Easy DIY Gaming Table (no woodworking)

[Truename]

My wife and I have always wanted a gaming table, but the price always seemed out of reach. This year, we had some money saved up, so we took a second look... and the prices were still out of reach. We want a nice big 4'x6' table, and that's expensive and hard to find. We did find the GameFold table, which isn't expensive at all, but reports on Reddit about its quality are pretty mixed.

In the course of looking further, though, we found this thread on BoardGameGeek. The video sums it up:


On the second page of that thread, Jesse Pohlman took the same concept and added legs. The resulting table looks great, and I feel like the aluminum rails will actually have more utility than a fancy wooden table.

So I'm going to give it a try! I'm going to document my progress in this thread. If you're reading this in The Future, the next post should have final results and build instructions.

 

[Truename]

[reserve for final results and build instructions]

 

[Truename]

I like the general idea of the Game Garage table, but I have reservations about the specifics. The biggest one is the use of marine tape to attach the surface to the table. I'm not worried about the strength of the tape, but I am worried about the repairability. Once the tape is in place, the table isn't coming apart again.

I'm also concerned about the strength of the floor laminate. In Jesse Pohlman's table version, it looks like he's using hardwood rather than laminate, and he supports it with additional cross beams under the table. I think his table is also smaller than ours.

Finally, I have zero woodworking tools and experience. Jesse's table has the wood and gaming mat sitting on top of the supports, which means you need to have a very precise cut to avoid gaps between the edge of the table and the surface. I'd like something I can build without that level of precision, preferably with minimal woodworking.

So my thought was to clamp the table surface to the bottom of the table and clamp it in place. That way the surface could be larger than the rails, which allows plenty of tolerence for sloppy cuts and should lead to a nice clean edge. In my next post, I'll share my initial drawings.

 

[Truename]

As I said, I'm going to clamp the table surface to the frame from the bottom. Plywood comes in 4'x8' sheets and the lumber store will cut it down to 4'x6' for me. With an inch of tolerance on all sides, that means the table's interior dimensions will be 5'10" x 3'10". The frame's rails will be 3" wide by 1.5" deep, so the total dimensions of the table will be 6'4" x 4'4".

Here's my initial drawings. (The numbers are 80/20 part numbers.) There's a single 3"x1.5" rail across the middle of the table and four aluminum plates on the side. They'll hold up the plywood and clamp it to the frame.

Astute readers will notice some problems with this design. More in my next post.

 

[Truename]

There's a saying: "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

In other words, it's easy to make something that doesn't fall down if you overbuild it. But to save costs on materials, you need to carefully engineer your design to be just strong enough to not fall down.

I'm not an engineer. I'm overbuilding the crap out of this thing. I hope. That means I'm probably spending more money than I need to.

I went to the lumber store and bought a nice piece of plywood. I went with 3/4" plywood, which is very strong, and I probably could have gotten away with 1/2". But this is a big table and somebody is probably going to stand on it at some point, so I wanted to err on the side of strength. I also went with the nice AC plywood, which is the premium grade, pre-sanded plywood. All together, it cost $91.08. (The cashier at Parr Lumber thought this was a cool project and gave me a bit of discount. Sweet!)

I brought it home and put it up on wooden blocks to simulate my planned support system. Then I walked around on the plywood, and even jumped up and down a bit, to see how well it could handle the load.

The problems were immediately obvious. The plywood flexed in the middle, between the central rail and the edge rails. But worst was the corners. They had no support and flexed badly.

Back to the drawing board. I changed everything to go width-wise instead of length-wise, put it back up on blocks, and tested it again. This time, success. Stable as a rock.