Building a Hall Table and Carrying a Design Forward

Today I want to walk you through a custom hall table I just finished. It’s not an entirely new design; it’s more of an evolution. If you remember the executive desk I built a while back, I did a segmented ring with a geometric copper-inlaid grid on it. I really liked that detail, so I decided to bring it into this piece. The difference this time is that instead of it sitting on top as an overlay, I suspended it between the two trestles. I think it ended up looking really sharp.

This kind of iteration is actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. When I started my furniture business, I had no idea what my style was going to be, or if I even had one. Playing with the same design element across different pieces is helping me figure that out. So I’m going to keep working with this segmented ring idea in future builds and just see where it goes.

Starting with the Base

Wenge and Saving Material

The base of the table is wenge. It’s a beautiful wood, but it’s not cheap, and my lumber yard only had eight-quarter stock on hand. I didn’t want to run it through the planer and turn a bunch of expensive material into sawdust just to get it to the thickness, so I re-sawed it at the bandsaw instead. That strip I cut off didn’t go to waste either; it’s what I used later for the segmented ring.

The design has a main leg with two smaller spindles on either side. To keep everything consistent, I set up a stop on my miter gauge so I could cut all the pieces to the exact same length every time. I know some people look at my setup and wonder why I’m using a wooden stop clamped to a sacrificial fence instead of the built-in stop on the miter gauge. It’s simple. The miter gauge on its own just isn’t long enough to be useful, so the sacrificial fence extends it to something I can actually work with. For the longer trestle pieces, I switched over to using the fence as a stop with a little stop block attached to it, which keeps things safe and avoids kickback.

Layout and Joinery

For layout, I always use a marking knife; that’s just the right way to do it. I do my layout on one leg, then butt the two together and transfer the marks from the first leg to the second. That way, I only have to do the layout once, and I know both legs will come out exactly the same.

To cut the tenons on the spindles and legs, I set up a dado stack with a sacrificial fence rather than running the main fence against it. Then I clean everything up at the bench with some handwork. And yes, round tenons and round mortises are dumb, so I squared them up.

Before I moved on to the ring and grid, I did a full dry assembly to make sure everything was fitting the way I wanted and to take accurate measurements off the actual workpiece. That’s important; those measurements are what I used to size the rings and the bars for the grid. If you work from a drawing rather than the actual piece you’re building, things don’t always line up the way you expect.

The Grid

The grid itself is three-quarter-inch stock, ripped to width. To hold it together at each intersection, I used half-lap joints. Once the grid was assembled, I put small tenons on the ends of each piece, and those tenons are how it locks into the table structure.

Building the Segmented Ring

I’m not a big wood turner, and I don’t have a setup that could hold a ring this size on the lathe. So I made a circle-cutting jig to cut a pattern, then double-stick taped it to the segments and routed my circle that way.

For cutting the little wedge pieces, I found a wedgie jig to be the most accurate method. Every single piece comes out clean with no gaps, no sanding between pieces, nothing. They just go together.

Since there are 48 parts in each ring, I used a slow-set epoxy, so I’d have enough time to get them all laid out and clamped. And yes, I managed to knock them all onto the floor mid-assembly, picked them back up, cleaned them off, and put them back together. Moving on.

After the epoxy dried, I ran it through the drum sander to get a clean, flat surface. I double-stick taped it to a board for support to keep it from flexing. The thing about segmented rings is that they’re primarily an end-grain glue bond, which means they’re not all that strong on their own. I still had several milling operations ahead — getting it round, cutting a dado, and routing a profile on it. So I glued a piece of hardboard onto the back as a backer. That gives it enough rigidity to survive those operations without blowing apart. Once I was done milling, I ran it back through the drum sander to sand the hardboard off.

For the milling, I routed it completely round using my template, then switched bits to cut the dado for the metal insert, and then again to cut a roundover on the inner and outer edges.

The Metal Center Ring

The center ring that goes between the two wooden segmented rings is steel. I originally wanted to use solid copper, but the price of copper has gone through the roof lately, so I went with steel and added a copper patina to it. I think it actually turned out with a more interesting pattern than if I had used solid copper. It is truly a beautiful thing where wood meets steel.

We had a little snow here in Colorado, so I took the metalwork outside. Grinding and cutting metal indoors with sawdust around isn’t exactly smart, and the snow makes a pretty good fire stop.

There are a lot of ways to get a copper look onto steel, but I won’t go into the specifics of what I used — let’s just say I experimented with a few different approaches and landed on something I liked. It took some playing around to figure out what kind of patterns were possible, but I was really happy with how the surface turned out. Once everything was dry, I planned to finish it with a Sherwin-Williams industrial coating to protect it.

The Top, Genuine Mahogany from St. Lucia

The tabletop is genuine mahogany from the island of St. Lucia. I sourced it through a small importer called Elements Wood Imports. They’re a small family-owned business that imports exotic lumber from St. Lucia. They manage a small plantation and also salvage trees that come down in storms, so it’s a pretty sustainable operation.

When the wood first came in, it was pretty light in color, which is normal. Give it a few days in sunlight, and it darkens right up to that rich, deep color mahogany is known for. I also planned to add a little dye during finishing to really make the grain pop.

I specifically picked this slab because it had a crack running through it — I wanted an excuse to put some bow ties in. I don’t use a router jig for bow ties. If you use a jig, every bow tie across every piece you ever make looks exactly the same, and so does everyone else’s who bought that same jig. Instead, I cut each one by hand so each bow tie is specific to that job. No two are the same across any of the furniture I’ve built, and that’s something that matters to me.

Final Assembly

To suspend the segmented ring between the trestles, it’s held in place with spindles connected to the ring via half-lap joints. Getting a half-lap on a curved surface is a little tricky — I found the cleanest approach was to scribe the joint with a knife and clean it out with a router plane. I’m using a Lie-Nielsen router plane, and whenever I can I try to support quality manufacturers that are building quality tools in North America.

If you want my take on improving router planes — and I know there was a bit of controversy recently around one manufacturer copying another’s design — the first thing I’d actually change wouldn’t be the knob. It would be to close up the area around the blade. Yes, being able to see your work is nice, but a smaller casting would let you balance it on narrower pieces, and that would be a genuinely useful improvement. Just my opinion, from someone who uses these tools every day.

Once all the joinery was done, I did final assembly and moved on to finishing. I wedged paper into the joints before spraying to protect them from getting finish on them — glue doesn’t bond well to a finished surface.

How It Turned Out

I’m really happy with this one. The copper-patinaed steel ring looks great sitting between the two wooden segmented rings, and the mahogany top has a beautiful grain and color. It’s a piece that builds on something I’ve already done, but it pushes the idea in a new direction. That’s exactly the kind of work I want to keep making. Maybe I’ll sell it in a Denver Art Gallery someday.

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