Amazing expandable table!!

[festooldude]

Most awesome table ever!! gotta watch!!

 

[peter halle]

Cool table!  My guess is that many don't know that Rick Christopherson built a large dining room table similarly.  You can go to his website and look for it there. I think he has a blog detailing the build.  http://waterfront-woods.com

Peter

 

[Michael Kellough]

Cool table!  My guess is that many don't know that Rick Christopherson built a large dining room table similarly.  You can go to his website and look for it there. I think he has a blog detailing the build.  http://waterfront-woods.com

Peter

And Rick's is motorized! Driven by a Festool drill.

I guess the one in the video could be motorized too, I didn't look.

 

[Frank-Jan]

If you search for Fletcher Capstan table on youtube you can see more videos of the table in the first post.

I didn't reread Rick's entire workblog, (I did remember that he used the motor of a C12), but the part I just read, mentioned he resawed the wedges so they were exactly the same, and could be placed at any position. In the related links on youtube, I saw a few similar tables with removable wedges, but they just numbered the wedges (Ricks's solution wasn't the easy way, but  much more elegant)

 

[jmbfestool]

I was thinking  wonder wa this special table is to find its something I had already seen years ago

 

[Rick Christopherson]

Interesting. I just stumbled on this thread. Back when I made that table, Domino was still a closely guarded secret, but I did manage to sneak in one photograph showing it in the background. No one noticed the unusual black and green tool at the time.  [big grin] By the time I got to making the substrate, Domino was public knowledge, so I could show it being used for the rest of the table.

I came up with the idea of using a Festool C12 early on in the project, but because I wasn't sure whether it would be successful, I kept it to myself until after testing. I had a backup plan for a manual drive, just in case. If you think the C12 is too spendy to put into a table, consider that the nondescript red cube in the center of the table is a $500 gearbox to harness the power of the C12. The total hardware was somewhere around $6000, but I think my existing machine shop could knock it out for a fraction of that cost today.

My biggest regret is not taking a video of the completed table in motion. The only way I could record video back then was using my still camera, and I didn't even have the ability to edit the start and end of the video. The one video I did record has lousy sound. The workshop was so quiet that the camera kicked up the recording level too high, and this made the mechanism sound really loud, when it was actually very quiet. I didn't even know the radio was still turned on, but the camera picked it up.

 

[Rick Christopherson]

..... but the part I just read, mentioned he resawed the wedges so they were exactly the same, and could be placed at any position. In the related links on youtube, I saw a few similar tables with removable wedges, but they just numbered the wedges (Ricks's solution wasn't the easy way, but  much more elegant)

Yup! I spent a lot of time calibrating the saw down to 3 decimal points accuracy on the angle, and then it wasn't touched until I was done cutting all of the angles. I didn't want the home owner to have to look at numbers to see which leaf fit in a certain location. But the same is true for the pie-wedges too. If they weren't also perfect 45 degree angles, then there would be a difference between when the table was opened versus closed. It's a level of precision that just isn't normally needed in woodworking.

You might also find it interesting how I used drafting techniques to divide the substrate circle into very accurate 45 degree sections. I needed these for laying out the slots for the hardware, and for mounting the linear slides.

 

[johne]

Here is the automated probably remote controlled version

 

[ldmillar1981]

Has anyone on here made one of the fletcher capstan tables? Shown in op video, i like Ricks version of the Jupe table. i am interested in how much extra engineering it takes to have the leaves integral?

Regards
Leigh