Context
In our previous apartment, we had our dining table in our kitchen, but our current apartment has an open-plan kitchen/living space and a bar counter so for the past two years we just used the bar counter as our dining table and stored our dining table in the closet. But sometimes, with more people, there isn’t enough space for everyone to sit around the counter (and we don’t have enough high chairs) so we decided to bring back our old dining table but make new shorter legs for it, so we can sit around it on the floor, and it doesn’t destroy the living space which has low couches.
Original dining table in our old apartment.
Build
We first tried living with it for a few days by placing the tabletop on 4 plastic boxes, to see whether it’s something we really wanted.
Wei made the legs at the Harvard wood shop, and pin xiu and I made the attachment between the legs and the table.
The way the legs attach to the tabletop is really simple, there is just a single threaded rod that comes out of the leg and gets bolted against the metal plate, pulling the leg tightly against the cross members underneath the tabletop.
We cut some scraps of wood at a 45-degree angle, so we could clamp it to the drill press and drill straight down.
Originally, I had thought that the best thing to do would be to use threaded inserts and screw the threaded rod into the threaded insert, but I couldn’t find any threaded inserts in Metropolis. Then, I realized we could probably just drill a smaller hole and thread the rod directly into the wood.
The trick is to tighten two nuts against each other such that they bind to the rod and can be used to screw the rod into the leg.
This was surprisingly difficult to get right. We had to apply even pressure to the back of the rod, and make sure to maintain the right angle as we threaded the rod into the wood.
Final product
