The Scoop Table -- part 1

There are a few materials that have held my attention for the past 20 years, and plywood is one of them.

Individual sheets of birch plywood

Plywood is really the workhorse of furniture and construction, yet most times it gets covered by a veneer or painted over.  It is the weird old uncle of the wood world, the one everyone likes to have but no one wants to see.

Layers of birch plywood being laminated together

My first explorations into plywood were to make a series of boomerangs – when sanded the plys emerge and make fantastic patterns that visually accent the airfoil shapes needed to make the boomerangs return.  High-end cabinetry often uses birch plywood, which differs from construction-grade plywood in that it has many more sheets laminated together and has virtually no voids from the gluing process.  It is a fantastic material – because of the cutting and orientation of its layers, it expands and contracts very little with the seasons and moisture content of the air.  The grain of each ply is oriented 90 degrees to the last, so it can be ripped on the table saw in any direction without much worry of splitting, and it can be loaded across each axis as well.  In addition, when sanded through the plys, the end-grain alternates and gives the edge a striped pattern.  Why we would want to hide such a fantastic material underneath a veneer I don’t know.

One of my current projects is to make a steel-based table with a carved plywood top.

 

Metal can actually deform significantly when welded, and I take a lot of precautions to insure that it remains in the shape I want it to.  Often times I will tack weld all of the pieces together before giving it the full weld bead, this way it holds itself in proportion as the individual parts want to expand and contract with the heat of the welder.  In this case I even tack welded extra supports for stability on the cantilevered parts that will be removed later.

Tack welds

Full weld beads ground down