Hello Everyone, I have been considering the idea of building a kitchen table with a marble top. My dad has a slab of marble about 6ftx4ft that he has kept in our garage for about 20yrs. I’m just not too certain how I would attach the marble to the wood. Has anyone tried a project like this?
I’ve looked around the internet but I really haven’t seen any ideas I like. Most countertop companies I think just silicon the stone to the wood but I don’t really like that idea too much. It seems like it would come loose if you picked up on it.
Replies
If you are willing to risk drilling the slab you could epoxy threaded rods into some holes to fasten the top. If you are not wiling to drill you could epoxy angle iron to the underside of the top and drive screws through it into the apron.
I don't think I would want to drill into the slab. It's only 3/4" thick so there isn't much meat there. The angle iron isn't a bad idea. I had thought about wood blocks but I like the angle idea better.
I built a large heavy roll-around kitchen cabinet some years ago. I put a man made stone top on it using only silicone. No problems. And, the stone edges aI re convenient handles for moving it around.
Stone of any type tends to be a rather brittle material. Mechanical fasteners concentrate loads and can cause fractures. Silicone is a flexible yet strong material that will distribute loads and is less likely to cause fractures.
However, I would not use the stone to lift anything. That is putting a lot of bending stress on the slab. Having said that, if you do, the silicone will be less apt to fail. And, if it does, the silicone will likely come loose from the substrate or the stone rather than cause the stone to crack. Easy repair in that case.
+1 on silicone. I have a monolithic slate slab top siliconed to the cherry aprons of a table used as a kitchen island for 19 years now. As Bilyo said, stone is brittle, so when I have to lift the table off the dowels that key it in place on the wood floor, I make sure to lift by the aprons. Fortunately a rare occasion when I need to refinish the floor.
I put a eight foot left-over granite counter-top on on a work bench. It weighed about 400 lbs. and it is just sitting on 2X2's spaced ~18" apart, and it is not going anywhere.
How or if you attach your top may depend on your table base and how much the marble top weighs. For example, if you need to move the table and can get a grip on the base to slide the table (vs. lifting it from the edge of the marble top) gluing it to the base with silicone adhesive may be fine.
Silicone.