A table for the ages

Pops says this is maybe his greatest creation yet. I'm inclined to believe him, and that's saying a lot. I won't tell you exactly how it started, but in brief, about 25 years ago my dad bought a slab of sandstone about the size of a sheet of plywood. He put it up on a wood frame, and there it sat, including a move from Utah to Colorado, until a couple months ago when my mom threatened to finally buy a new table or else. The story of how he got it polished is itself quite the yarn—I'll see if I can get him to write it up for you sometime. (In case you don't know, cutting and polishing sandstone is incredibly hard, more difficult than granite.)

But here's how it looked after the polisher got through with it:

While I was home for Christmas, I helped him move it around with the tractor so we could get the bottom set up to attach the legs and frame, which my dad welded up himself:

Unfortunately the bottom of the rock wasn't terribly flat, so we had to grind off some high spots to get the steel to lie flush (or close to flush):

Here are the legs, ready to be welded together:

Here's my dad taking the sharp edge off with some sandpaper:

Then we put about a gazillion coats of finish on the sucker:

Unfortunately I left before it was finished, but here's the boys helping my dad move the slab down to the house (from my dad's shop, where he was working on it):