To me it's confusing when someone says they pick at breaker stage b/c four breaker stages are recognized in the tomato industry. Breaker 1 is where there's just a blush at the bottom. Breaker stage 2 is color maybe up about 1/3 of the fruit. Breaker stage 3 is color up to about half. Breaker stage 4 is color almost up to the stem. I don't pick mine until there's color at least halfway up, but I guess there are folks who have critter and bird problems who might want to pick them earlier. And most of the time I let them ripen on the vine b'c I want to. LOL It all depends on what your usage for the fruits is, how many plants/fruits you're growing and knowing what kind of shelf life they have. And yes, shipped in fruits are picked usually at breaker 1 and then put in large chambers and gassed with ethylene gas to speed ripening. Tomatoes normally produce ethylene gas themselves as part of the ripening process, but gassing them externally does speed up the process. And folks do the same thing when they try to ripen fruits in paper bags or wrap them in newspaper. It's not that those shipped in ones that look anemic are unripe, rather, specific commercial varieties have been developed that are more amenable to gassing and the taste was never there in the first place. Sigh. Carolyn

You might get better responses if you post this on the kitchen forum, instead of this furniture forum.

Take a look at this book, and others by the same author. It's a nineteen century mechanical engineer's field day. You should be able to put together any sort of Rube Goldberg you want from ideas here. They are things like converting rotary to linear motion, continuous to intermittent motion, rotational to eccentric, etc. On my retirement list is to make a giant do-nothing machine by chaining a lot of these contraptions together. Here is a link that might be useful: Making mechanical marvels from wood

Were you thinking you wanted to pour the concrete in place and then never move the table? Not a good idea IMO. Easier to have the base fabricated in metal and then attached to the underside of the granite which will have plywood glued to it so you have something to screw the base into. Not like it's going to fly away in the wind.