Custom-made pecan dining room table
In October of 2021, we got a visit to the shop from a local pecan farmer who was in the final stages of building his home outside of El Paso in a town called Clint, Texas. He came to us with a request for quote for a dining room table. He had a few requirements. First, seeing as he’s a pecan farmer, he wanted the table to be made of pecan wood. He liked Stickley, Mission-style furniture and he told us that he prefers angles over curves. Finally, the dimensions: 10.5 feet long by 6 feet wide. That seemed extra large to us at the time; granted, we hadn’t seen his dining room yet.
We quoted the job, won it and got to work procuring enough Pecan lumber to build this beast of a table. We found a few great saw mills in Central Texas that were able to get us some really nice material. We started with the table base. Our team milled about 40 solid pecan spindles with tenon joints, which would eventually fit into the upper and lower base horizontal sections that had mortises that were precisely cut on our CNC router. Assembling the base was so satisfying. The two base sections were connected by a trestle and all three components were tied together by Maple clothespin wedges. When tapped into place, the joints a cinched together to create an extremely strong joint. This table has no metal other than where the base and tabletop connect.
Next up with the top, comprised of 10 boards. The boards were laminated with domino joinery to help prevent movement. Once the entire table top was glued together, we flipped it upside down and milled dovetail slots 3/4” deep and running perpendicular to the wood grain direction spread out evenly in four different places. We then milled cross-members with matching dovetails and hammered them into the slots. We didn’t use glue on these joints. It’s very important that the tabletop is allowed to expand and contract throughout the seasons. A Pecan glue-up the size of this table will grow by almost an inch when the humidity is high!
For finishing, we used a custom stain to match a chair the client brought us and finished off the table with a urethane blend that was then hand-buffed to a smooth and strong finish. After months of design and fabrication, we finally delivered the table on April 1st, 2022 — our company’s five year anniversary. The client was so happy to receive his custom Pecan table.
