August, 2023
My brother collects and restores pinball machines as a hobby. He recently procured a very old, penny arcade, tabletop pinball machine called ‘Broadway’ and requested I build a table to support it. This type of pinball machine is so old, it doesn’t have any flippers – it’s designed to have the player “gently” nudge it to guide the ball and collect points. I always thought that nudging a pinball machine was more a form of cheating, so I learned something new! The key here is that the table needed to be functional, and not detract from the star of the show: the pinball machine.
This was my first furniture build project, so I was excited yet apprehensive about proceeding. YouTube videos made it look pretty easy and straightforward, so I dove in and hit bottom hard. Lots of learning on this build.
Design
After a long thread of emails, mostly me encouraging him to add new features and make the build more interesting, we settled on the following design.
We agreed that legs could be purchased separately, and I would focus on building a sturdy table top with interior dimensions of 31″ x 16.5″. The walls would involve laminating wood of my choice and be rounded at the top with mitered joints and rounded tops. The coin tray in the front would allow the storage of some pennies to play the pinball game.
Build
This was a slow build, done over the period of many weekends with lots of projects in between starting in March and concluding in June. I settled on 2 types of wood for this build: “White wood” (which I think is a nice way of saying “pine”), and Oak. I was looking for inexpensive wood, that would have a bit of a contrast for visual appeal.
I started by cutting down the boards on my table saw and laminating them together. After drying, I cut them to length with the appropriate miters and rounded the tops with a round router bit.
I made my first mistake on this step by mitering the end of the right wall by mistake. I ended up salvaging the piece by cutting off the miter which leaves it about 3/4″ short. Silly mistake, but others who see it assume it was part of the design. I sanded them with 80, 150, 220, 400 and they were looking really good!
Next, I went to work on building the base. In order to save some money, I opted to glue up a pair of boards, rather than attempt to find a slab that was 16.5″ wide. I first attempted to use 2 pieces of 1×10 whitewood, laminated together (1×10 is actually 9.25″ wide, so the result was 18.5″ allowing me the opportunity to trim off the sides and avoid any blemishes or edge knots). I intentionally glued them up with the grain going in opposite directions in order to avoid warping as instructed by “professionals” on YouTube videos. However, the result was a significant warp which I found unacceptable. I went down a rabbit hole of attempting to plain out the warp, but ultimately ended up with a board that was too thin to use, so I scrapped it and started over.
My hypothesis was that I clamped it wrong during glue-up since the boards did not start with any warp. So, I bought another board and attempted to include both side pressure and top/bottom pressure to stop it from warping. Unfortunately, that did not work either and the results were the same! Ugh! What is going on??!!
Next, I resorted to laminating several pieces of narrow whitewood together with alternating grain patterns and applying both side and top/bottom pressure during the glue-up. This was the best of the three attempts, but still introduced a slight warp. At this point, I was getting frustrated and decided this was good enough. My hope was that attaching the sides would help to counteract the warp. I used a hand plane to lightly fix some high spots, and then sanded with 80, 150, 220, 400.
I glued the mitered joints of the sides and screwed them onto the base from the bottom. I used a router bit to trim the edges of the base to exactly match the sides and it was looking pretty good. I love my corner band clamps for these kinds of glue-ups – they are fantastic.
Next, I tackled the coin tray. I put this off to the end because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to tackle it. I knew I wanted to incorporate both types of wood in order to keep the striped pattern theme. I ended up cutting 2 triangular pieces of white wood and gluing/screwing them into the front sides of the table. I then used some scraps to create a laminate wide enough to cover the gap between the two triangular supports. I took the block to the bandsaw and resawed a narrow piece off of the block, about 1/4″ thick. I sanded this up and then used glue and supported it with a few brad nails. Unfortunately, the brad nails went in with such force that it started cracking the thin wood. I was able to rescue it with some CA glue and lots of sanding.
Finishing
I put several coats of Formby’s Tung oil onto the board. Although it says it is a high gloss finish, I find I get more of a semi-gloss result. My intention here was to give the table a bit of an amber hue that helped to make the grain pop – especially on the oak wood. I found the whitewood really absorbed the oil quickly, which prompted me to continue to add coats until it was saturated. I benefited from long pauses between coats as I mainly worked on this during weekends. I used 0000 steel wool to knock down the high spots and called it done!
Next, to choose some legs. The goal was to get this table about waist-high, but provide sturdy support. Also, it was very important that they have feet that can adjust the level to make the game work correctly (the game has a built-in level to help with this).
I explored lots of options, but ultimately selected this set of 28″ heavy duty metal table legs. I liked the look of these, but also the fact that they were easy to install and fit the width of the table nicely.
Conclusion
This build was a learning experience involving many failed attempts and retries. I’ve never had such issues with board warping as I did on this project. I did a similar laminate base for the Truck Drawers that I built, and I even used the same wood, so I’m still not sure what was going on here. I’m glad this was not a rush-build and had the time to experiment and find a good solution.
I did have some challenges working with the very soft “whitewood” and very hard “oak”. In the future, I’ll need to consider better matching the density of the woods for workability rather than selecting wood based on colour alone. Perhaps a Maple could have produced the same contrasting look with less challenges? That said, Maple costs 2x what I paid for the whitewood, so there is a cost to consider.
Looking at the finished product, I now realize I missed an opportunity to better match the wood on the pinball cabinet with the table. The darker brown wood matches neither the whitewood or oak that I selected for this project, but I only got to see the pinball machine after the project was done. I could have applied a stain that would have still allowed a contrast. In the end, my brother is happy and that’s the most important thing.
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