Modern elliptical dining table

[Jamie Buxton]

Here's a dining table I recently completed. It is 97"x54"x28". The top is elliptical. It should seat eight quite comfortably, and ten with a little squeezing. It is made of white oak.

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The top has a plywood core veneered top and bottom with shopsawn veneer 1/8" thick. In the field, the top is 1" thick. Solid lumber edging makes the perimeter 1.6" thick. Here's a shot of the table top in the veneering bag. This is the bottom face; you can see knots I didn't want to include on the top face. I had to make a new big bag to fit this top. You can also see the table base in the background.

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The base is made from beams 1.6"x4". I laid out the joinery in the middle so that the long beams run straight through the joint, to keep the beams as strong as I could. Here's a shot of the underside of the short beams, cut to sit firmly on the tops of the long beams.

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Here's a shot of the table edge, taken from below.

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[Jim Tobias]

Very elegant and sleek at the same time! I like the whole thing but the base is very interesting. Nice job on the table edge also.
How did you cut the ellipse shape? Router jig set up? I did that a few years ago on a good sized coffee table and the cutting was easy but the set up was tedious.

Jim

[Ron Selzer]

very nice .

[Mel Fulks]

Interesting table. Complex puzzle....but I don't think you are going to be allowed to take on the plane !
Just use the "tray table....don't make trouble.
It must make some really interesting shadows.

[Jamie Buxton]

Very elegant and sleek at the same time! I like the whole thing but the base is very interesting. Nice job on the table edge also.
How did you cut the ellipse shape? Router jig set up? I did that a few years ago on a good sized coffee table and the cutting was easy but the set up was tedious.

Jim

I laid out the curve on the computer in a 2D design program. I printed it out 1:1. The printer is limited to 8.5x11 sheets, so the curve gets printed to multiple sheets which I tape together to make a full-scale paper template. In this case, my template only needed to be one quadrant of the ellipse. I used rattle-can contact cement to stick the paper template to quarter-inch plywood. (MDF is slightly easier to work with, but I had this piece of plywood on hand.) I jig-sawed close to the line, and trimmed to the line with a handheld belt sander. That gave me a wood template. I used it to draw the ellipse on the table top blank, and jig-sawed close to that line. Then I put a template guide and a straight bit on the router, clamped the wood template in place, and trimmed the blank precisely to my desired curve.

Then I turned the top over, and used a chamfer bit in the router to cut the taper on the bottom edge. I kinda wanted a bigger taper, at a flatter angle, but this was the biggest bit I could fit in my handheld router.

[Jamie Buxton]

.. Complex puzzle...

Yeah, that joint in the middle took me a couple of days to think about. Definitely a puzzle. After I worked out how I was going to do it, actually cutting the joint took me an afternoon. Well, okay part of a morning for the prototype, and the afternoon for the real thing. It is all straight planes, so I could cut it with a pull saw, and adjust it with a chisel.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Very well done Jamie! It's an interesting design and it's well executed.

How did you lay out your elliptical table top? My wife wants an elliptical dining table but with a butterfly extension. I want to make it out of solid hardwood with the grain running across the width with bread board edges.

[Jamie Buxton]

Very well done Jamie! It's an interesting design and it's well executed.

How did you lay out your elliptical table top? My wife wants an elliptical dining table but with a butterfly extension. I want to make it out of solid hardwood with the grain running across the width with bread board edges.

I addressed the layout process in a reply I posted probably while you were typing.

I don't see a way to make an expanding elliptical top. The entire table edge is curved, so no matter how you build the expansion the expanded top will not be an ellipse. Maybe draw out what you're thinking, and post it in the Design forum?

[Jim Tobias]

As I imagined, the prep work is enormous......the actual cut is seconds/minutes. I was wondering about the taper on the underside. Nice look!!
Jim

[Mel Fulks]

Agree with Jamie. To put in new words. The table without the expansion piece can be an ellipse. But with an expansion
the curved part will not hit tangent to the straight part. You need to make a round edge to do that . But you could add about
3 inches of straight to the elliptical pieces to make it work. Draw it out 3 " might show the flat, so you might even have to
go to just 1 inch straight . And it might just look too weird,gotta draw it out

I'm sorry , I botched that . The straight expansion leaf would be tangent. The question is ,would the straight leaf look
odd

[andy bessette]

Looking at the small footprint of the base, do you find it a bit tippy?

[Jim Becker]

That turned out beautifully, Jamie...the base is very striking, too!

[Bruce King]

Very nice!
It won’t be “tippy” since the weight of the opposing side is a deterrent and that base foot print is larger than it looks at first glance.

[Steve Jenkins]

Beautiful Jamie. Very clean

[Jamie Buxton]

Looking at the small footprint of the base, do you find it a bit tippy?

Tippiness is a consideration with any pedestal-base table. During the design process I estimated the weight of the table, and calculated how much weight could sit on the edge of the table before the thing overturned. My estimate was that it would require a 190 pound person sitting on the edge of the table at just the worst sport to overturn the table. And by "sitting on" I mean he has his feet off the floor. It turned out that I overestimated the table weight by a tad, so the overturning weight turned out to be about 175 pounds. I can live with that. People lean against a table, but don't often sit on the edge.

[Jamie Buxton]

I addressed the layout process in a reply I posted probably while you were typing.

I don't see a way to make an expanding elliptical top. The entire table edge is curved, so no matter how you build the expansion the expanded top will not be an ellipse. Maybe draw out what you're thinking, and post it in the Design forum?

Maybe I took you too literally. "Ellipse" is a very specific shape, and like I said, I don't know of a way to make it expand. But there are related shapes which aren't ellipses but expand more easily. For instance, consider a table top which is essentially a rectangle in the middle with half-circle pieces forming the two ends. Maybe that's close enough to an ellipse for SWMBO. The nice thing about this shape is that you can put rectangular leaves in it to expand it, and they fit nicely with the not-expanded table shape.

[Jamie Buxton]

Very well done Jamie! It's an interesting design and it's well executed.

How did you lay out your elliptical table top? My wife wants an elliptical dining table but with a butterfly extension. I want to make it out of solid hardwood with the grain running across the width with bread board edges.

Maybe I took you too literally. "Ellipse" is a very specific shape, and like I said, I don't know of a way to make it expand. But there are related shapes which aren't ellipses but expand more easily. For instance, consider a table top which is essentially a rectangle in the middle with half-circle pieces forming the two ends. Maybe that's close enough to an ellipse for SWMBO. The nice thing about this shape is that you can put rectangular leaves in it to expand it, and they fit nicely with the not-expanded table shape.

[Jim Becker]

The ellipse shaped table can have center leaves to extend for a larger dining party, but obviously, during the period of time it's "stretched", it's no longer elliptical.

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Ken, I'm not sure how you can pull off breadboard ends with this form of table.

[Mel Fulks]

The ellipse shaped table can have center leaves to extend for a larger dining party, but obviously, during the period of time it's "stretched", it's no longer elliptical.

It's no longer an ellipse. But it is "elliptical". Dictionaries kinda ' define elliptical as "kinda' like an ellipse"
For drawing them you use a stick with nails (wont explain it cuz I have to look it up each time I need it); or you use
the "string method". There are directions for drawing two different radii to make to make pseudo ellipse
they look OK for taller ones, that is , when they are hard to discern from a half circle. But if you make them proportioned
like a nice ellipse ....they don't look like a real ellipse since the two radii are just too obvious.
It doesn't apply to op's project....but when you need to make templates for casings ,the best way is to bandsaw out a
"core" small ellipse from plywood, then cut 1/4" inch thick circles with radius the same as needed casing size. Push the
compass point all the way thru so a pencil point will fit ,then you roll it against the original temp. Lot of band sawing in
formal elliptical door frames. I always saved all the old circles in a suit case. Fellow workers thought that was nutty.
Casings that don't properly fit completely destroy the design.

[Frederick Skelly]

That's sure a beautiful table!

[Mark Rainey]

Sleek and unique!