$9000 Wood Slab Desk -- One Man Woodworking Shop

hey this is cam with blacktail studio and this week i start with a comically oversized slab of black walnut that might be the prettiest piece of wood i've ever worked with oh and i even try a new finish stay tuned if you're a regular to my channel at all you know just how fortunate i am to live where i live because i have access to some of the most beautiful wood found anywhere in the world and even compared to everything i've got before this slab is incredible you'll notice if you look closely it says art slab you'll also notice that i am not art and this slab belonged to art who is technically the owner of gobi walnut although you've probably seen his son aaron who manages it here on my channel before anyway art had stashed this because it was this incredibly figured incredibly beautiful slab of bastone walnut which is like the most rare walnut you can even find aaron came to me and said hey i gotta clear at the warehouse i'm sick of my dad stashing this stuff do you want this and i don't care if it's baseball cards or mattresses if the owner is stashing something i wanna because you know it's gonna be the best since they have access to so many different slabs so i jumped on the opportunity to buy this one i know some of you are already furiously typing out your angry comments about who would cut up such an amazing slab and unfortunately my client was not able to fit a 65 inch wide desk and it's already really big this is like 80 some inches by like 36 inches at this point so this is gonna have to do for his relatively small home office and then i know what you're going to say next is why don't you save this for a bigger project i can't believe you would do that and this client wanted the best they wanted a basketball walnut slab and this was an incredible slab and i saw this movie once where a guy was afraid of heights and the woman asked him why do you get the penthouse if you're afraid of heights and he said because they don't put the penthouse on the ground floor and can't remember the name of that movie i think it was the expendables or something but that's kind of how i feel is if you want the best you got to use the best after i got that crack cleaned up i took it into creative woodworking to have it just skip plain not going too far with it but just enough that you can really start to see that color that grain and that figure and the reason for this was i needed a good flat surface so i could properly fill that crack if you've seen any of my videos before you're going to be shocked to find out that i'm actually going to fill that crack with black epoxy and as i've mentioned before that black dye is horrible at staining wood so i need to seal it first and how i seal my slabs these days is just with that same deep pore liquid glass epoxy and the cool part about this is now you get a really good color pop you really get to see that grain that figure and it's gonna look much much better than this in the end but it is pretty fun to see all that color come to life i had initially assumed my client wanted three straight sides and one live edge side and then when he saw the slide we said oh no i love that other live edge corner can we keep that on there and i'm kind of a yes man so i was like yeah yeah okay we can do that but i didn't really know how i was gonna fill this crack because that live edge kind of flowed down over into it so i had to get really creative with this whole process and you'll see what was so tricky about it once i start the filling process but all i did to start was add some melamine caulk it under every side anywhere i could think of and now here is my secret weapon and i've mentioned this before in videos but i use the tabletop epoxy i warm it up to make it extra thin you just use like 100 degree water or something kind of a nice warm bath there mix it up and then i pour that in there and that is going to be kind of my insurance policy where it's going to seep in and fill in any of the little micro cracks that i might have missed with that caulk this crack was right on the edge of being big enough for the deep poor epoxy or small enough for a tabletop epoxy and in the end i decided to use the deep pore epoxy i'm glad i did it was about two and a half inches thick or so and it would have been a lot of pores to use the tabletop epoxy and i do get a better result on these deeper ones with this depor epoxy you'll see some of the problems i ran into here was look at how there's not like a firm wall and if i fill that crack all the way up it's gonna spill down the side and run all over my floor so i came up with this little foam piece and it doesn't look like it works here but it actually worked really well okay it worked okay i wouldn't say really well but i used that as a dam was able to fill the crack all the way up and it did leak a little bit out you'll see me break it off here but in the end i was actually pretty pleased with the whole process all right that wasn't my most elegant epoxy pour but in the end i accomplished what i needed to accomplish so we will just call that a win now i was ready to take it back into creative woodworking and bring it to its final thickness using their planar slash wide belt sander and fun fact i've been coming here for years and i do this awkward kind of offloading of the slab when i move it over to the car and thor who is the guy who usually helps me finally showed me right there hey here let me show you how to load this and i'm like okay and look how slick this is man that is a lot better and i'm pretty embarrassed it took me five years to get there but this is what we're looking at this is pretty incredible this bastone walnut with all kinds of curl is in the home stretch now people always ask me if i'm a self-taught woodworker and i don't really believe that's a thing i think unless you're like the kid from the blue lagoon you basically learned it from somewhere i learned everything i know from online tutorials and just trial and error since online tutorials worked for my woodworking i decided to use skillshare to up my filmmaking game not filmmaking my youtube my youtube content creation i'm using skillshare to make my videos better i've talked about a little bit in the past but i shot my first 90 or so youtube videos with just my iphone and my last three videos i've shot with my new fancy mirrorless camera since you're watching this video there's a good chance you're one of the several dozen comments i got from people on my very first video i shot with a new camera about how bad the audio was it was horrible people said they had it turned all the way up and they couldn't even hear it i know that skillshare has literally thousands of courses so i got in there and i just searched audio editing davinci resolve and i wasn't sure what would come up and sure enough there's a full course by an industry professional someone that actually does this for a living specifically on editing audio in davinci resolve the software that i use the course icon is about 55 minutes long and so far i'm only about halfway through it so hopefully this audio is sounding a little bit better than that first video there's also a full youtube course that includes video editing by marquez brownlee that i'm really excited to check out because he apparently looks like he knows what he's doing best of all unlike my videos there are no ads in skillshare and there are new premium classes being added all the time topics ranging from woodworking to web development to youtubing if you have the time and you want to show some support for my page i would really appreciate it if you click that link in the description below the first thousand of my subscribers that click that link will get a one month trial of skillshare absolutely free all right if you're wondering what you missed there i filled some holes with epoxy and now i am ready to recess the table legs if you're wondering these table legs are by a company called flowy line design they are really cool a really contemporary design and they are even handmade they're not going to be for everybody if they are something you want to check out i will leave a link to these in the description below along with a link to everything else that i use here those funny looking chisel the router i have there everything will be linked in the description below as much fun as i have crushing myself with giant tables i really like these more one man sized tables they are fun to work on because when i need to do something like this i can do it by myself and i don't have to worry about crushing myself with an oversized slab here you can see the overspill of the pour and how i'm cleaning it up i'm using the cut saw fine ball nose bur and i just removed most the epoxy i was making sure to wear a respirator this stuff is kind of nasty when it's airborne and after this i moved on to my dremel with a little bit of sandpaper just so it doesn't look so much like a exon valve you've spilled down the side of the table make it a little bit more finished a couple years ago i had made a few no talking woodworking videos and one of them even did pretty well and i hadn't done it in a while so i thought it would be fun to do a no talking kind of asmr video on this bowtie inlay that you see right here so i made like a 15 minute video no talking whatsoever just woodworking sounds and i also get a couple comments a week of people that tell me how much they hate the sound of my voice and how i should let the woodworking do the talking for me so i thought this could be a good way to give that audience something that they want what i didn't anticipate is all of the dozens and dozens and dozens of comments that i got from you guys that apparently actually want my commentary it was bizarre and actually really flattering so i decided i will not have any more no talking woodworking videos because for whatever reason at least the vast majority of you guys actually want to hear what i have to say and i thought that was some great feedback most of the people were nice a couple were really upset saying they were unsubscribing which i guess is just the cost of operation but if you want to check out that no talking version i'll include a link in the video description below and i am still going to make a commentary version of that detailed bow tie inlay in probably the next couple weeks anytime i do one of these bowtie inlays in a video i get a lot of questions ranging from what do they do are they just for looks do they actually hold the crack together is epoxy better than a bow tie is a bow tie better than epoxy why would you ruin a beautiful slap of wood with those hideous bow ties all kinds of great questions and the answer a lot of times is the same as basically anytime my wife asked me something which is i have no idea and that's really true is a lot of times i'm guessing and here i believe the epoxy was enough to keep that crack closed but right here is one that i didn't think it was going to be enough because it was such a small crack and it actually went all the way through the slab that i actually added these bow ties on the underside because i didn't think they looked very good whereas i actually like the look of the other ones these ones i didn't think looked great but they were going to be very structural because that epoxy really wasn't penetrating and the fact that crack went all the way through the slab i would sleep a lot better if i added some bow ties in this particular crack as the slab sits right now it's about 76 inches left to right and around 32 inches front to back and a few weeks ago or maybe a month or two ago i started adding in the metric numbers and the captions because i have a number of international viewers and a few of them asked and said hey this would be really helpful if you could add the metric numbers to make it easier for us and so i said yeah absolutely no problem however whenever i do that i always get the international viewer that likes to pile on and tell me how us americans are so stupid so i wanted to address that really quick if i can and first of all yes we are using the wrong system the metric system makes way more sense however everybody i know uses this system they use the wrong system the hardware store uses the wrong system all the tools use the wrong system all of my clients use the wrong system so i really am not big enough to change the system from within it's kind of like i think it was in the 1700s the french came out with a 10-hour clock for a 10-hour day where it was a 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute and everything was gonna make way more sense the problem was everybody already had clocks everybody already had their watches or pocket watches whatever they carried back then and nobody would adopt it because they didn't want to change and i think that a 10-hour day makes way more sense than a 24-hour day but people are already used to one thing and so it never took off and that's really the system that i'm in right now i know other countries have changed in the past if you know americans at all we are way too stubborn to change at this point so i hope you can understand the position that i'm in when i first got this slab surfaced it looked so clean that i thought i'd be able to cut this up for instrument grade projects if i had wanted to i could you know use it for guitar blanks or gun stocks or things like that after i got a little bit further into it i realized that there were far too many little imperfections that i think those ocd guys that build guitars this one probably wouldn't have passed muster and for a desk it was totally fine but all that meant for me was i had to spend a lot more time than i'd anticipated filling all these imperfections sanding it perfectly and just keeping a sharp eye out for all of these little micro cracks if you're looking for a great tool to spot these imperfections this is called a light stick and one of my youtube subscribers here actually recommended it in a comment he's a photographer and this was only like 45 or so but it does an amazing job at spotting all of those little micro imperfections i mentioned at the start of the video that i'm using an all new finish and i'm still going to be using my normal finish for the base coat but what's going to be the new finish is going to be for the final really two top coats and i'll get into that here in just a minute also if i didn't mention it i have time stamps down below that show every single chapter so if you want to skip around if you want to come back to an area or if you just really don't like a certain part feel free to skip around using those time stamps i mentioned in each video that i finished both sides immediately meaning i finish the bottom and while it's still wet i flip it over and then i'll finish the top often i'll get the question don't you get marks on the underside of your table if you flip it over while it's still wet and yes i absolutely do get marks here is my solution to that this is the following day i come back with that maroon pad scuff it up nice and even then i'll add a second coat of this rubio monaco this time i will not flip it i'll let it set overnight let it cure the following day i'll come over flip the slab and do the same thing on the top if you do some woodworking and you want to get a perfect finish in a dusty shop and you think that i just went way too fast over that entire finishing process and you need a deeper dive into that first off i totally agree with you i do not expect you to understand everything i just did based on that brief summary i did a full finish video oh six or eight months ago i will include a link to that that gives a step-by-step guide including all the tools you need all of the consumables you need everything to get a perfect finish in a dusty shop i still have a couple really cool things to show you on this desk build however i don't want your charity but if you think up to this point that i've earned your subscription i would really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button right now and if you wanna hit the like button that's cool too and if you're one of those people that hates people that ask for subscriptions and likes and you're gonna give me a thumbs down because of it i have to warn you that youtube actually considers that a positive youtube actually considers thumbs down thumbs up comments shares everything is engagement so if you're going to leave me a negative comment and a negative thumbs down those actually help me so do yourself a favor and don't do either of those things if you actually dislike this video if you do like the video as always i really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button and like button or really any of them over the last few months i've gotten a lot of questions from people asking me what i thought of the black four ceramic finish and initially i was a little embarrassed because i had never heard of it and really it seemed like kind of something you'd find on an infomercial something that that shamwow guy would be buffing into a car sitting in a junkyard so i was a little skeptical so i did more and more research on the ceramic coat kind of finish in general how they use it on cars and it seemed pretty legit so even though i'm friendly with the black force guys i used my own money and i purchased this myself so that way there is no expectations or obligations on my part i tested the finish initially on a number of small pieces and it did pretty well so i decided the first real test for it was going to be on my personal dining room table that i recently built and if you watch that video you didn't see the black four ceramic in there because i added it after the fact and we've been living with that table for about a month or so now with the black four ceramic on it and it has performed extraordinarily well we have had our multiple family dinners and i had to bite my tongue people were using their icy glasses with no coasters and i decided i just had to see how this table was going to perform without me babing it and there is no cup rings there are no stains there are no marks on the table still to this point one of the really unexpected benefits to it is the porcelain plates seem to kind of glide across it it's kind of like a wax where they glide so smoothly that they don't scuff up the table so i thought that was really cool and also like you saw there it really steps the sheen up steps the depth up it's kind of like an instagram filter where it just turns the contrast up of all of your table all of the grain all of the figuring so i'm thrilled with it it's not foolproof it's not something that you can just put it on and forget about it but if you're going to take care of your stuff this is really really going to help and it's going to really improve the look of it too i didn't want to make this a how-to video on how to apply the black four ceramic because i do feel that they have a better video and i'm still pretty new to this i've only put this on a few tables up to this point it is really really easy essentially you just add the base coat in those grids you add a little bit just a spritz of water to the microfiber you wipe it off either with your hand or an orbital like i was using and that is basically it you can come back then i believe they want you to wait about an hour for the top coat and you do the exact same thing you just work it on in grids buff it off lightly you're not really putting any pressure down just lightly removing any excess finish up your table and that is it it is really really simple there are no lap lines that is something i was really concerned about i was sure there would be lap lines from the different sections that i buffed it on but that's it and it genuinely generally helps the protection and really really steps up that sheen and contrast oh i almost forgot to get the numbers in the cost of this raw wood slab was two thousand five hundred dollars and the cost of this finished desk was nine thousand nine hundred dollars i know that a lot of times you guys are generally pretty curious about the numbers so i hope that helps out some of you guys and also i like to give a little bit of credit to people that make it all the way to the end of the video so let me know your thoughts on the bow ties start your comment with either bowtie or no tie to let me know how you feel about those as always thank you so much for watching have a great week

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 309,999

Rating: 4.94629 out of 5

Keywords: live edge, live edge furniture, epoxy resin, how to, how to woodworking, black forest wood company, river table, black forest wood co, epoxy table, black forest, resin table, resin pour, live edge slab, live edge wood, black walnut, diy projects, woodworking projects, custom desk, wood working, furniture design, how to build a table, woodworking business, how to make river table, furniture portland oregon, epoxy dining table

Id: GtISpORhJ7o

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021