Trestle Table

Remember that pile of maple that provided the top to my salvaged Herman Eames coffee table?

I had asked my dad if we could make a trestle table (for the dining room I don’t have yet) and ordered him a Tommy Mac trestle table DVD for Christmas (so selfless, I know).

My uncle liked the idea so well he used the design to make a table for his daughter (modifying it, of course—he used 2x3”s on edge for the tabletop and essentially doubled the thickness of the posts, stretcher, and battens).

Dad and I sawed the boards to length and planed, edged, and glued the tabletop over the summer. It then it took up space in his woodshop until I came home over the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Sorry, dad!

Over Thanksgiving, we sawed boards to length and planed, edged, and glued the pieces for the battens, posts, and stretcher. Using the band saw, I cut the angle on the battens (essentially the shoulders and feet on either edge of the post). Dad used the edger to clean up my work.

This Christmas, we sanded everything and stained it with the same light cherry stain as the coffee table. We used a wood conditioner before the stain on the table top to make sure we'd have an even application.

Then it was time to assemble.

Once assembled, we applied several coats of polyurethane.

My favorite part came next: deciding on the metal embellishment I wanted on either side of the stretcher. I had in mind an industrial plate with square-headed bolts, but wood bolts with square heads were decidedly a thing of the past. No hardware store carried anything remotely like what I wanted, and a salvage surplus store in town only carried 5/16” bolt (with a 1/2” head). I had something more striking in mind.

The eureka moment came when my uncle stepped out the back of the woodshop and eyed up an antique dump rake (essentially a horse-drawn hay rake). More than 100 years old, it had the square-headed bolts I’d been hoping for. Amazingly, we were able to unscrew them with crescent wrenches (and hammers and a drive pin) and collect eight of the size I wanted.

Next, dad used a chop saw to cut two pieces of flat bar (a 1/4” x 3” bar of steel). In order to give it an antique finish, we used a ball-peen hammer and took turns distressing the flat bar’s surface. My dad and uncle used a wire wheel to clean the brown rust off of the bolts and the pieces ended up matching perfectly.

The project took longer than we expected, but it definitely exceeded my expectations! (Now I just need to move into a bigger apartment.)