For well over a hundred years the world has failed to take proper notice of the word "Table" clearly contained in the name of the famous Periodic Table of the Elements.
One evening while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, I became momentarily confused. He begins a chapter with a description of a periodic table display he loved to visit in the Kensington Science Museum, and in mis-reading the paragraph, I thought it was a table, not the wall display it actually is. While my confusion only lasted a few seconds, when I found out there wasn't a Periodic Table in the British Museum, it left a hole I felt I had to fill.

Actually I would never had had this confusion, or built the table, if I hadn't been thinking for the previous month about the need for a new conference table in my group's common office area. I had already built the Triangle Table to be our coffee table, but we needed a conference table too, and I certainly wasn't going to buy one of those expensive ugly ones from the office supply catalogs.

And I would never have built the table if I didn't happen to have a nice pantograph engraving machine with a complete set of fonts from the closing out auction of a local hospital (new $1700, mine for $50 with fonts).

So really the table is a result of three unlikely and totally unrelated factors coming together at the same time, which probably explains why, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has ever built one like it.

Having decided to make a table, the details fell quickly into place. One thing was immediately obvious: Each element group (e.g. alkali metals, noble gases, etc) would be represented by a different type of wood, with suitably clever analogies made between wood grain and chemical properties. Equally obvious was that the basic matrix of the table would be made of two-inch-thick Walnut boards, because I have two-inch-thick Walnut boards up the wazu on account of a fortuitous auction purchase some years ago. //

Then of course there's the whole question of collecting elements! I won't even begin to get into that, other than to give you one example, the isolation of zinc from roof flashing. It's done by melting.

You start with a bucket of junk from the local scrap metal dealer:

Melt it down in something that gets hot (for zinc a good stove will do, but this dandy is handy for many of the others):

Pour it into something that won't melt, crack, or explode (plaster is nice), and you'll get some metal samples:

and some more of that entropy:

This technique works well for the isolation of copper and aluminum from electrical wire, tin from fishing weights, lead from plumbing lead, etc. You'd be surprised how many elements are available at Walmart, and the isolation is far easier than from the ores.

While many element collectors (is there a society I should know about?) seem to concentrate on authentic mineral samples, I've decided to go with a theme of manufactured objects that use pure elements for their intrinsic properties. I think it's absolutely amazing how many of the elements actually are used straight up in by and large pure form, in common objects you'd find around the house, farm, shop, or battleship. (By the way, if you have any depleted Uranium from Afghanistan, I could use it.)