How to create tables and copy records in blocks?

Source db has Postgresql 8.4. I want to copy some tables and records to Ubuntu 14.04 which has psql 9.3.

I need to create a test database, but I only need to copy some tables, with some of the records to the test system. I thought there was a way to dump the table layout as an SQL CREATE statement, then dump the records as INSERT statements. I'd like to dump 1000 records from each table at a time so as  not to put a strain on the production server. So my job would run as a cron job at night.

I've Googled a bit on this but can't seem to find anything on this. How would I go about using SQL to do this? Is there another way to get blocks of 1000 records to a brand new test db which will be a subset of our prodution db?

Thank you.

Chuck