Comments and Photos from Martin Middle School in Austin, Texas.
This plan makes a beautiful table!
I'm a math teacher and I used your
plan for a summer project for some of my 8th grade students who
were willing to come up to school for 3 weeks to learn and work.
This table will go in next to our school's garden beneath a tree.
There were plenty of lessons on fraction and decimal conversions,
angle measurements, equilateral triangle and trapezoid
characteristics, and we even used the Pythagorean Theorem to figure
out if we could fit the completed table out of our school's courtyard
doors once complete.
Three things I would do differently if I were to build another one:
1) It seems like the seats are too low to the ground by an inch or so.
2) I would use crates or car jacks to set the seat frame- this was, by
far, the most difficult part.
3) The stain we chose seems to be too dark for pine.
Three things we modified from the plan:
1) If you build according to
the plan then you will have half inch gaps in between the trapezoids
on the table top because the wood you actually buy isn't 6 inches
wide- it's more like 5.5 inches...so we re-calculated and drafted a
table top with no gaps and brought the seats in closer a bit
2) we used 1x6 lumber instead of 2x6 for the table top surface to make the
table lighter.
3) We added chunks of 2x4 for seat support at the end
of the lower frame pieces.
4) We took the recommendation of
someone else on this site and cut our frame pieces in 60 and 120
degree angles.
Total cost in material = $170
Total time to build (with students and teaching them etc.) = 35 hours
Many thanks!
Ingrid Ristroph
Martin Middle School in Austin, Texas
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