High Noon;
Good afternoon to you sir, I trust that all is as well as can be all things considered.

If I may do this first, my background in answering this question is spending 27 years in the kitchen cabinet and furniture industry.

For over 3 years I ran one of these as well as being Lead Hand in the work cell where we did the rough ripping, then molding, planing and sanding of all the cabinet door parts.

[Linked Image from machinerysales.com]

Please note that the safety stop bar is missing from that photo - it's a 2 head 37" Sandingmaster made in Holland.

Anyways for the last several years we also ended up with a 52" wide belt sander from Italy - funny the name escapes me at present but will come to me hours later when it no longer is relevant.

Most of my time in the cabinet industry I was involved with millwright work too, since that sort of thing has always made sense to me somehow.

In this instance I'll differ with Sitka Deer in that a good wide belt sander operator can very easily dimension wider pieces such as table tops - we did it daily because our planer was only 24" wide and we made tables which had wider tops.

The front head on a sander like the one in the photo is solid and when the operator runs something like an 80 Grit up front it's not an issue to remove up to a millimeter at a time - but that's about it.

We'd often have folks bring in various projects to get sanded and would do it as long as there wasn't an excess of glue on the laminated tops or the wood was really wet or sappy. In those instances it'd usually mean we'd kill a belt which back then was more than $50 each, having bought none in 6 years I'm not sure what they'd be worth today, sorry.

If it were me building a table, I'd canvas the local furniture and cabinet makers to see if anyone has a big enough machine to take it down to where I need it and what they'd need to do it.

In my experience the end result would be preferable to attempting to do something that large by hand.

Hopefully that was useful information sir, good luck with your project and stay well.

Dwayne

The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"