Crafting a Table of Galactic Proportions
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When a customer approached Dan Zongker, co-owner of Omaha, NE-based Zongkers Custom Furniture, with a challenging request to build a galaxy-themed table for their dining room, he happily obliged, meeting with the customer to work out the design.

“It’s a joy to do something different every day or every week, it really is,” says President Dennis Zongker, who co-owns the 19-year-old company with Dan. “Just making drawers or whatever every day, all day long, all the time; that would be like prison for any of us here.” The company has nine employees and manufactures a wide variety of items including dining, coffee and end tables, entertainment centers, night stands, dressers, custom conference tables, reception counters, podiums, credenzas, liturgical furniture and more.

The customer was looking for a table to complement a dining and sitting room, which was filled with collections of world travel artifacts, with a solar system motif. “They had an existing table base, which resembled the globe and galaxy, made of metal, which they wanted to re-use,” Dennis says. “It was a nice piece of art, and we didn’t want to lose the visual. The table is designed to represent the solar system or galaxy. Inserting a glass center enabled the view of the metal table base, from both the table top and from the sides, giving the table depth and perception.”

After receiving an isometric drawing from his brother Dan, Dennis engineered the top of the table on AutoCAD. The top substrate core is made from hardwood veneer core plywood. He then veneered the top and the bottom with maple wood on wood veneer, which was yellow-glued on and put in a vacuum press bag and cold-pressed for six hours.

“The 54-inch diameter table top has maple, birch, walnut and ebony,” Dennis explains. “I cut the parquetry (geometrical shapes) with a scalpel using the ‘window method.’ The outside bull nose edge is glued up with five 1/8-inch layers of solid maple. The radius rings of ebony were glued up on radius templates with three layers to equal the ebony inlays. The center opening is open with a 3/8-inch-thick beveled glass insert so that you could see the custom metal table base of rings of spheres. I clear coated the top with three coats of Magnalac dull pre-catalyzed lacquer.”

To learn more about the parquetry dining table and other Zongkers custom projects, visit www.zongkers.com.

Zongkers’ dining table features decorative parquetry designs (above) and a metal table base resembling a globe and galaxy (below) that can be viewed from both the top and sides of the table.

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