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Well, it's taken a white - but our side tables are finally finished! I'm still blown away by the fact they came out almost exactly the way we planned (bonus points if you can pick the design change)

These are just some quick iPhone photos, but the plan is to take some better shots soon.

So... this is where we're at. Timber tops have been sanded, and have come up really nice. Now we just have to give the timber a coat of something to protect it - not sure what yet, there's a few samples with different options that we need to pick.

The other thing that needs to happen is the white shrink-wrap plastic needs to go on - again, we're still not 100% sure if that's going to work, but we'll find out for sure soon enough....

Here's a little instagram video of how we did the holes.

We started with a CNC'd template of the table top made from MDF, This is then laid over the actual table top and would become the guide for the router. For the holes, the router would need an entry point, so we initially drilled them, but to make sure the drill holes were in the centre of each hole Hugh made up a little jig to guide in the drill bit. Then is was just a case of routering around the edge of each template.

More photos below....

Sanding.

Sanding is a bitch. Sure, it's a beautiful thing: you take something rough and put work into it and eventually make it beautiful to the touch - that's the romantic ideal, but the reality is that after 3 hours of this your arms and back are screaming, you've got sawdust in every hole in your face, and you're coughing up stuff you're pretty sure is carcinogenic.

Still, those table tops were really smooth by the end and I had a really, really excellent shower afterwards.

We'll have to do some more sanding after we put the holes in the top, but I'm going to cross that bridge when we get to it.

Gluing the tops.

We were going to use biscuit joints for this (yeah, I didn't know what they looked like either, so I'll do the google image search for you) In the end, we figured the glue we're using should be strong enough - I guess time will tell on that one.

So I've been a bit lazy with posts, so I've got a few catch-up posts to get through. Here's the frames, freshly painted, straight from the powdercoaters. The colours came up really well, and the thickness of the paint has been pretty good at ironing out any little inconsistencies in the metal work (of which there aren't many anyway) - We got them painted at Action, who I'd highly recommend. To be honest, I have no other powder-coating experience to compare them with, but I'd use them again for their customer service alone.

Frames are now at the painters, so now it's on to tackling the table tops. We haven't really worked with timber since the Z Stool, mainly because we've discovered that metal is, funnily enough, a far more forgiving material to work with. The ability to just weld a bit more back on if you cut something too short doesn't really exist with timber, also I quite like the smell of welding over choking on saw dust. Anyway, here’s the three colours the frames are being painted.

The great thing about bending metal rather than cutting and joining, is that it's a hell of a lot faster, the downside is accuracy. Of the three tables we're building, the frames for each one is slightly different. No matter how accurate we attempted to be, each frame ended up being 4 or 5mm too long at one point or two short at another. This then necessitated some 'chop and drop' maneuvers, which could be deemed at cheating, but we're far more preferable than wonky tables.

This process of 'aligning' the tables takes a lot more time than we anticipated: going back and forth between lining it up with a square then bending it slightly in the vice, then back again, then back to the vice, ad nauseum. Does make for dramatic photos though.

At this point, we thankfully realised we'd run into a problem if we were to weld our spigots into the tops of the arches. There's only going to be one join in the frame from which to slide the plastic sleeves onto the frame, and so in order for them to be slid along to the smaller 'feet' they'd need to pass over the spigots. For this reason, we cut out little bases that the spigots could then be screwed into, and removed when it comes time to put that plastic on.

Working out how to join the two ends of the metal rod took longer than I'd care to admit. We designed a whole range of halving joints, and other various screwing methods, before finally working out the relatively simple and (in hindsight) most obvious method. These assemblies are built independently, then welded into place while closed.

Even with all our forward planning (test bends, measuring out bend points, etc) Our frames still came out skewed. Given that we're bending them from single lengths of rod, small errors tend to compound into something far more significant. This then necessitated some extra bending, pushing and pulling and in a few drastic cases, heating the metal up and twisting it. Despite the assumption that this kind of thing would leave the frame looking like an deconstructed coat hanger, it actually worked surprisingly well.

Bending rod is more complicated than it looks. Once you bend 100mm of rod, it's not exactly 100mm long anymore, or it is, at some point... The inside edge is less than 100, and the outside edge is more - the assumption is that the centre line would be 100 on the dot, but this also is not the case - according to Hugh the line can be found about a third of the distance out from the inside line. - what all this means, is that working out where to place the bends for out frame requires a fair bit if forward planning, and lots of test bends.

It's amazing how a small design change can shave potential days or even weeks of the build time of a project. Initially we intended to hide the join points of the metal rod where it intersects the table top (as shown in the above image). In the end, this started becoming over complicated, and also meant that the table top would permanently be fixed to the frame. The alternative was to design the table top so that it could be removed, while hiding the metal join points under some shrink wrap plastic that will be used to protect the frame where it touches the ground…. The upside of all this is that our untested (for us) table top can be easily removed and repaired/re-treated if it ever fails to withstand the poolside environment.

New Project!

We've finally got ourselves some commission work, and so the days of haphazardly knocking up our own stuff could, at least temporarily, be coming to an end.

The brief was for a pool-side table, to replace on old rusting one. 'Somewhere to put a book and a gin and tonic' The dimensions of the previous table and 'something minimal' where the only other requests.

The design we've come up with utilises our beloved 12mm steel rod, as well as combining a timber top.

Given the table will spend most of its time outside we've added holes to (hopefully) drain off any pooling water that could eventually warp the timber. All up, it’s a relatively straight forward design, however experience has proven that the more ‘simple’ the design the less simple it is to construct for some reason...

Table 01 - Droop Street Studio.

Some quick shots of the desk lamp almost finished!

Will do a proper post showing working images soon... also, better photos coming soon.

Experimenting with some folded metal options. Don't like this design much, but the render came up quite nice, so thought I'd throw it in here.

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