Branching out: Campus collaboration builds handcrafted tables

The boardroom table in the Digital Agriculture and Innovation Lab. Its tabletop is made of ash while the leg assemble tops and bottoms are cherry wood and the cross braces are walnut. Submitted photos.

Chris Saleh's childhood hobby helped him lead a group of innovative employees at the Digital Agriculture Innovation Lab to build two tables from fallen trees on the Iowa State campus. The effort involved more than a dozen individuals, including some from facilities planning and management (FPM) and the Student Innovation Center, to design, build and assemble an executive conference room table and counter-height "collaboration" table for the lab, which opened in December.

The tables serve as showpieces for visitors to the lab and as gathering places for employees.

"I started doing woodworking as a child because my father was a longtime cabinet maker in Wisconsin," said the electrical engineer whose work at the innovation lab focuses on digital signal processing and sensing algorithm development and evaluation. "We wanted to use university resources and have the work performed by members of our team with a passion for creativity, design and fabrication."

Saleh said the project began with a tip from Alison Doyle, ISU Research Park associate director, about a campus source for wood. That led to a visit with Rhonda Martin, FPM campus landscape architect, to a barn where fallen campus trees are stored and dried in the university's TreeCycle program. Martin said the initiative to find the best use for impressive but fallen Iowa State trees began after a tornado on Sept. 8, 2005, knocked down about 70 campus trees, including the state's largest scarlet oak. The trees selected for the program often are damaged by storms or insects or removed for new building projects. 

The group settled on cherry wood for the boardroom table and ash for the collaboration table. The cherry came from a tree removed at the College of Veterinary Medicine in 2014, while the ash was removed from the Buchanan Residence Hall site in 2015.

The boardroom table -- which is 18 feet long and 4.5 feet wide -- was cut into three pieces to fit through the lab doors. The two end pieces can stand on their own with the third piece serving as a connecting leaf. 

The collaboration table is 7.5 feet long and three feet wide. The two ash slabs that make up the tabletop are sister slabs -- sequentially cut from the same tree. The tabletop is supported on a custom base of four clear tubes containing grains -- corn, soybeans, wheat and rice -- the research group works with frequently. The footrest running across the table bottom is made of hexshaft, a component used in combines and other ag equipment.

"In a lot of ways this project was really refreshing," Saleh said. "These are my coworkers, and I work with them in a professional capacity, but it is neat to see a different side of them. To see how their brain works in this scenario versus the work they do in their everyday jobs was exciting."

Teamwork builds boardroom table 

Digital Ag Innovation Lab staff frequently fabricate using metal, but woodworking requires a different set of tools. Fortunately, the Student Innovation Center's Metal and Wood Makerspace proved a perfect fit for the group's needs. Saleh designed plans -- an instruction book -- for every part of the table. 

"Everyone that comes into the makerspace gets trained on how to use the equipment, and everyone in their group learned on all of the equipment they needed to get to the end result," said makerspace supervisor Steve Eaton. "We were here for any advice they needed, but really this was just a workspace for them."

The woodworking involved six employees putting in more than 100 hours over six months. The entire project took just less than a year to finish with lab staff working around their day jobs to make the tables. Saleh said the project wouldn't have been possible without the equipment the makerspace makes available to faculty, staff and students. 

"The lumber was rough sawn and as it dries it warps, so the first process was getting down to finished dimensions and cutting everything square," Saleh said.

Employees then split time in the makerspace between flattening the face of the wood on the jointer and ensuring 90-degree edges. Next, they used a planer to create two parallel flat faces for a tabletop. One rough edge remained and was finished with a table saw. Saleh said they used the same process for every board in both tables.

The boardroom table has four custom leg assemblies whose tops and bottoms are cherry wood and cross braces are walnut. Once the legs were assembled and glued together, two innovation lab employees designed and fabricated steel plates that fix on top of the leg assemblies and secure them to the tabletop.

"I like to incorporate contrasting wood species because it draws your eye to the different features in the wood," Saleh said.

The collaboration tabletop is made up of two sister slabs -- sequentially cut from the same tree -- and supported on a custom base of four clear tubes containing the grains corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

One of a kind

The collaboration table is designed for engineers and researchers to work at if meeting space is in short supply. 

"The collaboration table required us to get creative," Saleh said. "It's made out of two slabs of ash joined in the middle, but the slabs were too big to run through the planer and get a flat face." 

The solution to that challenge was a 12-foot jointer sled, a flat plywood box the ash labs rested on so the boards would not wobble when pressed down flat in the planer. 

The ash tabletop features a unique look, courtesy of nature. Saleh said the team decided to dig out the Emerald Ash Borer tracks in the wood and fill them with clear epoxy to highlight the tunnels the insects make in a diseased tree.

"We have well-rounded people on this team," Saleh said. "This is a group of people who love to learn new things and expand their horizons."