There something about a set of big wheels that is attractive in a chunky engineered kind of way. My wife found these in her place of work as they were being dumped from an industrial tool that was recently purchased by her company (at the time)and wheeled into place. Once in place these wheels are removed and discarded. Sadly, in industry settings there isn’t really time or any incentive to reuse of some of the wonderful redundant parts that have no immediate use. In our previous lives at a large multinational manufacturing plant, we used to marvel at the kind of stuff that was removed as surplus to requirements.

These fine big castors were calling out to be re-used and at the time we were browsing sites with ideas for industrial looking furnishings – and came across this coffee table design. With the new wheels we were half way there. The timber top I ended up making from more leftover pine lamwood. The picture should make it clear how I put this one together. Being new an enthusiastic for woodworking I wanted to go for more than a flat top and made this box structure with a space for books in the centre. I didn’t use any fancy jointing in this and just spent some time routing the corners and sanding seams to tidy it up and give it a somewhat modern rounded look.  The wheels were easy to screw into the base with large screws. One thought, if you have a choice when sourcing some castors for this, I would recommend making all 4 rotating as opposed to two rotating and two fixed in our case. Even though the timber box was heavy, the table is very mobile now and has turned out to be a workhorse in our house as its mobility means it moved rooms regularly and the kids love the height of it for doing art project, homework and as a Launchpad.