San Diego "ultimate game table" Build part 2

Fast forward a little bit and you got yourself 2 table halves.  Nice. 

We flipped over the two halves to check for alignment then drilled the holes for the carriage bolts.  With 4 bolts the two halves squeeze together tight and become one piece.  Now we flip it again and begin to assemble the pedestals upside down.

BTW, Can anyone spot the Hirst molds in the picture?

You can see a bit of bowing in the middle.  We gave each top's brace about a 1/16" gap and let the carriage bolts squeeze everything together.  The braces look a bit warped under the pressure but the table top looks like one piece from the other side.

Here is where we threw out the plans for the bases.  No crate bottoms for this baby!  We "octganized" each pedestal half and spread the legs around.  L bracket pieces and screwing right into the wood both insure there won't be any shifting or wobbling.  I had read elsewhere that the secret to a good pedestal table is to make the base rock solid and heavy.  Done.

The only problem with building it all upside down is that we were constantly afraid of measurement drift.  We constantly checked each leg for plum and height and used vises to hold everything together.  We had to unscrew a few of the legs and re seat them too.  This was one of the longer parts of the project for sure.

As a note, the table legs do not rest directly flush and poke onto the bottom of the table surface,  We added soft furniture feet stickies to each one to rest between the table and the legs to insure that the majority of the weight was transferred to the horizontal bracing of the pedestal.

Now onto the leaf.  Our original designs called for a lot of cross bracing to sit between the two long braces....but it was totally unnecessary and we settle for just 2 more towards the center.  We also had to make sure we didn't inadvertently cover up a spot where carriage bolt holes were going to go either.