5 Tips For Better Live Edge Tables

hey guys welcome back to the shop in this video I'm gonna give you five tips on how to make better live-edge furniture including material selection design and finishing boob sweat check it out first tip when it comes to making anything with live edge is understanding if your woods actually dry which requires a basic understanding of moisture content is your wood dry or is it wiet. For those of you who aren't familiar moisture content is the amount of water that is in the wood now when you buy kiln dried wood it's pretty much gonna be ready to rock and roll and it should be nice and dry if you're going that route all you got to do is bring it in your shop let it acclimate for a couple weeks it should be ready to rock and roll but if you're not buying it and you're like myself and you like to get cheap stuff from local guys who claim it's dry you're gonna want to go ahead and snag yourself up a moisture meter now I've got a couple linked down in the description that are some really good options I do recommend though if you're gonna go this route of just getting a nice expensive pinless meter from the beginning I have this cool meter from Lignomat and it comes with this nice little chart here that shows you what settings to put it on for your specific type of wood when you're buying slabs off of sketchy dudes on Craigslist you want to make sure when you go to pick them up you take a block plane or this is a smoothing plane with you so you can use your meter properly all you got to do give yourself a nice flat surface and then this pinless meter like this one just lays on top you set the wood type based on your chart and here we're working with maple so it's 55 then we're gonna hit the read button this can is going to give you a depth of three quarters of an inch and as you can see here right now it's reading at eleven point eight percent which is below twelve percent at three quarters of an inch which means that I'm happy enough with it to flatten this thing up and use it for a piece of furniture so what does that eleven point eight mean well there's moisture ratings for material types like construction grade materials got to be below twelve percent and furniture grade you're typically looking for seven to nine percent moisture content reason this is important is because because wood expands and contracts the wetter the wood is the more it's going to contract as it dries over time why it's so important to by kiln dried lumber now that you know your wood is dry enough and some guy on the street isn't ripping you off you're gonna want to go ahead and flatten your wood and sticker it in your shop let it dry I would say let it acclimate for about two to three weeks before you use it so even though this woods at 12% it's still going to move which brings me to my second tip which is stabilizing the wood I like to use either a beefy metal base if you guys are familiar with my stuff I use a lot of metal bases on slab furniture or you can also use wood so some people make c-channel inserts you can buy them I actually made my own for this table specifically and you can see here it's just a piece of c-channel that I created some slots inside of it for wood to move I learned in setting seed channel a few years ago from my friends up in Canada that do a lot of slab work it's really really cool you essentially route some grooves you're gonna in set some threaded inserts into the wood and in the slots that are allowing for wood movement across the grain you're going to be able to insert this piece of C channel and help keep the wood flat the reason we want to keep it flat is because when you look at the graining of the wood on the end grain you can see here how the end grain is going to want to cup the wood this way so by putting the C channel in there it just helped keep it nice and flat across I like to use these button capped hex screws that way they're nice and round there's no jagged edge to catch with a washer so if you follow along you probably recognize both of these tables because it brings me to my third tip which is allow the wood to speak to you two ways that I like to do this a lot is by using the voids in the wood and allowing them to eccentric (Gibberish) accentuate to make your piece more beautiful you see in classic furniture defects are typically cut out or not used in in whatever the pieces and with live-edge furniture you have that opportunity now I love using inserts to do this if you haven't noticed but if you don't know what an insert is coming in a little closer so these are what I mean by an insert essentially they're just inserted into the tabletop in order to add visual aesthetic here are they're actually binding these two together and they look really cool and they're kind of functional this is a more classic application of an insert which is called a Dutchman or a bow tie or butterfly inlay and I've actually got a video on my channel if you want to see how to do one of these yourself you can check out I've got a link down below this piece of furniture here specifically this what I would never be used in classic furniture so what I did was take the void and I let it become an accent in the piece and I filled it with these stainless steel bow ties which I think made the piece just look absolutely incredible so the classical application of a bow tie is to stabilize a crack in something like this but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to use another piece of wood or try to hide it or make it match because it's wider on the outside than it is at the center it keeps the crack from pulling itself apart unlike on the zipper table where it squares those are just used for looks you can essentially use any shape you one if it's wider on the outside than it is in the center and make a really really cool visual pop in your piece of furniture another awesome way to kind of let the material speak to you in your building process is to think of the voids in whatever you're making as an opportunity to fill those with something like epoxy now there's really popular ways of doing that right now but I think a really really cool opportunity to use epoxy in a build is in the way Matt Cremona did with his wall hanging cabinet this is a really cool piece just because he essentially made his own panels with book-matched slabs in black epoxy and then he cut them and used them in a more traditional sense now a really cool application for me personally was two projects I've done in the past three years that I happen to get into the project and let it dictate what I was gonna do with it first being the collaboration build I did with my buddy Mike Montgomery at modern builds so I'm beginning some help today for my buddies John Malecki who's a great welder and is gonna be coaching me along on the base pair that with Brad Rodriguez from fix this build that who's actually done an epoxy resin table himself last summer out at the maker ranch in California he enlisted me and Brad to do a large resin pour kind of coffee table with some cookies that he bought so these olive wood cookies were really really cool but they weren't big enough to be one standalone piece so instead we filled all the dead space with epoxy and we kind of let the look of the slabs dictate the way the tabletop was going to look second example is the reason my channel exists today basically is the live edge River table I did with the kind of finger in it now when I cut into that slab I had no idea that that void would be there and I was planning on doing just a basic down the middle type of glass River but low and behold that void was there and I had to make a design choice at that moment so instead of trying to avoid that and cutting the table from the opposite side of the slab I decided to incorporate it and it ended up being the entire reason that this piece is super unique but before you get to doing any of those things you need make sure your material is prepped properly so you can apply the perfect finish put more effort into your finishing promise you'll see better results and to start you gotta prep the surface the right way so here's a few tips 1 no bark get rid of the mark stop leaving bark bark continues to grow after the tree has been cut actually a properly dried piece of wood the bark should be falling off a bit so shouldn't be there anyway and then two - it's gonna continue to die and fall off regardless so you don't want a piece of bark falling off in a client's home just don't keep bark on your furniture when I'm flattening slabs myself I always start with 80 grit after the flattening now I use my Rotex and I've got a lot of information in other videos on how to go about this but a couple tips here are one to start mark the surface of whatever you're sanding with a pencil or piece of chalk reason you do this is because one, it helps you not miss any areas on the table and two if you're going slow enough to remove the pencil you're going slow enough to eliminate swirl marks that's a rule of thumb you have thumb you do have thumbs give this video thumbs up this is a vacuum and you want to be using a vacuum when you sand then we give you a better finish because you're removing particulate from the surface so if you're wondering what a swirl mark is it's the little pesky pigtail looking things that get left behind in your finish when you're going too fast to help you see those pesky swirl marks I like to use a low angle light like these what it does is it cast a shadow from one side and kind of shows the swirl marks and then if you need more help seeing them I use mineral spirits what I'll do is I'll go in after I find some circle them and then once the mineral spirit dries off you know where your swirl mark is and you can focus on going a little bit slower back on that area so for me my favorite go to slab finish is rubio monocoat why it's a single application and you only have to sand up to 120 grit it is a two-part oil-based low V-O-C mix you don't need a massive booth you don't need to spray it and you can hand apply it super simple and really easy to repair as well makes it easy on your client if I'm not using Rubio I'm using enduro var by general finishes this is my go-to finish for pretty much everything else if you don't have a nice safe shop that you can spray in I would probably go with the hand applied finish if you guys are interested in more info on Rubio specifically I've got a whole video on how I finish live-edge slabs using Rubio - check that out at the link in the description or up in this card and I've got links to all of my favorite finishes down below for you that's a wrap on this one if you guys have any tips on how you handle your live edge furniture leave them down in the comments below I've also got a playlist of every live edge furniture piece I've ever made a video on get up for you right here and thank you one more time for tuning in go punch your next live edge project in the face and I'll see you on the next video what's up yinz welcome back to the shop in this video I'm gonna teach you five tips to making better live edge furniture including material selection finishing and boob sweat

Channel: John Malecki

Views: 547,900

Keywords: John Malecki, John Malecki Builds, Woodworking, How To, Wood, make, DIY, Create, Custom Made, Live edge slab, Live edge, Live edge furniture, live edge slab dining table, live edge slab finish, how to finish live edge wood slabs, how to finish live edge wood, how to finish live edge, how to finish live edge slab, how to finish live edge table, live edge slab table, live edge slab table how to finish and coat, live edge slab finishing, live edge slab epoxy, guanacaste

Id: M1GEHvncD-4

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019