Modern Dining Table Build - Epoxy Woodworking

hey this is game the black-tailed studio and this week we are going to build the dining table fix a busted corner take some pretty cool photographs and last but not least we are going to show you how to clean up epoxy when you are done and reuse your buckets all that and more this week stay tuned any epoxy table project I start I start with the template just like this and this template isn't super precise it's just roughly the size of my finished table and I do make sure that I make the inside of my template the finished size of my table and then I will cut slightly larger than that to make sure when I cut it down I can get the exact size table my client is expecting and I mark the exact finished size of my table with the pencil or I should say the rough finish size with the pencil and now I'm going back with the chalk and about an inch outside that line just marking a rough chalk line so then I have a good place to set my Festool track saw here so when it's all said and done poured the epoxy planed it cut everything out I can ensure that I get the exact finished size of my table which this one I believe was eighty-four by 44 is what we needed to hit and be very end if you were good with Photoshop or fusion 360 or one of those fancy software's you could probably do all this without ever having to make a template I am not that good with computers unfortunately so this is what I am left with but if you are a maker and you're starting to get clients and you're not sure if they're gonna love the layout you had in mind make a template FaceTime them put your phone in a tripod move it around and let them decide that way you guys are both on the exact same page you know exactly what its gonna look like in the end there is always someone who asks in these youtube videos what my neighbors think of me making all this noise my driveway making all this dust all these power tools and my neighbors love me so don't even worry about me I pay them in woodworking they're always coming over to use my planer or my table saw cutting something down to size for them because I have the tools that make it about a 10 second job instead of a half a day job so before you ask they love me don't even worry about it at least for now until one of them moves out but I am fortunate to have great neighbors and they don't mind this massive amount of noise and dust that I make every couple weeks if you haven't gathered what I'm actually doing here is I am removing all the soft wood all the bark all the raw anything other than just good hard walnut I'm getting rid of and I really prefer the angle grinder and the wire wheel but all those other tools in there I used to get into some of the tighter spaces so just making sure that the epoxy has a really good hard surface to bond to after I get all the bark and softwood removed I need to go back and I need to seal everything with a faster drying epoxy and you can use your deep Pore epoxy for this but it'll just take a couple days to cure so I use one that cures it in about ten or twelve hours and just brush it on and this is gonna prevent any staining I love the black epoxy if you watch my videos regularly you know that I almost always use black and this is going to really prevent any of that black from bleeding into the wood and if you're wondering here this is shellac and this is in case I get any drips or spills on top of the wood again will prevent that black dye in the epoxy from staining the actual wood you always want to scuff up the layers between epoxy pores if they are totally cured like this one is so go back with a wire wheel there's a porter cable restorer where a nylon wheel anything you can't even sandpaper or scotch brite pad just give a good scuff to that glassy layer to ensure you get a really good bond between that and your deep pore resin a couple weeks ago I actually made an entire video dedicated to just making a leak-proof epoxy table mold so I will include a link to that in the video description below also maybe a month or two ago I did an entire video on how to calculate exactly how much epoxy you need so that way you don't run out in the middle of your pour and run into trouble so all this will make sense if you click the link in the video description below on how to calculate exactly how much epoxy and I did so doing a three thousand dollar 105 later pour so all that information will be in the video description I am pretty excited to announce that after about six months or so being a regular customer of the liquid glass epoxy I am now officially a brand ambassador for them so thanks to them for supporting my page if you are looking for a good epoxy it's the only epoxy I purchased for the last six months or so and it will be my epoxy going forward so thanks so much to them for allowing me to be a brand ambassador of their great product one of the only things you can't fix is unmixed epoxy and I get a message every week or so from someone that says hey it's been a month my epoxy is still tacky and that's probably because it's not thoroughly mixed so don't be afraid to over mix it really really really make sure you scrape the side scrape the bottom with a stick just really make sure it's entirely makes it another good tip don't spatula out the epoxy in the bottom you see I'm just letting it drip out I'm not scraping any excess epoxy out and that's because any potentially unmixed epoxy is going to be on the sides or the bottom so when you're doing it make sure you scrape the sides scrape the bottom when you're mixing but do not scrape the sides on the bottom when you're pouring it into your mold one of these days I'm wondering when I am going to stop teaching myself a lesson to making these tables I feel like I've made enough these tables that I should just know how to do it right unfortunately this time I taught myself a new lesson and you saw the weights there ahead about 75 or maybe it was a hundred pounds of weight on that main slab and figured that would be more than enough so it wasn't a ton of epoxy and what happens here and a little bit Neels I included a clip of it is the wood started to flow even with that much weight so my lesson this week clamp your stuff down no matter what just clamp it down no matter how little you think or how little of epoxy you think it's gonna be watch here this is where I started showing the clips and those boxes there you see piled on the right that was more weight to try to hold the slab down and I ended up wasting about eight or almost ten liters of epoxy because it started to float and then when I finally got the weight on it that's how much epoxy started flowing out over the top this wasn't the harshest lesson I ever had to learn but it was a good lesson on how to save some epoxy by clamping your pieces down now I'm going to D mold it and if you didn't watch the how to build an epoxy table mold video that I included in the video description make sure you use mold release on these don't just use melamine you can also use that tuck tape or the Tyvek tape but make sure you have some sort of release agent otherwise this melamine will essentially be impossible to get off and you can see it's kinda hard to get started on the bottom piece here but once you do get that edge in there it goes really easy and I just have a handful of these wooden wedges I made from two by fours work my way around the perimeter and then it just pops off and the whole bottom it's actually quite smooth and slick from that mold release as soon as I get this out of the mold I'm taking it up to a creative woodworking Northwest in Portland and they are a big industrial shop that allows me to rent out time on their end a planar and wide belt sander cost me about 75 bucks for 30 minutes in this table will probably only take me 15 minutes to get it plain completely flat so if you don't have a creative woodworking near you first of all I would call around some cabinet shops and see if somebody will rent you time on their desperate machine because this saves me so much time and gives me such a higher-quality finish than if I had to use a router sled or something like that so call around see if there is an industrial shop that might rent some time out to you if not I did a blog on how to surface these pick these pieces using like a router sled or something you can do in your shop which is a lot more messy and not nearly as nice but it's totally doable in a small shop I have another new tip that I haven't done before and this is for filling these small pits along the side and what I have started doing is I use just a small v-groove type of gouge and I actually make these holes larger and seams counter but the small pits really are hard to fill they're hard to get that epoxy to bond and that tiny little pit so what I've done is I start carving these grooves out slightly larger and that ensures that it's able to take the epoxy a little bit easier than the tiny little micro pits that seem to get air trapped between the epoxy and the pit so the little v-groove gouge works wonders for carving those out and then makes the touch-ups much better on these wide slabs like this one because this one did span the entire 44 inches in some places I decided to add some Canadian woodwork style C channels and the ones I had today were actually ones that I made myself but I usually do prefer to order them and it's actually sold by concept 13 now who is affiliated with Canadian wood works but here is how I make my own and it's just some regular 2 inch by a 1 inch by quarter inch C channel cutting it here with my only metalworking tool I own basically and the nice thing about making your own is you get to make them the exact length you want and then you get to cut the holes exactly where you want them on these epoxy tables it can be kind of hard to line up your holes since you don't really want to go right into the epoxy so it is kind of nice on the custom-made ones but it is a mess I hate making these I really prefer just to have the ones from concept 13 so I'll add a link to the video in the video description if you want to order them but this is how I make them I'm in a bind and if you were new to my page you may not know that I actually read and respond to essentially every single comment that you guys asked below a couple weeks ago I had my most popular video ever and I had like 8000 comments on there and people kept commenting that they couldn't believe that I'd responded to 8,000 comments and I told them that I only had to respond four thousand because four thousand of those comments were probably my replies so if you have questions on these si channels if you have questions on why I'm doing it or what this acrylic is or where you can buy the si channels or a product in here that you really want to know what it is and I didn't already include a link to it definitely feel free to ask me in the comments I will read it I will respond unless it's like a super weird comment which some of you guys do has some weird comments but most of you are really nice really helpful and just want to know where I got something or why I'm doing something so a long way of saying if you ask a comment I'll read it and I'll most likely reply so don't hesitate to ask me anything in the comment section below speaking of that one of the more common comments I get is telling me not to talk so much so that's why I took about a four second break there let you guys hear the C channel is going in and now I can talk through the rest of the videos so now I'm just using the threaded inserts that I will be attaching the C channels with and the threaded inserts are really my go-to because they allow me to tighten down those bolts but I'll still allow for that seasonal wood movement when you aren't touching up these epoxy touch-ups that we did there a couple days ago a good good tip is to warm it up and I like warming it up with the sander and then the scraper makes it really really easy if you don't warm it up it can be kind of brittle and actually pull it right out of those holes that you were filling so sander works well to warm it up and then scrapes really easy with that baho scraper I think that's how you say it is a Swedish name great tool again I'll have this in the video description below another way you can do is using a heat gun to heat it up modesto maker actually commented on that and told me that's how he heats up his epoxy so warming up with a sander hit it with a scraper and it should come out really really smoothly you'll probably see there that I'm also doing some small touch-ups with that black CA glue as I am sanding and scraping these and for just a tiny little micro pits that's where I like that black CA glue but the larger ones I'll do use the epoxy but definitely definitely use that black CA glue for the tiny little micro pitch or tiny cracks that are left after filling with epoxy after you get all your pits filled you can start the sanding process and I start with a hundred grit and I'm using a row Tex here but after I do the first pass of a hundred grit with the Rotex then I will move on to using the finish sander but before we go all the way up what I do is I sand with the hundred to make sure it's perfectly flat and now I can go back and I can add my bevel and before you say it's actually a chamfer but most people don't know what a chamfer is so that is what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be adding at 22 degree chamfer to the edge of this table and I'll show you a pretty cool method using a track saw since the chamfer I'm going to be adding is gonna be too big for really any router bit I would assume it is possible to do this with a saw that's not a festival would probably just be a lot more difficult you'll see why here in a second because I line everything up right on my festival track so definitely makes it a lot easier with the tracks I would like to see if you guys had a method that you've created not using a track saw to do this similar chamfer but for me this is the method that I use and all I did was I drew a line to where I wanted my chamfer to start put my track on there lowered the blade till it reached that line and now I have a consistent overlap which is usually around a third of an inch or so just making sure you keep it the same in the entire way otherwise your chamfer will vary from one end to the other and before I make my cut what I was doing here was just intentionally kind of scouring the wood with the blade to make sure it was hitting where I wanted it to hit and everything seemed to be right on track so to speak and I am good to make my cut I am doing a full youtube video just on how to make this cut so in a couple weeks I should have that video out showing how just a tiny adjustment on your track will make a big difference on your chamfer so I'll show you how to make some shallow ones and then some deeper ones and I will also show you how to avoid making a pretty big mistake that I made here just a second where I took a big chip out of the end of my table if you're squeamish you might want to look away yep broke it off clean right there it was pretty obvious what I did is I had that whole all that leverage from that 7 foot long piece of wood and it was just pulling against that corner and it broke off just before it was cut so stupid mistake by me next time I'm using painters tape on that corner and also supporting that piece while I cut so it doesn't have all that leverage pulling down and wanting to break but I've seen some other woodworkers do a similar patch and I had never done one quite like this but and it being pretty easy and actually worked really well this is my Lee Neilson low angle block plane getting it nice and flat luckily I have some perfectly matching wood cuz I just cut off a bunch of it one of the problems was I couldn't clamp it down to this such a weird angle so what I did was I used the tape on three wood glue got my two pieces that were both perfectly flat and I actually just used painters tape to hold it on and I got it as snug as I possibly could which was actually quite snug left it for 24 hours and I came back and it was just like one piece of wood in the end I always loved reading you guys his experiences woodworking that you leave in the comments because so many of you out there have so much more woodworking experience than I do so let me know in the comments a lesson you've learned maybe you're a nine-fingered woodworker that has a good safety tip for us maybe you've had an experience like this and how you salvage it because it's not just for me it's everybody else watching the video this also reading the comments you might solve a problem you might save a finger by giving a quick story quick anecdote about something that happened to you and how you overcame it and don't get me wrong I don't want to compare a tiny busted corner with losing a finger but this was something that wasn't really going to be acceptable I'd you know I didn't want just put black epoxy in the corners that wouldn't have really matched anything so I had to come up with something kind of creative that would look pretty seamless and my client doesn't even know about this corner yet but he usually watches these videos so I'm curious to what he's gonna say when he finally sees this cuz I guarantee you he has not noticed this patch at all and this table has been delivered so we will see what he says stay tuned for that maybe I'll give you an update if he has something funny to say on it so that corner was a little bit of a hang-up but now we're finally ready to move on with the rest of the build and after sanding - I believe I actually stand up to 120 grit then I come back with my 8-inch router bit my trim router hit that top corner with the eighth inch roundover and then I continue my sanding process but before I sand any more on the top I need to kind of smooth out that router there's router marks and I'm doing that with my sanding glove and some old sandpaper and I will just hand sand the side there to 150 then 220 and then continue through all my grits the 120 150 180 up to 240 for this particular table the wood is much more forgiving than the black epoxy so what I am doing is just really really taking my time have a microfiber handy wipe it off if you can see any inconsistencies crossing it up back and forth side to side circular motion making sure that it all looks the same kind of uniform frosted look before taking it to finish I will have some shots of this table completely finished here in just a second because I am outsourcing the finishing to have it sprayed with a conversion varnish but before I show you the finished shots at the table I'm going to show you how I clean up the epoxy and I prep it a stick or a stump or a piece of wood something in there to give me to hold on to let it completely here so about a week or so till it's nice and brittle and then just break that piece out and these other pieces you can just peel them out they actually come out pretty satisfying so sometimes you get it all in one piece other times you have to go back and kind of peel out these individual ones but the same works for a bucket but my stir stick in there pull that out and then yes get those sheets of epoxy and spend a couple minutes peeling these out and the buckets are good as new and you can use them in your next pour about one out of three buckets I can get in one piece like that and the client for this table actually had his own base so I was shipping him a top only but I was lucky enough that I had this custom base made for a table I have coming up so I just set it on this base for these photos and I thought it actually looked pretty cool which got me thinking a lot of people like wood a lot of people like metal a lot of people like the natural metal color a lot of you like black metal so let me know in the comments which you prefer and every week I like to give a little bit of credit to the people who make it all the way to the end of the video so start your question or comment with what you prefer wood or metal and one reason I like to do it this way is it's gonna confuse everybody else that didn't watch the whole video why people are starting to comment with wood or metal so it'll make me laugh maybe it'll make you chuckle and it will let me know that you watch the entire video and I promise I will answer all of your questions or comments first anyway thanks so much for watching please subscribe for more videos just like this one

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 506,060

Rating: 4.9292946 out of 5

Keywords: epoxy table, river table, resin table, epoxy resin table, resin art, ecopoxy, epoxy, how to woodworking, diy projects, diy epoxy, liquid glass epoxy, blacktail studio, epoxy river table, diyer, diy project, how to make a dining table, walnut dining table, diy dining table

Id: lQ41TIGhovM

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020