the time I’m ready to start attaching the player trays and cupholders.
My local supplier does have sapele plywood, but the last time I got some it had an MDF core, which I don’t think will be ideal for this project. I’ll be using splines to attach the hardwood frame to this plywood core, and I’m afraid the MDF could break away too easily. So I may have to compromise and go with whatever plywood they have in stock that has an actual wood core. You’ll never see this panel (unless you look under the table) and the undersides of tables are usually pretty gnarly anyway.
If you’ve worked with plywood before then you know the instant it’s not laying flat it starts to bow. The only flat areas I have large enough to store this while being assembled are my table saw outfeed table, and the floor. Neither of these are going to work because I’m going to need the outfeed table to build and work on the rest of the table, and the floor would just plain suck. But, I found a really nice set of sawhorses that you can connect together with 2x4s to make a huge table, flat enough to support this all the way around the perimeter while it’s being assembled:
After those are in place I’ll work on the sides, in sapele:
These are 6” tall have a small 1/8” groove running along the center of the top edge that will serve as a place to prop up any game cards, and also a drip trap in case someone spills something on the top:
Those wide gaps at the bottom are for the drawers, and I’m going to make a big effort to get all of the grain to match across the entire front, so that once the drawers are closed it almost looks like one large board. To do this I’ll need to rip the board in half (cut it lengthwise down the middle), cut out the drawers, and then glue the remaining places back together. It seems like a lot of work, and the effort will be pretty much invisible once it’s done. But if you didn’t make the drawers match it would be very obvious and distracting.
Next will come the web frame out of poplar, which will hold the plywood under tension and keep it flat. Once this is in place I’m less worried about the sawhorse support and may build and attach the legs so that it’s self-supporting. This frame provides the pockets that the drawers will slide in and out of:
Up to this point, everything built above are all large pieces of wood that will be fairly easy to mill and join together. After this, things get much more detailed and will involve a bunch of joinery and engineering to fit and assemble. I’m still thinking about my strategy for these…more on that to come!
The joinery on this project is pretty unique, I think. There will be some traditional woodworking joints, like half-blind dovetails in the player trays and drawer fronts:
But for the most part things will be screwed together. The main reason is because wood moves—it literally changes shape over time. If you don’t account for this wood movement, and just haphazardly join and glue parts together, parts would crack and tear themselves apart over time as these competing forces work against each other.
Even after a tree is cut down, dried and milled into boards, those boards can still absorb and expel moisture. This equates to a board getting wider when it’s humid, and narrower when it’s dry:
For all intents and purposes, a board never gets longer with changes in humidity:
As you can see here, longitudinal change in length is 0.01% or less, which means we can effectively ignore it when building your average piece of furniture (although someone building a bridge out of wood may have to worry about this movement!). But even a relatively narrow board of 6” can change 1/8” or more during the course of the year. So if you have boards meeting at 90° you’re going to have a problem:
Unless you use a woodworking joint that allows for that movement:
Here, a large slot (mortise) is cut into the end pieces (called breadboards) and attached only with the three pins driven through them. No glue is used, and the holes in the narrow ends cut into the table top (tenons) are elongated, allowing them to move around the pin as those boards grow and shrink.
That brings us back to the game table. The player trays and cupholders are going to have wood grain going in all kinds of different directions, and would be difficult to join using traditional woodworking joints. Here’s just one example, with arrows added to denote the directions that the wood will be expanding/contracting:
The web frame inside will be getting taller and shorter, the player trays will be getting deeper and narrower, but also taller and shorter, the same for the cupholders…ahhh! How will I ever keep all of this from falling apart? But before we get to those, we have an even bigger problem. Remember this image?
That center piece is 42” wide, and with an 8% size change that’s almost 3.5” of seasonal size change, how will that ever work??
This is the reason why this center panel is made of plywood: plywood does not change size. Plywood is constructed by alternating layers of wood at 90° to each other, and each so thin that the layer above and below cancels its tendency to change size:
So the center of the table is good to go. Next, check out the detail of the frame surrounding it:
That frame is solid wood (sapele) and is subject to the normal rules of wood movement. But those tabs sticking out look a lot like the mortise and tenon construction of the table we looked at above. When they’re separate pieces slotted into a groove in the end like this, they’re called splines. In this case, since we don’t have to account for the center board moving, we can just glue them in place on that side. And the solid wood they’re being attached to is positioned lengthwise, and we can ignore lengthwise (longitudinal) changes in size! So we can glue that side of the spline as well.
The only area where this gets tricky are the ends where the boards meet at 90°. There’s still a spline here, but we’ll only glue about half of it. I learned that when joining two pieces of wood like this, you can ignore the first 3-4” in regards to wood movement. After that you need to leave the joint unglued, or attached with pegs, to allow for that little bit of remaining size change. So in this case I’ll only glue in this area:
Now we come to all of the random holes drilled in the frame, and how I’m going to avoid this table destroying itself. This is where the player trays and cupholders will be attached. And by elongating the holes just a tad, the screws are given room to move along with the wood. They also make it handy to potentially remove certain sections and replace with different modules if I come up with a new accessory in the future! If we go into x-ray mode in Sketchup you can see how they align with the cupholders and corner piece:
I’ve given the layout of these various pieces a lot of thought and I’m fairly confident I’ll have a table that can last a couple of generations of family board game night!
