$5,000 For THIS Piece of Scrap???

today I'm going to sell this chunk of wood for as much as I possibly can [Music] so something that I want to do with this build is keep track of all of the costs that way we can see what the actual profit is and it's a little tricky with this project because there's one big variable which is going to be the actual slab top itself so this is a piece that would have first come into my life a few months ago when I was on the hunt for a claro Walnut slab for a dining table so first off if you've never heard of GL veneer do yourself a favor and after this video is over go do some online window shopping just for fun because if you're anything like me you're gonna have a good time but anyway while I was doing that a couple months ago I stumbled upon this slab which was exactly what I was looking for so the reason this is a big variable in terms of cost for the project is because the slab costs thirty three hundred dollars now I think it would be pretty reasonable to say that the cost of the wood for this top should be zero because all of the costs were sunk into that initial dining table and this is really just the off cut but I'm not going to do that so instead I calculated the volume of this chunk as a percentage of the slab which came out to a little bit less than five percent so let's just call the cost 156.75 now the other thing that we need to address is how I'm going to sell this piece so what I did was prior to building I set up a quick website to host an auction and gave people a week in early November to submit their bids and the way we're going to pick the winner is by taking their bid minus shipping costs and whatever's the highest wins now all I'm really doing here is trying to get the edges cleaned up while leaving them as natural looking as possible and it's actually really surprising how much work goes into making something look like no work went into it at all maybe like somebody with nice Bed Head hair I guess the litmus test would be if anybody ever sees the finished piece and compliments me on how well I shaped the edges then I failed now if you saw the dining table video then you might remember that that slab had a lot of bow in it and unfortunately this chunk is the same with the slab that was fine because it started off at about three inches thick and the finished dining table only needed to be a little bit over an inch and a half so we could remove a lot of material in the flattening process and it would still be okay but here since I sliced it in half I'm starting with a lot thinner of a piece so we don't really have that luxury which means we're gonna have to get a little bit more experimental now some of the most common questions that I get in these videos are about design and really there's two that are by far the most common the first is how do you come up with your designs and I always wish I had a good answer but it's basically just a lot of drawing and modeling but to be more specific what I usually do is start with a bunch of stuff that I don't like and then eventually find something that I do and sort of just keep working on that until I'm happy and that's actually one of the things that I like about slab projects the top sort of gives me a box that I have to work within so not having the ability to change the look of a design by changing the major Dimensions like length and width in a weird way speeds things up and I think kind of forces creativity so that's one question and then the other and probably more common one is what do you use to do the drawings and the answer is procreate for the iPad okay so here I'm getting set up to do the pour and you can see in this shot again just how bowed these chunks are and normally a really good way to mechanically flatten boards is with c channel you might have seen me do that in a few other videos here though I couldn't do that for a couple reasons first is that the C Channel that I normally use is too thick to even fit in this slab I do have some thinner C Channel that I could use that's not as strong though actually in shorter lengths it is pretty strong so that is an option but with any kind of c channel the other problem is order of operations basically I can't possibly install it until a lot later pretty much not until I've poured the epoxy and flattened the slab at the earliest so it's kind of a Chicken and the Egg problem I want my boards mechanically flattened before pouring but I can't mechanically flatten them until after pouring actually that might be a catch-22 problem what I ended up doing instead was taking a Gamble I'm betting that if I Brute Force the slabs flat with some clamps I can pour and it'll hold things flat enough that I can get to the point where I can mechanically flatten them later so I mixed up a couple gallons of total boats fathom thick set and took a leap of faith what bids have come in so far so the first bed came in for a dollar a dollar that's you oh that was my test bid well then I can say the person who bid that is an idiot give me one of the random real bids not me test bidding a dog a hundred dollars okay 501 uh fifteen hundred where does a person live Texas everything's bigger there including the bids yep so with these videos I don't really have a schedule set in stone but I try to get out about one project and video per month and what I've recently realized is that starting a project four weeks before I want the video to come out is not a good idea and that's because with this slab I had to leave it in my form for about nine days before I felt confident taking it out and starting working on it now part of that was because of the bowed wood I wanted to give it some extra time to really cure but mainly it's because of the weather prior to this I had only done pores in the spring and summer and I was only waiting about two days before I could take things out all that said the good news is everything came out really easily except for the form itself which almost busted a neck vein trying to get unstuck once I did though it was nothing but Blue Skies all right so at this point I gotta say I was feeling pretty optimistic about the curve in my wood by the way if that's something that bothers you apparently they make pills for that unfortunately for me though with slabs there's no magical fix and there's also a good chance that as I thin this thing out the curve is just going to come right back that said I don't really have a choice in the matter because I can't leave it like this so after I cleaned up the edges I took it over to my planer and slowly worked my way down to bare wood and as you can see in this shot after all the dust settled I was left with about an eighth of an inch of bow and you can also see that it barely takes any pressure to force it flat so I think this is going to be well within the tolerance that I need to end up flat once everything's assembled and really what I'm more worried about than Bo is cupping which is a curve that goes across the width instead of along the length so normally this is the exact problem that people use c channel to fix but rather than doing that I'm going to make some wooden inserts that I can recess into the underside which will solve the same problem but I think look a little nicer and I guess I take back what I said earlier there is a pill for that so to cut my recesses into the bottom I decided to use my CNC which I honestly probably don't utilize enough and this might sound like a weird thing to say but I'm actually really bad at cncing so I don't want this to sound like I'm bragging but with woodworking it's pretty rare that I catastrophically messed something up but whenever I'm using a CNC I almost always mess something up here's a good example actually cutting out my pill shaped pieces I messed up twice once because I started the machine in the wrong spot and was going to basically carve Into Thin Air and again when I realized it after cutting out the first pill it ruined the structural Integrity of the rest of the piece thankfully I was able to catch both of those things before it was too late but yeah two mess-ups in what should have been one really simple cut and it's not like it's the machine's fault I'm definitely the one to blame but I guess I don't know cnc's just aren't this magical machine where you push a button and a piece of furniture pops out like people think it's a skill just like anything else and yeah it's related to woodworking but not that close so I just want to say to all the CNC operators out there doing awesome work while their machine gets all the credit I see you and I value you two thousand oh now we're getting so where's that person live Colorado is his name yes who is he do you know him I think I'm psychic 301.48 honestly if the winning bid was 301 I would just take it out in the parking lot and hit it with my truck why if you've watched some of my more recent videos then you know that something that I like to do is take the time to respond to some of the more frequent questions that I get in the comments and part of the reason that I like to do that is I think honestly YouTube is kind of a clunky platform when it comes to discussion for example I read pretty much every comment that I get and I do respond to a lot of them but it's pretty rare that the person who I respond to responds back which is fine and actually if they did I don't even get notified so I guess all of this just illustrates the point that this isn't really what YouTube is set up for it's kind of one-way communication also as a quick aside if you see somebody with my logo respond to your comment saying you've won some kind of contest it's spam so don't respond to that anyway back to the comments so I always figured that anything that anybody leaves a comment about there's probably hundreds of people who've thought that same thing or had that same question so I try to address some of them here and something that I've noticed is that they tend to be disproportionately negative when in reality by far the majority of comments are actually positive actually probably the single most common comment that I get is somebody just saying they liked the piece being built in the video something like this so thank you to everybody out there for all the comments good and bad and especially you squirty mcbooger balls anyway to get back on track you can see here that the top still has a bit of bow in it but here's why I'm not concerned so this is the design that I finally landed on and I know it's hard to tell in this drawing but the overall thickness of the top is a little bit over an inch while the thickest and probably strongest part of the entire piece is this stretcher right here which is about three inches wide so the amount of force that it would take to bend that piece is a lot I'm not going to calculate it but just trust me meanwhile you just saw that the top could be flattened with one finger's worth of pressure so the hope is that the stretcher is pretty much going to act like a giant call to pull and hold the top flat once we attach them all right for lumber my total costs came out to 168 dollars and 22 cents and this was actually a first for me ordering online from Woodworkers Source and this isn't a sponsorship but I get asked a lot if you can order Lumber online and I always used to say I don't know and now I can say yes so that'll save me like two words every time that question comes up although then if I tell them where I'm right back to where I started with three words not really sure what to do about that but either way before I could start cutting up any of the White Oak I did the same thing that I do in the beginning of pretty much every project and that is creating myself some templates out of MDF to dial in my shapes now this is one of those jobs that's a perfect candidate for CNC obviously a CNC is way more accurate than I can be with pencils saws and Sanders but I do have one secret weapon so if we look back at the drawing the two templates that I need are this leg shape and this stretcher shape and for the most part everything's pretty arbitrary it just needs to look good to the eye so one advantage of doing it by hand is that you get to see it take shape and adjust off of a real world item instead of a drawing on a screen and what would by far be the hardest part of making this template would be making the stretcher piece symmetrical so what I did instead was just make half of the piece and then use that as a template to make another template on a larger piece of MDF basically the analog version of copy paste Ctrl C TRL V two thousand but he's in Australia he said the bid is in Australian dollars but I don't what does that mean I think in Australia for dollars they use kangaroo turds Chris 2500. there's a higher bed where did that person live they did not put a state just so let me do a quick look it might be a scam googie Indiana I don't think that's even a real state and since then has anything beat the twenty five hundred dollars yet is whatever money I end up selling this piece for we're gonna donate to a local non-profit that serves victims of domestic violence called The Women's and Children's crisis shelter so I'm really hoping that we're able to raise a lot of money and we're able to help a lot of people and now I'm gonna ask for your help not for money but just figuring something out so design wise something I'm not doing with this table is giving these legs any kind of inward lean and if you saw the desk project that we built a few months ago you might remember that we did Lean the legs in on that one so in that video I talked about how sometimes a weird optical illusion can happen when you make legs perfectly vertical where they actually look like they're leaning in slightly at the bottom so the reason that we'll often lean them out is to counteract that and in the comment section somebody said that what I was probably talking about was a concept called intasis so I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and I think the idea is similar but different I guess in architecture when people would use tapered columns if the taper is straight it creates an illusion where the column looks like it's thinner at the center so to counteract that they would make the column slightly bulge at the center I might be explaining that wrong but that was the basic idea from what I could gather so my question is does anybody know if there's a term that explains what I'm talking about with the Leaning optical illusion I poked around and couldn't really find anything the only other mildly similar thing that I could find was the ponzo illusion but that's where we judge the size of objects based on their background so why this box looks bigger than this one even though they're the same anyway if you're a know-it-all this is your time to shine because I'm genuinely curious to find this out all right I want to take a minute to quickly thank ecoflow for sponsoring this video so they recently sent out their newest smart generator and this is an upgrade from their old gas generator and they call it the smart generator dual fuel because it can still be powered by gas just like the old one but now it can also run off of liquefied petroleum gas or LPG hence the dual fuel now probably the biggest benefit of that is that LPG is cleaner easier to use and maintain and in the event of a disaster with both options combined you've got more access to power so this isn't my first time working with ecoflow a couple months ago they sent out their Delta II power station and I've been getting a ton of use out of it I've been using it to Power Tools in my shop near my roll-up door where there isn't any power honestly just because it's faster than running an extension cord every time I've used it to do some work outside and I even took it to my oldest son's school's fair to power a bounce house so it's been really cool to have and that's not the best part what's really good is knowing that this thing will have me covered in case of an emergency or rolling blackouts which are really common here in the summer it can power all of my family's devices and our essential appliances now the ecoflow smart generator dual fuel is the smartest and most efficient power option especially when you combine it as backup with the Delta II or one of ecoflow's other portable power stations it takes all of those benefits and takes them up to the next level so with a standard 20 pound LPG tank generating up to 20 kilowatt hours connected to something like my Delta II all being controlled and monitored from the ecoflow app with things like auto start and stop enabled to make sure that I always have power and that I'm reducing fuel consumption emission and noise I've got a worry-free high capacity smarter more efficient and more intuitive Energy Solution so if you're in the market they're running their biggest promo of the year for Black Friday with some products up to 50 off right now so check out my links in the description below to find out more and take advantage of their best deals until November 20th thanks ecoflow so far making the base has been pretty straightforward you saw me make myself some templates and then it was just a long process of using those templates to replicate the shape out of actual wood but things are going to get a little bit trickier for the next couple steps well actually not the very next step because the very next thing is just putting the large radius on my Sharp edges which isn't very tricky at all but then after that we're going to cut in our mortises for attaching the top and the base together so I'm going to quickly explain this with two types of visual aids and then you let me know which one you like better after so what I decided to do is drill an oversized hole all the way through my stretcher with an even more oversized mortise that way a bolt in the washer can go through and secure the top to the base and still have a little bit of wiggle room okay here it is again with a different visual lid so what I decided to do is drill an oversized hole all the way through my stretcher with an even more oversized mortise that way a bolt and a washer can go through and secure the top to the base and still have a little bit of wiggle room all right which one of those did you like more animation or drawn for long time viewers you'll remember that I used to explain everything through animations and then switched to drawings a couple months ago honestly just because they're kind of more fun for me to make that said if one of them is clearly easier for people to understand I'm pretty open so let me know now the next thing that we need to do is create our lower shelf and figure out how we're going to attach that so every so often I'll make a project where the stakes are really low and it's basically just an excuse to try out new techniques and about a year ago I built this weird kind of floating shelf thing so on that the main experimentation was really on the transparent foot and I'll be the first to admit that this was a very goofy project but while building it I also messed around with doing shelves with a round Edge that fit into a round Groove and that was actually my real takeaway from this project I thought they look cool kind of tricky to assemble but yeah so I figured this was a good time to implement that look into a real not goofy project and I went back and forth in my head several times on different ways to cut the grooves in my legs and what I landed on was using my CNC and this was not a decision that I took lightly because you've already witnessed firsthand my ability to scrub even the simplest of tasks and here if I really mess something up it'll be not good because I've already got a lot of time invested in these legs thankfully it all went have you guys ever seen those advertisements where you get 16 000 woodworking plans for like 67 bucks or something like that well I did the math and that means that each plan would cost a little less than half a cent and full disclosure I've never seen those plans so I can't really speak to their quality but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say even at a half a cent per plan think you're probably overpaying my personal belief is that with woodworking plans you're really looking for quality over quantity and maybe I'm crazy but I figure if I'm gonna spend hundreds of dollars in materials and dozens of hours of my time building something I don't want it to be just one of 16 000 things I want it to be the one thing that I really want and that I'll love now obviously I'm biased but I really do believe that our woodworking plans are the best out there so maybe that was a hard sell but I'm not trying to Hard Sell you and instead I'll just say if you're looking to build something and you like plans give ours a look and see if any of the pieces speak to you and actually just to clear up any confusion we don't even call them plans anymore we call them online project courses and honestly that's more what they're like of course but in the end instead of getting a crappy certificate you get a table or a desk or a chair or whatever piece you want okay I'll shut up now but also throw a link in the description and again if you're interested check them out all right the last time that you saw the top you'll remember that it was bendy but what you didn't see is that every time I thinned it out more I was revealing more and more bug holes or wormholes I can't remember one of those two so the good news is that I'm pretty much at maximum thinness here so as long as I take care of all of these holes we should be good the bad news is there were some on the top some on the edges some on the ends and thanks to gravity you can only really get one face at a time so this is kind of a slow process getting one face then waiting a few hours doing the next and so on then with all of that out of the way I could give the top a quick sanding and then any remaining problem areas are just going to get fixed with a little CA glue and then from there I can continue shaping the top by hand getting rid of any of the caked on epoxy and just making sure that I like the look of the shape okay price check time our total costs ended up being 156.75 for the slob estimated 220 dollars worth of epoxy 168.22 cents for the white oak on the base 1956 in Hardware and I'm estimating about 25 in Finnish and other consumables for a grand total of 589.53 now the top bid when we last checked and there were a few days left in the auction was twenty five hundred dollars from a guy in Indiana and in the final hours nothing came in and beat that kind of so I called to get a shipping quote and the cost of packing shipping insurance and all that ended up being well over five hundred dollars which means that the bid that ended up maximizing profit was actually the two thousand dollar bid from a guy named Scott so in between the days when the bid came in and when I contacted Scott to tell him he won he had looked into the charity that we're raising money for and he felt so moved that he actually increased his bid to five thousand dollars so that is what the Women's and Children's crisis shelter is getting and I love it and that makes me very happy thank you Scott seriously now the reason that I bothered keeping track of expenses was that earlier in the video I said I would do it to see what the profits would be if this were just a normal sale so in my opinion you basically throw out the 5 000 bid in that scenario and even shipping is kind of a weird one-time variable that's going to be different based on where you live and where the client lives so I think to be fair let's just go with the 2500 bid that's really the most that somebody was willing to pay which means that profit would be one thousand nine hundred and ten dollars and forty seven cents now all that said regardless of how you calculate it my takeaway is going to be the same from the point of view of the Builder this was a bad business move or not bad but maybe not the smartest so the slab was basically free because it was leftovers that said if I were to buy a slab to build this piece instead of using what was Far and Away the hardest part of the slab to work with I would have saved a ton of time and I know it's a cliche but it's a cliche for a reason time is money now it's hard to say exactly how much time because everything gets really cloudy when you're filming and editing video but even without knowing exactly what the time difference would be I can tell you that I value my time at more than whatever the cost of an easier to work with slob would have been I think we have this very romanticized idea about the notion of nothing going to waste and I get it that's a great thing you know using every part of the Buffalo and so on but the reality is if you use everything at some point you're gonna eat the Buffaloes Chris let's just say it's not all wings thank you for watching and thank you to everybody who've been I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 977,628

Keywords: black walnut table, diy epoxy, diy epoxy table, ecopoxy, epoxy art, epoxy river table, epoxy table, how to make epoxy table, how to make river table, liquid glass epoxy, resin table, river table, slab furniture, total boat epoxy, live edge table, live edge slab table, coffee table, river coffee table, slab coffee table, epoxy coffee table, modern coffee table, expensive wood, bookmatched wood, river table epoxy, foureyes furniture, blacktail studio, Walnut Slab

Id: GWwUg5PL-9M

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2022