I am putting together an(42"wide) 18 foot dining room table with 2" red oak I have taken off the property. Wife saYs,"It's too f****ng big." So she wants a leaf in the table. Red oak is 45LBs/cu-ft. Looking like a 6' leaf would keep her happy. i will put wheels on the corners and thinking some kind of support in the middle.
Any ideas what to use for a sliding contraption when installing the leaf? I'm thinking some kind of rectangle tubes that might telescope.
I have 16 children/ grand children so need the space. May be doing a bed and breakfast too.
thanks. ===========================
The slides on mine are made of wood. The surfaces where they touch have female dovetails on both sides and the double male dovetail that joins them appears to be wood also. I can see only the end of it. The slides are about
5/4" thick and 2" high. The dovetails look like they could be cut with a router.
I built a bandsaw mill based on motorcycle wheels and tires to cut any straight dead red oak on my property into lumber. The fixturing for cutting custom lumber consists of two L shaped wooden brackets to clamp the wood to with bar clamps, usually with a straight 6" square beam or a plank underneath to support the whole length. It can cut down to 1/8" veneer and
3/4" square stickers to stack the planks.
Since getting good lumber from logs with defects can be tricky I rigged an overhead gantry hoist crosswise over the center of the saw track and lift the log in a rope sling run through a pulley so I can debark, inspect and rotate it to the best position, then lower it onto vee shaped supports that keep it there. The smaller end is wedged up to level the centerline, or the cardboard templates of the beam I want to cut. Tension on the elastic nylon rope sling makes a half ton log moveable by hand. The gantry track runs from the log storage shed over the saw track to space to load the wood on/off a narrow trailer.
This system is slower than Woodmizer's hydraulic log turner but more versatile and less damaging. My gantry and sawmill track is 3" C channel that was once pallet rack, spliced with the mounting plates that had been welded onto the ends. I turned down the wheels on HF's 1 ton gantry trolley to fit the channel. They fit 4" channel as-is.
Some EMT and lighter gauge chain link fence posts combinations of the same nominal pipe size loosely telescope together, since the posts match the OD of pipe while EMT has the Schedule 40 ID. The designated sizes of chain link fence posts are closer to their actual OD, for example posts with the 1.660" OD of 1-1/4" pipe are called 1-5/8". It's on my list to try swaging EMT to a press fit for splices with an exhaust pipe expander.