Coming from a family of large people, comfortable furniture is difficult to find. One winter break, I made this table to solve our qualms with the old one.

Goals

• Replace an existing table with one that is taller and longer
• Improve the stiffness of the table to reduce wobble

Methods

• Cut and welded steel tubing
• Increased wall thickness and filled legs with styrofoam grout mixture to increase stiffness

Results

• Fabricated frame with parallelism tolerance of 0.008"
• Reduced natural frequency by 40%

The wood sits proud of the steel rail by 0.005" to 0.013" to protect the steel from being scratched by plates and silverware