Homemade tabletop
01-10-2019
So I love designing furniture in all kinds of ways. I also was interested in woodworking for quite some time already. This summer I decided to combine these two things, when I made my tabletop for my new desk. The tabletop is 180 by 70 centimeter and is made out of pine wood. The structure of te table is a so called breadboard. A breadboard in woodworking is when the boards are aligned next to eachother along the long end, like a standard tabletop, but with two plates added at both sides. This way we have a small begin board, longer boards after that and at the end a small end board again. The drawing below also shows how a breadboard is structured.
source: Woodmagazine
Something I wanted to really pay attention to in this build is the movement in the wood. The whole tabletop is made out of woodglue and joinery only, so no screws are used. The reason I used wood joinery and not screws is because now the table is able to move a bit. If the air is changing throughout the year and the air becomes more dry or wet, the boards have space to expand and contract. This would not be the case with screws. For this desk I used mortis and tenon joints at the ends. This is when one board has a hole in it and the other has a sort of tongue that fits in the hole. If you keep some space (a few milimeters is enough) at the left and right of the tongue, the wood is able to move. In the long boards I used wooden pins that connect the two and some glue between the boards. All set together we get a strong tabletop. The only things to do is to sand it smooth and I used a stain for the color and a varnish for the protection of the wood. After that the table top is officially finished.
