Pine Slab Coffee table with moving gear centerpiece

Incredible Coffee Tabe

Finished product first. Here's a moving gear coffee table I made!

Step 1 was getting the gear I needed. Here's the slab of pine (I got two) from a local lumberer near me.

Second were the gears. These were ordered on Etsy and are just MDF wood gears. I did this to keep the cost low.

There's also a pane of glass for the center, but those don't photograph so well.

First thing's first. Sand the crap out of your slabs of wood (or plane them. planing is a great idea. I don't own a planer.)

These were cut with a nice saw, so planing wasn't *necessary*.

Oh yeah, for this to work you also need a motor, and some way for all this stuff to rotate. Here's a picture of my motor spinning a dowel. The dowel was drilled dead center by a shop I know. You can do this at home if you have the tools, or take it pretty much anywhere.

Here's a dry sitting of everything laid out. Notice here on the slabs there's a lip for the glass. This was done with a routing table. It can be done with a table saw as well (cut 4-5 lines in it and then chisel out), but I had a router available and it was easier.

Stain up the pieces. I went with "Red Mahogany" as the stain. I applied this with a cloth and let it sit for about 5 minutes before soaking up the excess.

Clearcoat Clearcoat Clearcoat. I did about 5 applications of clearcoat and there are still quite a few rough spots on the slabs. When the weather warms up I may do a few more to even things out.

This is also where you find out how level your slabs are. I noticed some clearcoat pooling in the low spots of my slabs. Didn't hurt much other than it took longer to dry.

Dry run of the gears moving inbetween the slabs with the glass pane over. They run pretty good!

The base of each gear is a 3/4" wooden dowel for the axle they ride on. Glued underneath each of those dowels is a 1" dowel for each gear to turn on so that they aren't rubbing against the whole piece of wood.

I used some metallic paint from Home Depot to make the gears look more metal-like. The "hammered" look didn't turn out as well as i'd like, but it still looks like an old-time gear, and much better in the end result.

I forgot to take pictures of how I built the legs. They aren't anything special. I used 1x4s and screwed them together in a box fashion. As of this gif they aren't actually even screwed in to the top. They served the purpose will and also gave something for the gears to sit on.

The piece of wood (and dowels) under the gears were also painted black (like the legs) to mask them a bit.

Last note is that I'm using a PWM to be able to vary the speed of the gears. I got a 30RPM motor (currently what you're seeing) and i like to vary it down to as low as it can go. With the TV on you can't hear the motor, otherwise it's a small hissing.

the lamp light better captures the color of the wood. I'm happy with how it turned out!