Quaker table in spalted maple and steel.

Table with balls of steel

This design is about as spare as you can get. What keeps it from being boring is the beautiful figure of the spalted maple and the kinetic nature of the decorative recycled steel balls.

I started this process by eliciting some help from my daughter Sonya. She’s a designer for Artistic Designs For Living in San Francisco and has a great eye for modern design. Sonya sketched out a few designs of a slab table where the steel frame protruded beyond the plane of the top. That was the starting point.

I kept the design loose — I had some idea of the overall dimensions, then began milling the maple slab.

It wasn’t long before I encountered my first fork in the road. The maple was so twisted and cupped that I had to saw it in half in order to mill it flat without losing thickness.

Once I had two slabs, I decided to keep it that way (instead of gluing the halves back together). That presented an interesting design opportunity — what to do with the negative space between the two halves?

Recycled ball bearing finials are attached with rare earth magnets.

I thought of putting some natural materials in between the halves of the top — stones, even live grass. And i fact, this table could be configured in a number of different ways. But when I came across a seller unloading a pile of recycled steel ball bearings from an old, massive electric motor, that did it for me.

The frame is made of welded square steel tubing. I ground all the welds smooth so as to give the frame a seamless finish. The steel is textured with a 3M abrasive pad disc  powered by a die grinder.

The balls in the center ride in a wooden tray and the fixed balls are held in place with rare-earth magnets. The name of the table is inspired by its simple design and a unique quality: Any motion of the table — from a slight bump to an earthquake — will cause the balls to roll or wiggle.

Cherry-and-steel bar stools

Bar stools measure 12 in. wide by 12 in. deep at seat by 33 in. tall.

These extra-tall bar stools are constructed from cherry and 1/2-in steel square stock.

The seats were roughed out with an angle grinder, then further shaped with a scorp, then smoothed with abrasives.

The cherry is finished in poly and the steel is coated with a hammer-finish paint.

Carved cherry bar stool seat