Build Table Part One April 9th, 2007.

Last week I got around to buying the steel from the salvage yard I’d found previously. Due to its size and weight I had this thing delivered. The picture below shows how it came…

So what this is, is 150mm x 100mm ‘C’ sections bounding 8.5mm steel checker plate, as delivered it was too wide so I bought a 9″ angle grinder and a stack of cutting discs to go with it. Today I got my first chance to have a go at cutting it down and took a big slice off of one side.

It took roughly an hour and a half to cut this off and a disc and a half of cut of wheel. This trims it back to another 150mm x 100mm section. On the other side it will be trimmed back by much less just ~50mm to tidy up the gas axe cut that there right now. Once done I’ll have a table top 1.75m x 3.64m which is a bit wider than I thought it’d come out as I was sure it would measure 1.5m all done when I measured it in the scrap yard. I guess the garage space will just be a little bit tighter than hoped for.

The more major shock was the checker plate on top proved to be 8.5mm thick rather than 6mm as I’d guess in the salvage yard, which on the one hand is good but on the other with the increased size the table top is now 200Kg heavier than I’d expected! So I hope the heavy duty castor wheels I’ve bought live up to their name.

In the pictures you can also see the bit of 100mm H beam that’ll be turned into six legs.

I’m planning on cutting the wide off cut into 6″ strips to weld edge ways onto the underside of the table to stiffen the whole affair up. I may just go and buy some strip if the job of cutting it gets to tedious to go through.