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Fred Voorhees

Building my custom poker table

Rating: 13 votes, 4.69 average.
Building a custom sized oak and walnut poker table was a project that I was eagerly awaiting. The table was to be located in the new bar room and I wanted it to be a large enough table that eight guys could fit around it and have plenty of room to play and not be crowded by one another. Eight sides was one side more than necessary since a maximum of seven players can play many poker games utilizing only one deck of cards.
I got the idea for the style of the table from David Tiell from California,MD, a fellow woodworker who posts on the Saw Mill Creek woodworking website - http://www.sawmillcreek.org/forumdisplay.php?forumid=3 - I visit this site almost daily and enjoy it immensely. I had a few style changes in mind for what I wanted in a poker table and this all went into a degree of custom work that would take me into a few things that I hadn't ventured in woodworking before - so - I was excited to get underway with it.

Before getting on with this piece, for comparison's sake, here are two pictures of Dave's version of a poker table.



Now, there are a number of people who will be taking a look at this photo essay and not all of them will be woodworkers, so with respect to my fellow woodworkers, please forgive me if some of the essay sounds and looks a bit elementary.

The first detail needed to be taken care of was to determine the size that my table needed to be. I didn't want to make any of the structural elements of the table out of multiple pieces of wood since one single piece would be stronger than two or more pieces glued together would be. This need called for plywood to be called into service. Now, most plywood comes in four foot wide sheets. This limitation made for a table that would be a bit smaller than I cared for. However, Baltic Birch plywood comes in five foot square sheets and that was the key to getting what I wanted as far as the construction of the table went.

Below, I am shown in the starting stages of getting the size of the outside segments of the eight sided playing surface determined - using cardboard in a cut - measure and fit method until I had the size determined. In the end, the widest (outside) dimension of each segment came to near
two feet long.



I used other cardboard to simulate the size that I wanted the tabletop to be. When I got the segments cut down to the proper size and they matched the layout, I had my segment size.

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Comments

  1. Ron Baird's Avatar
    Fred, I am looking for a plan for a power table. This si just what I was looking for....nice! Thanks for the post. Ron Baird
  2. Edward Norton's Avatar
    I don't play cards but will say you done a very nice job on your poker table!