I'm in the middle of making an 90" long x 57" wide dining table from 8/4 white oak.

Home alone

I had help loading these planks into my trailer at the lumberyard, but the guys didn’t take me up on my offer to travel with me to my shop to unload and start machining the sticks of lumber. One by one, I managed to get them into the shop, ripping them to width as they entered my shop doors.

I could never have ripped these properly on my bandsaw, as it’s just too hard to control them accurately and make small adjustments to cut along a marked line. A jigsaw would have taken hours to rip a single board, and a circular saw wouldn’t have been much faster. I considered using my track saw, but I eventually set the rip fence of my table saw to the dimension I needed and made the first cuts there.

The main challenge with doing this operation on a table saw is that the material on the left side of the cut starts to move inward, pinching the blade as the saw releases tension from within the plank. Another risk is that, once tension is removed, the section of the board between the blade and the rip fence can start to shift, causing that section to press against the fence and into the blade. Both situations can cause kickback, but since these planks are so heavy, I wasn’t as worried about that.

The first cut went surprisingly smoothly. There was virtually no tension in the wood, and the cut went well. The second and third cuts were just as smooth. In fact, I had no trouble at all ripping any of these boards, except for having to lift and carry them between my trailer and saw.

How heavy?

I’m not a big, strong guy, so maybe these planks aren’t as heavy as I’d like to think. My initial guess was that the larger planks were getting close to 100 pounds, but curiosity got the best of me. I didn’t have the determination to lug one of these planks to my bathroom scale, nor did I have the time. Instead, I took an offcut from a smaller piece home to measure it. The piece was 5-1/2″ wide, 4-3/4″ long, and 2″ thick.

I weighed myself on our bathroom scale three times and got the exact same result, down to 0.1 pounds. Then, I held the wood offcut while stepping on the scale again, and it weighed 1.1 pounds. A bit of math put the larger plank at about 65 pounds. Not crazy heavy, but heavy enough for me.

Getting a straight edge

Now that I had the rift-sawn material from each plank, I jointed their faces and started squaring up an edge so I could begin laminating the pieces to make the top. It wasn’t easy to ensure the edge was square to the fence and pressed down onto the jointer bed at the start and end of each pass. I decided to use my track saw to cut the first edge straight, then followed up with a rip on the table saw. Although the track saw took at least a minute to make the first cut, it turned out straight, and it wasn’t difficult on my part. Then, over to the table saw to rip the second edge straight, which also worked very well. The mating joints were tight, and I was pleased with the results.

I made sure my track saw blade was sharp and that I took the pass slow enough for the cut to sound smooth and even. As soon as the blade bogged down at all, I slowed down to ensure the edge was cut evenly. It was pushing the limits of what a track saw can do, but by listening and watching closely, the saw performed valiantly.

All this got me thinking about what the tabletop will weigh when it’s complete. I’m aiming for a thickness of 1-3/4″, and the shape is oblong—very similar to an egg—so it’s not easy to get an accurate estimate. A quick internet search said white oak weighs four pounds per board foot. If this tabletop were square, it would contain about 62 board feet of lumber. My rough guess is that the final shape will include about 30% less material, leaving around 43 board feet. This means the top will weigh about 175 pounds. Does anyone in the Peterborough area want to help me lift this monster?