Hey there!

I just picked up a huge table made of old, old beams (still have lots of metal in them, nails, etc) from a friend who wanted to throw it out. Whoever made this table should be exiled for how poor of a job they did on it. I want to restore it. 

To move it, I had to remove the legs from the bottom of the table. They were simply just screwed onto the table with regular screws. I don’t understand how the entire tabletop didn’t split, crack or anything of that nature — my understanding of wood movement and expansion and contraction leads me to believe that this was dumb luck, but maybe you all have better insight than I do on the matter.

Before I get into completely rehabbing the table, I want to just reattach the legs so I can use it as a table for the time being.

What’s the best way to do it?

As you can see from the photos below, the metal legs were attached to the tabletop via that metal plate with all the holes in it. There weren’t many screws in each leg, maybe 4 in each. The first photo shows the bottom side of the table top and theres a weird thin peice of plywood stapled to it which is where they screwed the legs into. (There’s only one pictured below because the other one fell off when we removed the legs)

Would milling oblong holes into the steel plate instead of having them just be perfectly circular help? That way the screws could move freely. (I don’t really like this option because I dont have the tools to do it and really dont want to haul these things to a metal fabricator, im on a really tight aka nonexistant budget)

Help! LOL

Thank you in advance.