BEST...DESK...EVER

today we're taking a leftover chunk of wood and turning it into one of the best things we've ever made you don't want to miss this one this slab is kind of boring actually it's not even an entire slob it's just the leftover chunk from a pretty interesting looking slab the one that we used to build the circle table a couple weeks back so what do you do when your wood is underwhelming you overcompensate but before we do anything boring or interesting first we have to deal with some rotten wood pretty much what we found is that functionally the wood is totally usable it just doesn't look good so our solution here was to remove any of the bad wood from the surface and about a half of an inch down from there that way you're not going to have to see any of it in the finished piece but we still have the benefit of not having to use as much epoxy to fill in the gap so thank you to everybody who gave us input about that on the last videos now something we weren't thrilled about is how when we were removing the wood it kind of ended here with this less natural looking break and there were two ways we could go either leave it as is or try to kind of feather it into a more natural bottleneck like you see me drawing with my finger here so we decided to leave it and now we'll just have to wait until we see the finished piece to know if that was the right decision and when you see the finished piece you can let us know and i haven't mentioned it yet but this slab is going to end up becoming a desk and it's going to be for sale so basically i have no idea where it'll end up or how it's going to be used actually let me rephrase that i have a pretty good idea of how it'll be used but i don't know specifically if the person who gets it will put it up against a wall or put it in the middle of a room where you can see it from every side and because of that the big question now is do we cut straight lines on the edges or leave them natural so thankfully the piece is pretty rectangular basically on one edge there's this long subtle curve and this is where i would imagine a person will sit then on the other edge it's close to straight and i think that either option will be fine in the end but if it goes in the center of the room i do think that the natural edge is definitely cooler and if it goes against the wall the natural edge is still flat enough that it's not going to look too weird so here we're just following the natural shape of the edges and removing any knots and the softer wood that's just below the bark which i think is called phloem and if you're wondering if i had to just look that up the answer is yes up until 30 seconds ago i thought phloem was just a kind of slime alternative that nickelodeon made in the 90s because we didn't cut any straight edges onto our slab that means we can't build a normal form for pouring epoxy so instead we're going to make a partial form around the slab by just attaching a few pieces of melamine to it so that's what you see us doing in these shots and if you're ever thinking about skipping this step and just using tape here's why that's a bad idea epoxy is expensive actually i got curious and started thinking about other expensive liquids that you can buy for comparison's sake and i don't know why but for whatever reason the first place that my mind went was fiji water which i've never tasted but based on price must be good but as expensive as it is epoxy still blows it out of the well water also i just realized that i don't think the rest of the world uses gallons so here are those prices in leaders also i guess the rest of the world doesn't use the us dollar either so here are some conversions to a few other currencies if you want to know others that's on you all of that said in our past couple videos we received a bunch of comments from you saying that we should check out blacktail studios if we want to do more of these slab and epoxy projects so we took that advice and actually got and went through his entire epoxy workshop course and after doing that i'll say that if you ever plan on doing this sort of work and want a super thorough resource i highly recommend it honestly i did the math and the price of the course is equal to about 1.08 gallons of the epoxy that we use so basically if it saves you from making one bad mistake then it's already paid for itself so yeah if you're thinking about doing this kind of work check it out i think it's legitimately valuable info and the more attention that it gets the better at this point our epoxy has been curing for about 48 hours and you can see that it's still about a half of an inch below the top of the slab so we're using a product called fathom thick set from total boat which can be poured up to two inches thick and since our slab is just barely over two inches we probably could have done it all in one pour but honestly you almost always end up having to do a second small touch-up pour anyway so whether that second part ends up being a half inch or an eighth of an inch you're still doing a second pour so it doesn't really matter also have you heard of tripophobia i hadn't but apparently it's the fear or disgust of closely packed holes and i guess popping epoxy bubbles in slow motion can trigger it so there was your complimentary tripophobia warning now i don't like to brag but shawn and i are pretty good at building forms i mean when we build a form and poor epoxy nothing comes out of it literally like not even the slab that we're trying to take out of it which is why long time viewers might remember that in the last video we had to use a power planer to pulverize the entire sheet of melamine that we bonded to our slab which might look kind of satisfying in a replay that's like a thousand times faster than real life but it's not fun so we were really hoping that with these pores the tape would prevent that from happening again and there she goes it did yeah we did it let's see if the other side does the same thing then it didn't but only because i whiffed on my first attempt but once i actually hit it we were all good so i'd say this was a solid 900 improvement but i think that next time we'll go for tape and either mold release or wax and just for old time's sake we decided to bust out the power planer just to remove some of the extra epoxy on the top actually the real reason we did that is because we're gonna flatten this slab on our cnc and epoxy ruins bits faster than wood does speaking of that this one was a pain so maybe you've noticed but now on youtube if you hover your mouse over the timeline on the video that you're watching you'll see a graph that shows the most popular parts of the video well in our last video the most replayed part was us flattening the slab on the cnc so naturally i thought oh man we got to flatten slabs more so long story short if you ever want to mess with me just keep re-watching a random part of one of our videos and then all think that there's something magical about it and waste a bunch of time trying to recreate it and everybody wins something we've realized with these epoxy slab projects is that there's a lot of hoping involved like whenever we've built a more traditional piece of furniture we have a pretty good idea of how it's going to turn out how long it'll last under normal wear and tear and that kind of stuff but take what we're doing here for example which is filling in some cracks on the underside that we couldn't get to at first well is it even necessary probably not but it's also probably a good idea to get as many filled as you can or what about adding the c channel is that necessary again probably not this piece isn't that wide but we had a few leftover pieces from our last project that were almost the perfect length so why not use them it's almost like there's these 20 things that you can do to get a perfect epoxy slab table and you don't have to do all 20 and for any given project maybe five of them might be totally unnecessary but you just do all 20 anyway and you hope a minute ago i mentioned that the slab is going to become a desk and a couple videos back we teased three potential designs and this one got the most votes but this was still a really rough idea so we kept designing and coming up with this idea where the cabinet is leaning is where things really took off so we kept playing with that before eventually trying the leaning cabinet paired with the design that people had voted for and after seeing those together that felt like the way to go by the way i should also mention that in addition to votes for which desk you liked best some people had some write-in ideas and one person even suggested using the slab as fuel for a bonfire which i think they meant as a mean comment but it's kind of funny so kudos to you approval 89. the legs we're building for this desk are i think really cool looking but kind of intimidating when you first see them but they really aren't nearly as hard to make as they might look honestly i would say that the hardest part of making these kinds of shapes is just creating the templates but once you have the template no matter how simple or complex the shape is the workflow is basically the same and that's why with all of our plans that utilize templates they come with several options for making your templates as easily as possible or if you're willing to pay a little extra we'll even cut out and mail the templates to you now i know that a lot of you might not have any interest in building any of our plan pieces and that's fine so i'll stop talking about them and for anybody who is interested i'll throw a link in the description and getting back on topic at this point all we've done is trace out our template shapes onto our work pieces and then cut them out leaving everything oversized on the bandsaw then from there we used our table saw to cut just the two mating joint faces and now we can go ahead and glue everything together so things are still really rough at this point but we're gonna let the glue dry for now so that we can continue shaping these tomorrow well tomorrow for me but a couple minutes for you if you want super in-depth information about making panels and making boxes we're gonna put links to both of these videos in the description and in this video we're going to just fly through this section pretty quickly i will say though if you do want to get into woodworking and furniture making building flat panels and building good boxes are arguably the two most important skills that you can have also one thing i'll add just because i don't think we had them at the time that we recorded the other video is if you get super into panel making especially larger panels check out something like these rockler panel clamps they're unique in that they squeeze both in and well in or maybe down i guess this way and this way you know what i mean anyway then for the box something that you probably noticed by now is that instead of being a rectangle it's a parallelogram so that just means instead of cutting a bunch of 45 degree angles to create 90 degree corners we want to create 80 and 100 degree corners so we need to cut 40 and 50 degree angles instead and you'll see that in order to do this sean is using this jig so that we can cut the work piece vertically and again this is another topic that we can make an entire video on so we did and we'll link that one as well now if you appreciate the fact that we just spared you from like 25 minutes of panel and box making and you want to show your appreciation we would appreciate it if you click that little subscription button and notification bell that said if you wanted to see that in-depth info then i completely understand that we haven't earned it and you shouldn't subscribe so what i would ask of you instead is go check out one of those other videos that you wanted the info from and then click subscribe and the notification bell from there we're all about giving you the choice and honestly we do appreciate it now we're about to do something that could potentially ruin all of the work we've done on the legs so far and it's such a subtle detail we could probably have skipped it and nobody would even notice but at the moment the desk looks good from the front and back but the side view looks kind of clunky so to hopefully fix that we're gonna tilt the legs in by about three degrees so very subtle so the thing about this that makes it hard for me at least mostly has to do with keeping track of pieces and that's because first the pieces are mirrors of one another which means every time you cut a three degree angle on one of your pieces you have to cut the opposite three degree angle on the other piece and three degrees is just a really hard amount of degrees to see so if these were like 20 degrees it would be way harder to accidentally cut something the opposite from how you meant to because it would be really obvious to you and it's also the kind of thing that because of the way all of these pieces are gonna come together if we cut one too short on accident we're basically screwed so i don't even know if this was worth it but like i said earlier i don't know where this piece is going to end up if i knew that it would be in a room where you only ever really had a clear view from any sort of distance when you were looking at it either from the front or the back i would probably skip this but my fear is that it could be in a room where maybe right when you walk in you're looking at the desk from the side so that's the first thing you notice every time also sometimes having the legs perfectly vertical can create an optical illusion where they almost look like they're tilting the other way i don't know why or how that happens but it does so we wanted to make sure that that wouldn't be the case i'm not sure how much this entire desk is gonna weigh when it's all said and done i would guess somewhere in the 175 pound range which isn't a ton but it's definitely a size and shape that could be awkward to move around and it's not something that you want to accidentally bang into walls so we want to make sure that it's really easy for a person to be able to break it down into a few large chunks for shipping getting through doorways and that kind of stuff now a lot of times people ask us why we don't just use screws for what we're doing here and there's two main reasons first is it screws the more you take them in and out the worse your connections get so basically over the years there's a way higher chance that things are going to start to loosen and second is that these threaded inserts and bolts that we're using make it really easy to deal with wood movement so i'm not going to get super into it here other than to say that wood moves across its width over time not a lot but a little so with each one of these connections what we're doing is making a hole that's bigger than the bolt so that the bolt can go through it and into the threaded insert and hold tight this way but throughout the year the oversized hole will allow for things to move this way i guess there's kind of a third reason that's more subjective but i think most people would probably agree that using a hex bolt just feels more upscale than using a screwdriver does and usually you can get nicer looking hardware too but basically if we were to sell this thing for several thousand dollars and then the end user gets it and needs to screw it all together versus using an allen wrench and bolts i don't know why but that creates a very subtle but very different perception and quality at least i think so probably the most popular cliche woodworking saying is measure twice cut once and an almost equally cliche thing that woodworkers say is something along the lines of i love applying finnish because i love to see the grain pop which has always made me wonder do those people get just as much joy from things like cleaning the leather in their car if so they should definitely check out leather honey actually i kind of am one of those people ever since i was 16 i've genuinely loved washing and cleaning cars so that would have been about 1997 which means that since leather honey's been around since 1968 i've missed out on like 24 years of potential leather cleaning satisfaction but i'm making up for lost time so leather honey is perfect for use on all types of leather and colors so that's your furniture upholstery car seats shoes jackets purses you name it and it'll clean condition moisturize and promote flexibility on all of them now personally i'm not really a leather jacket or couch kind of guy but i have been using it on our cars and i really like it mostly because it doesn't leave surfaces feeling oily or greasy and i think that's because it doesn't just sit on the surface of the leather but actually penetrates and hydrates the individual fibers of the leather which is also why just one application can last six months or longer leather honey understands the value of quality leather and the importance of keeping it looking new they have thousands of five star reviews and are the best selling leather care products on amazon so see all the ways leather honey's cleaner and conditioner can help prolong the life of your leather by clicking the link below thanks a lot there honey if you want to be a youtuber you have to grow a thick skin people are going to call you every name in the book and nitpick everything they see you do and honestly i'm totally fine with that but i did get a little bugged by a few comments in our last video so you'll remember in the beginning of this video i talked about how the chunk of slab we're using is the remainder of the circle table slab we built well in that circle slab video we talked about how the slab itself was one of the worst or roughest from its bull and just like phloem bull is another word that i didn't know 30 seconds ago but basically it means the log sliced up this way into longitudinal slabs and apparently it also is the name of a french bread that's round and crusty anyway big john the guy at the lumber yard even said in many eyes 90 of the world's eyes probably an unusable piece so a few people commented saying that he kind of tricked us into buying this slab and i felt bad because he can't defend himself in the comments section so i just wanted to say that big john is a very honest and extremely likable guy i think that comes across in the video and by the way i know i'm on a tangent here but what you're about to see is shawn making the handles and we had a lot of ideas but decided to go with this design to tie in some pieces of elm slab back into the base anyway like i was saying john did not hard sell us these slabs and the reason that we sold ourselves on them was because honestly a worse slab will usually make for a more interesting video i guess that's another thing about being a woodworker on youtube versus just being a woodworker your priorities get mixed up if we weren't making videos of course we would just pick the best slab possible to make our lives as easy as possible but at the end of the day it's not about doing things the easy way it's about doing them the best way whether that's the furniture the video or hopefully both by the way big john if you're watching don't worry about those comments because some people had some very nice things to say so yeah that's being a youtuber you have to grow a thick crusty skin like a bull also you have to be likable you have to be likable and likeable for this piece we decided to go with two different finishes for everything other than the top we did a water-based polyurethane and the reason for that is it's going to leave the beach wood a lot more pale versus golden basically we wanted as much contrast as possible between the slab top and everything else so after we sanded everything up to 180 we did about five to seven coats everywhere for the top you'll remember that a few minutes back we had filled in all of the major cracks with epoxy so after sanding all of that back we filled in any little remaining cracks and holes with some ca glue then sanded the slab up to 180 making sure to pop the grain in between each grit with water and for finish here we used rubio monocoat anyway i don't really have much else to say about finishing but i know watching finnish go on is a lot of people's favorite part of a video so while we're putting it on i'll just thank you for watching this video whether this is your first time here or you've been watching since way back in the days when i was in my garage thank you for watching and for taking an interest in this stuff and extra special thanks to my new and long time patreon members for their support i don't expect financial support from any of my viewers honestly i'm such a pessimist that usually whenever i'm editing a video together i don't even expect views from my viewers that said for the views and the support i sincerely thank you we couldn't do this without you and for anybody who wants to find out more grab a four eyes t-shirt and a field notes booklet and even get discounts on our plans i'll throw a link to my patreon in the description so you can check it out and see if it's right for you and as always no pressure [Music] so way back in the beginning of this video i said that we were gonna overcompensate for the more subtle slab on this piece by going a little crazy with the base with all the other slab projects that we've done so far we've tried really hard to be restrained making sure that the slab is the star of the show and treating the base like more of a thing that's just there to hold the top in position now i don't think that there's a right or a wrong way to go and i think it should be a case-by-case decision whatever the slab needs the slab gets but what i think doesn't matter so what do you think [Music] thanks for watching and if you want to buy this desk it's for sale right now on our website so check it out and we'll see in the next one [Music]

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 851,142

Keywords: 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, dining table, river dining table, slab dining table, epoxy dining table, expensive wood, bookmatched wood, river table epoxy, foureyes furniture, blacktail studio, Coffee Table, desk, modern desk, midcentury modern

Id: T3cwKyFLP28

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022