How should I replicate this detail on a particular table?

[Jesse Bushman]

I want to build a table that looks like those in the Apple store (see: http://www.oobject.com/items-to-buil...y-fetzers/952/)

They're made of plywood, but there's a twist.

The tops of the legs have a slice of end grain on top of what is essentially a tall plywood box, but I can't figure out how thick that slice of end grain is because they have veneered all four sides with long grain veneer to give it the appearance that the legs are solid.

Clearly the plywood box that is the legs has a flat surface on the top to which the slice of end grain was adhered before the veneering was done on the long sides of the leg. The question I have is, how thick should that be to keep it stable and keep it from splitting. If I have nicely dried wood, can I simply take a very thin slice of end grain (maybe 1/16 of an inch) and make sure it is uniformly and solidly glued to the plywood below? Will that keep it from cracking up? Or should that slice of end grain be thicker to keep it from splitting? My concern about attaching a thick slice of end grain is that it's going to move underneath that plywood at a different rate than the plywood slide and that may split out the veneer at the corners and also I have to attached the legs to the table with the typical bolt, going into the corner of the leg. If the slice of end grain is very thick, it will make it a little more tricky to place that bolt in a way that it will be strong.

Thoughts?

[david brum]

Are you sure the legs are plywood? It seems unnecessarily difficult to make them out of ply, since you'd have to do the veneer that you're describing, somehow overlapping the ply skin to make the end grain appear realistic. Plus, you'd have to do flawless full length miters on each leg. After that, you'd have all of those fragile corners, just waiting to get bumped and dented.

If it were me, I'd make the legs and probably table top ends out of solid wood. Movement shouldn't be much of an issue since the lengths of cross grain are only a few inches.

[Aleks Hunter]

It seems like an awful lot of work to use plywood, and the result will be , as Jesse said, quite fragile. Make the top frame and the legs out of sugar maple and mortise and tennon joints all around and you'll have a table that will last centuries.

[Jamie Buxton]

The basic theory of veneered plywood is that the veneer is thin enough that the substrate constrains it from moving. I'd use a thin -- maybe .1" -- endgrain veneer. Apply it first, then apply the long vertical veneers.

One might expect this approach to be fragile, but those Apple tables do seem to be holding together, in what probably isn't an easy environment.

[Jamie Buxton]

If I were building those legs the way Apple does it, I'd be trying to kinda line up the end-grain veneer with the face-grain veneers on the leg's sides, so the whole leg looks solid-ish. I'd probably aim at making the post look rift-sawn. That is, the long faces would be made from quarter-to-rift veneer, and the top veneer would be arranged so the growth rings run corner to corner. It'd be really nice if there's no glue lines on the top face, but now I'm talking cutting veneer off a piece of lumber that's what, 7" thick?

The Apple leg might be one of those things that makes sense for mass production, where it is cost-effective to devise some tricky construction method to save money on material costs. However, for a small shop making just one, it might be easier just to make the thing from solid lumber -- more material cost, but more straightforward construction.

[Jesse Bushman]

Thanks for the thoughts all!

The legs on the Apple store tables are plywood. I found one picture of the company that builds them and it's clear they're all ply.

I had thought about using solid wood, but the table my friend wants is to be 7.5' long so I think a plywood torsion box is the way I'm going to go. So the legs will have to be as stable as possible to keep the surfaces in plane with the top and aprons. At this point I'm thinking a slice of end grain veneer or 1/8 - 1/16 will do it. I just don't know if one is preferable to the other in terms of keeping it from splitting.

I plan on building the legs as a long, sort of tubular plywood box. Since I'll be veneering all four sides, I'm just going to cut rectangular strips for sides (2 sides at 5" and 2 sides at 3.5", no miters) and connect them together with a bunch of dominos. At the top, I'll drop in a triangular piece of solid wood, maybe six-eight inches in depth, and glue that to the inside corner of the leg so that the bolt coming from the table top going into the leg will have something to give it purchase, cap it with a square piece of plywood and the end grain veneer. Then veneer the sides so it all looks of a piece.

Nice thought, Jamie, to line up the grain in the vertical veneer with the end grain. Hadn't thought of that.

[Jamie Buxton]

I was in the neighborhood of an Apple store today, so I looked up close at the leg. Perhaps I'm being picky, but I think the manufacturer kinda jumped only halfway across the creek.

The leg is about 4"x4" cross section. The manufacturer made the top veneer from two 2"x4" pieces. That's a little undesirable, but I have to admit that 4"-thick lumber isn't easy to acquire. (On the other hand, Apple is big enough to force the world to supply exactly what it wants...) At any rate, the top veneer is arranged so that two of the leg faces should be face grain, and two should be quartered/rift. But the manufacturer used face grain veneer on all four leg faces. So the top veneer doesn't align with the faces. To somebody who has spent a lot of time looking at wood, it is an obvious fail.

[Jamie Buxton]

I'd argue against a torsion box for the top, unless you include some sort of leg leveler on the bottoms of some of the legs. The problem is that the floor may not be perfectly flat. If the table is really rigid -- which is what a torsion box provides -- you may find your table teeter-tottering on two legs. However, if you make the table top as five sides of a box -- that is, without a bottom -- you get less torsional rigidity so the table will get all four legs on the floor -- even a non-flat floor.

[Art Mann]

As they say, there is no accounting for taste. The customer should always get what he wants but that table is just butt ugly to me. It looks like what it is - a bunch of plywood boxes stuck together with fake looking wood grain.

[Mike Schuch]

I would consider making that end piece 6" tall. Then cut shoulders into it like a tenon so all but the top 1/4" slips into the hollow square leg. This way it becomes a structural piece you can screw your table aprons into for a much firmer anchoring than just going into plywood.

Of course the worry would be that if the piece expanded it could blow out the corners of your hollow plywood legs. Maybe make the end grain cap piece 1/16" undersized of the hollow in the leg and only glue the cap piece on the two inside leg surfaces that the aprons anchor to?

You could even consider putting a T nut on the outside corner of the plug that you could use to anchor the diagonal brace of the table with a long bolt. It should be very strong this way.

Just a thought.