I came across a bar that was discarding all of their old bowling alley lanes.  They just had the sections stacked up in the parking lot awaiting someone to take them off their hands.  I decided to buy 16 feet and then designed a table to use the reclaimed wood.  Each 8’ section weighed several hundred pounds and took 4 people to safely move into the shop. 

The project in total took me 4 years to complete . . though I did not work on it continuously.  All of the wood for the top was made from the alley lanes by disassembling the old lanes with a crow bar and a lot of sweat.  There are 2-1/2″ iron twist nails every 6″ holding the original lanes together.  Each board was resurfaced and joined back together with splines and glue.

Since the alley boards were covered with nail holes on the face of each board, the base had to be made from new wood.   Equalizer slides from Rockler were used so that the table could be easily opened and closed without having the legs sweep across the floor.  The table was also designed to hold each leaf within the base so that premium closet space is not used for storage.  The whole table top and base was designed on Pro/Engineer CAD software prior to cutting any wood.  This resulted in no scrap or rework.   I prefinished all the base pieces before assembly to avoid glue squeeze out and for ease of finishing each piece. 

Now that the table is finished, we can finally enjoy our dining room that has been sitting empty for the past 2 years awaiting completion of this table. 

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