Craft Tables

[revchris]

Several years ago teeka and I were looking through the Levenger's catalog and found what we though would be a useful table for lots of projects. Levenger's calls it the Reader's Table Two. We thought it was a great idea, but didn't think it was worth the $170 they charge.

So, being the sort of people we are, we went to Menards and spent about $20 (mostly on furring strips), and created something that we felt was equally useful. Friends of ours thought it was a great idea (I don't remember, they might actually have thought of it in the first place), and I helped them build one too. We did theirs first, and then I made a few tweaks to the design and built one for us.

I just built a third one for my mother-in-law, who wants it as a larger bedside table while she recovers from knee replacement. This one was built entirely from wood laying around my garage, all I had to buy was the two bolts that hold it all together (One bolt forms the top pivot, and the other, along with two wing nuts, allows you to adjust the height).


Click for larger picture

The top also swivels up, and raises from tv-tray height to about 12" taller than that, making it usable over the bed, much like a hospital bed table. The base measures about 20"x30", and the top is 16-18"x30". This one uses oak for the table upright and arm, and pine for the base, as well as a pine top (stained to match my inlaws' woodwork). It also uses two small pieces of zircote (yes, like I do occasionally have random scraps of odd hardwoods laying around the house) in the base, which act as the feet if you need to remove the diagonal braces on one side to fit it under a chair or sofa to use it as a tv-tray or whatever.

So far, after several years' use, the only modification we've made to the design is to add a 12" wide front foot, instead of using only the 3" base rail, which makes it a lot harder for the cats to tip over.

Comments

[misteropinion.livejournal.com]

Big enough groove to let you get your fingers in there, or would you have to use a "bead digging stick"? You should at least use a rounded-corner square groove, methinks.

[revchris.livejournal.com]

teeka's craft table uses a 1/4" radius half-round groove, and beads that roll into it usually 'ski-jump' off the table. My thought was to put the same half-round groove in, but then mill the outboard radius into a square channel, so that the bead rolls from the center of the table down the curved slope, across the flat outboard half of the groove, and then hits the outboard wall of the groove. The groove would be shallow enough to pick beads out of, but would have a hard stop to keep them from rolling out.