DIY Epoxy Dining Table Build—Part Two of Two—How to Woodworking

welcome back to part two of my DIY epoxy dining table where we left off in the last video was we just did our last epoxy pour and we're ready to take it out of the mold so here you go Iko epoxy says it's fully cured after about 72 hours I like to give it a week just to make sure everything is fully cured and I mentioned before that I use silicone on putting these together which is why I was so hard to take off if I would have used to caulk it would have come off in one big piece but and I'm having to beat these edges to get them off so again lesson use the fast dry caulk not silicone if you watch my last video you saw me go up to creative woodworking in Portland and here I'm doing it again for it's 120 bucks now or 60 bucks for a half hour you can use their awesome array of industrial equipment this 48 inch planer saved me days of using my hand router sled or however I would have tried to get this flat I really appreciate them letting me come in and use their shop you probably noticed I planed that first side with the form still attached to it and I did that so I had a nice flat base and you're gonna see a lot of epoxy underneath this table which I don't mind it helped make it easier going through that planer that's a thin layer of epoxy that we're gonna plane off now once the sander hits this epoxy it makes it really evident how much foxy was on there only took a few passes though notice that really cool oscillation feature that this sander has the zig zags there and give a really clean finish to these I could obviously square this table up in my house with my Festool track but while I'm here I have access to this sliding table saw which is more accurate faster I'm gonna give a little cleaner cut it can go up to a 22 inch blade by the way I learned last time probably won't need a 22 inch blade for this table but nice to know it's there if you need it now that I'm all finished up there and back in my modest little shop I'm gonna start in laying these C channels I have a separate YouTube video out about doing these Canadian woodwork style C channel the reason I do these is for support that will help keep this table flat these large slabs especially the ones with a lot of character and figure they like to twist and Cup so these C channels are gonna help keep them flat I really recommend you watch my other video on these steel C channels I used my Festool track here which was not nearly as accurate as this other jig I built it'll work it just takes a little more tweaking since I want these C channels to sit flat I'm going to route out the thickness of the top plate and that way they'll click right down in there flush I use these threaded inserts for most everything and what I do is I mark the center of the hole with the same bit that I'm gonna drill the hole with and then I drill the hole straight up and down and these are the EZ lock threaded inserts for soft wood they work just fine for hard wood and I use a little bit of glue epoxy would probably be better but I haven't had any issues using this glue clicks down they're nice and flush and I do not know how to say the name of those bolts but they are great to use for these this is also another good tip I learned is covering your pieces with plastic when not in use it'll help keep everything flat everybody's favorite time sanding takes a lot of sanding to get these done right the pencil marks are great for tracking your progress and here are the sanding steps that I did to do this table I could probably have gone to 220 if I wasn't doing the epoxy but the epoxy tends to show there's really fine scratches a little bit more than the wood so I went all the way to 320 also if you want a slightly rounded corner but you don't want a big half-inch round or one inch round radius get this little quarter inch bit it saves your fingers tons of time on the sanding and gives you a really nice professional consistent look across the entire table you're some good tips on how to fill these small gaps near always gonna have these little gaps that need filling these little holes that didn't quite get filled in the main epoxy pour this is probably the biggest small gap that I had and this is because we planed it down and exposed a little bit larger gaps I'll show you here in a second how I felt some of the really tiny gaps witcher's odd leaves some of the hardest to fill once you've filled all your tiny gaps you're gonna want to scrape off the excess and you don't want to go back to the commercial planner and it doesn't really work to sand this off because it won't be perfectly flat it'll sand it uneven so I used this backhoe I think's I say it scraper has a carbide blade and does a really nice job at getting it nice and flat without damaging the wood or scraping the epoxy does take a lot of work though you'll see how much I removed here and this was just one portion of the slab once you've sanded back that first touch-up job you're gonna have these tiny little pinholes left and these are the ones I was talking about before they can be really tricky to fill and here I used actually this is even too much epoxy but you take a really sharp object or a paperclip works well and you just use the minimum amount possible to just barely fill in that little hole for those of us that like to own every possible tool this is a chisel planned by Lee Nielsen and it works really well for removing the epoxy before it's fully cured when it's nice and soft here I am doing the same round over on the top as I did on the bottom far as mounting the legs I just wanted to make sure they were perfectly centered and then I'm gonna do the same threaded inserts that it did on the C channel you see here using that 5/16 bit Center it up drill some holes install the inserts now that I got the inserts in and the tops handed to 320 along with the bottom sanded to 320 I am all ready to go to finish if I can ever get this thing loaded I'm gonna take it to Burt's View furniture over and Gresham to spray it with a conversion varnish it's the same finish I used on the last video I made turned out really nice just a matter of getting it in my truck first it took Jeff over there Birds view a lot more work than it looks like here but after it's all done I'm unloading it he did an amazing job did a satin conversion varnish finish and I'll show you just how nice of a job he did and how hard it can be to get a perfectly uniform satin on a really big table like this this light really gives you a good example of that satin Sheen when I come around the other side you're really gonna see the color of the wood and how amazing it looks again this Claro walnut slab from goa walnut couldn't be happier with how this turned out okay that's pretty much the whole build I do have some bonus footage here of how I get these photographs of the tables I am NOT a professional by any means but I'll show you the method that an amateur like me uses to get these pretty good photos so once you have this equipment I'll basically show you all I do here and then set up the tripod and the angle you want set the shutter and this was I think a twenty second shutter and I'm just painting the table with the light back and forth try to be even try to move it as fast as you can but watch your shadows black background really helps and with a little bit of trial and error you can get photos just like this you will need some basic editing like Lightroom or a similar software but with a little bit of practice it's really not that hard to get photos just like this okay that's the whole video if I left anything out or you have any additional questions for me please leave them for me in the comments thanks again for watching

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 2,516,508

Rating: 4.9185624 out of 5

Keywords: how to, diy, epoxy, ecopoxy, resin table, river table, woodwork, woodworking, amazing diy project

Id: lmjZNTXve7I

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 18 2018