My wife purchased a few singer foot petal operated sewing machine bases and we finally finished one of them. The table top is made out of a piece of 18″ x 36″ wood purchased from Lowes that I edged with a piece of rope trim. After lots of sanding to get the edges of the trim and the wood to line up (the trim started off just slightly wider), my wife took over and stained and sealed the table top. After I screwed it to the base she had cleaned up and spray pained, here is the finished result.
I have a similar project for a Christmas present. How did you attach the top to the table to the base?
I used short wood screws that were carefully chosen to not poke through the top of the table when screwed in from the bottom. They are only gripping about 1/2 inch of wood, so I wouldn’t recommend lifting the base using the wood top, but if you move the table around by lifting the cast iron base the screws are fine for holding the top down. If you want a really secure fastening, I’d suggest attaching two or four pieces of wood to the table top with wood glue and then screwing into the wood using 1 to 1 1/2″ wood screws.
How did you decide on the sizw of the top so it would be in proportion with the table?
I went to Home Depot and bought a pre-assembled unfinished pine tabletop/shelf unit. They conveniently had one that was about the right size. So I was constrained by the available offerings, but they generally have a relatively good selection of sizes. (Then I took the tabletop board over to the trim section and bought some trim that was just slightly thicker than it’s width. I sanded down the trim to match in size.)
how did you get this stand?
We found a person selling it via Craigslist.