Lathe Table

I just completed another table that's been in the works for almost two years now. We had to clean out my familie's warehouse the summer before I started grad school so that it could be demolished - really sad. We scrapped and threw out dozens of semi-trailer loads of steel, stainless, aluminum, brass, lead, copper, etc. (in ascending monetary value of course) in the process. That place was a true treasure trove or potential projects.

The legs are cast iron, although because of their age there's probably a good amount of nickel in them making it more like steel or so I'm told, they came off of a working lathe. This is it sitting on the flat bed - it's probably the frame of a Toyota or rebar buried in Mumbai now; or something else equally undignified.


The dimensions are 48" L x 32" W x 26" H, the tabletop is 1 3/4" thick, and it weights around 250 pounds (I'm guessing tabletop 100 lbs + 75 lbs for each leg - I'm going to weigh it soon). UPDATE: the table top is 88.0 lbs, the legs are 78.0 lbs and 78.6 lbs, and the bolts are 1.6 lbs giving it a total weight of 246.2 lbs.


The wood is jatoba and is also known as Brazilian Cherry even though it's not part of the cherry family. The wood is insanely heavy and literally twice as hard as oak (2300-2800 on the Janka harness scale, oak is around 1300-1400). It will darken with time too. Some other random specifics: it's finished with several coats of semi-gloss polyurethane (I kind of fought doing this but it does protect it so well); the bolts are 5/8" stainless; the tabletop is what is known as a "glue-up" which means that the pieces were joined, glued, and planed into a single slab; and I sealed the cast iron legs with boiled linseed oil, it's the same stuff that artists use to seal oil paintings, which gave it a great kind of lacquered feel that will keep it from rusting.