Few of These Slabs Left in the World

hey this is cam with blacktail studio and this week i work on the oldest piece of wood i've ever got my hands on i introduced my very first product and by the time it's all done i realize why more people don't work with redwood this build started about five months ago and i don't know that i actually have any hardcore fans but if i do some of you might recognize this footage and this crate from the ebonized map of burl table that i built just a couple videos ago and the reason this crate was so big and the reason this crate was delivered to my wife's work instead of my shop is because of this massive old growth redwood slab which is what we're working on here and both this redwood slab and the map of burl came from a company in southern california called gl veneer and one of the things i love about gl is unlike my local suppliers that deal mostly with local woods gl has slabs from all over the world although this old growth redwood slab did come from california i almost exclusively work with hardwoods like walnut and maple and if you're not a woodworker you might assume that working with soft woods would be easier than working with hardwoods because it's easier to cut it's lighter to move around things like that and while that is true everything else is more difficult including this live edge cleanup because i was afraid if i used some of my normal aggressive tools i could really damage this extra soft redwood and so i reached out to the guys at pure space dry ice blasting and they use tiny dry ice pellets and this is primarily used for like fire damage cleanup where they can blast away all the charcoal and leave the solid wood so i use them to help clean up this redwood which has a very soft edge and hopefully just leave the perfect remaining live edge i make a lot of jokes on this channel and usually i have a pretty good idea when that joke isn't going to go over super well with certain demographics however i don't think i have ever underestimated a group more than i underestimated the passion behind the anti-circumcision group when i made a joke last week comparing the cut edge versus a live edge i can tell you an edge that's cut is going to be much easier to clean some would say more hygienic and in my experience women actually prefer it this way as well in that video i had joked that some of the people that felt so much passion for live edge furniture and live edge humans they could border on fanatics and after the hundreds of comments countless emails and guy who signed me up for a consultation with one of the doctors from doctors against circumcision.com i can now see that they are not fanatics i think that you guys are just doing the lord's work the non-jewish lord's work anyway and you guys are just more of a man than me and i mean that quite literally you have slightly more man parts than i do so i want to thank everybody and because of that i am no longer taking the live edge off any tables i am in fact reproducing the live edge on some parts of this table that were disgracingly cut and i might even look into reproducing my own live edge just please please don't fire by my house alright now that we got that unpleasantness out of the way let's move on to a less controversial topic and something i think that all of us can agree on and that is using old growth trees for decoration and furniture in wealthy people's houses [Applause] i don't know do you think that segway is going to get me canceled or not but this is something that i want to talk about because there's a lot of misconception about working with these big old growth slabs and first off you can't cut old growth trees down now people think that they just go level the redwood old growth trees now and make it all into paper and that's not the case you can't even cut down one of these trees they're all protected now back in the day they did they just destroyed these forests in horrible shameful ways and there is no satire in that i genuinely think that was a horrible thing that they did this tree had been sitting or this stump i should say been sitting for something like 50 to 100 years from back in those logging days and back in the day they didn't want the really pretty figured wood they wanted dimensional lumber to build houses and so all of this crazy grain this wild grain the really pretty stuff they just left it and because it's so big it didn't really rot and this company gel veneer they come through now and they salvage it enable it to be turned into something amazing and some people still might not like that and i think that they're completely entitled to that however i think it's pretty cool to be able to use this it reduces the fire load in these forests because they are just laying dead on the forest floor so that is how i got to use this amazing old growth redwood slab and just know you can't cut an old growth redwood tree down today one of the very difficult parts about working with this particular slab is just how freaking big it was it was about seven feet wide by about seven feet tall and the biggest cnc that i could find in my town was only six feet and so what we had to do which was almost kind of fortunate is you might have noticed that tip of this slab was actually broken off there's a chainsaw mark that i'll point out here in a little bit and it was just under 72 inches or six feet with that tip removed so what we did is we took a couple passes we did a little bit of flattening on the top flipped it over did some flattening on the bottom and then came back and finished flattening the one top and then we added that top there's the tip of it right there and that way we can hopefully get all of the thickness pretty uniform but again just had to be creative that was my friend jordan guy who's really good on the cnc got it worked up for me and now i got it back home and now the next thing i need to do is attach that top and really get started sanding this thing the person who the slab is for who by the way ended up being my favorite client i've ever worked with decided to maximize the thickness of this redwood slab which is why you see it wasn't completely surfaced on the back side and in order to get the backside as flat as the front would have had to lose about a half an inch or so of thickness and they decided that it was going to be better and really a lot cooler looking if they could maximize the thickness of the entire piece so just had to rough sand that with 80 grit and one thing about the soft wood it does sand really really easily so that was a lot nicer than sanding something like white oak earlier i mentioned the chainsaw miscut in the slab which is what caused this tip to break off in the first place and that's that piece just to the left there that straight line and i decided i didn't want to hide it i didn't want to try to fill it with other wood or fill it with epoxy it's part of the history of the slab and while it doesn't look amazing again it's just part of the history and i think it's pretty cool so what i did is i just lightly epoxied on that tip so then i could go attach it a little bit more securely despite our best efforts with the cnc you can tell we didn't get that tip just perfectly level with the rest of the slab so i had to break out a tool i don't really like this is my old makita hand planer and it removes a lot of material it just is a little bit messy and i wouldn't say that i am the most proficient with it but got the bulk of it removed and then used the belt sander which can be a pretty good tool for keeping things nice and level got a perfect straight edge there and now this enables me to introduce you to my very first ever product people are always asking me why don't i find a faster way to do my bow ties why don't i use a cnc or why don't i make a jig and first off one is i don't have a cnc two i don't have room for a cnc and three i wouldn't know how to use a cnc even if i got one and as far as the jig there are other bowtie jigs out there but they all make just kind of ugly bow ties they make kind of a square blocky one with a rounded corner and that is the inherent problem with any of these bow tie jigs is you have a round bit so it's gonna have a round corner and so i wanted to come up with a design that really highlighted that round so i made this one with a round back and one of the things i really like about this one is using different bushings you can make different size bow ties and this cuts the bow tie and the inlay itself and i'll show you how to do this i'll probably have a separate more detailed video on exactly how to do it but this is the biggest bow tie that the jig will make and these ones are just structural these are going to be what holds that top on the back and there's a look i would love to get some feedback from you guys i want to know if you like this design if you don't like that rounded back if you do like it if you stay tuned in the video i'll show you a smaller a little bit sleeker bow tie that you can make with the very same jig though what i think the majority of you guys will appreciate most about this bow tie jig is just how few of tools you need to make essentially perfect inlays all i'm using here is my router and no you don't need a 600 festool router almost any router can accept these bushings you need that inlay kit which i got the one from whiteside and then just the blacktail bowtie jig and with very little practice you can make essentially perfect inlays and i've seen some really really bad bow tie inlays out there even at like actual furniture shops so don't feel bad if you aren't great at hand cutting them and no i'm not done hand cutting my own bow ties this is just an additional option because cutting a rounded back one like this would be extremely difficult freehanded and also doing inlays in redwood or softwoods is extremely difficult so this is just another tool for my toolbox and we're doing an extremely limited run of these so if you're interested they are for sale now there's a link in the video description i hope you'll check it out and give me some feedback about how you like using this blacktail bowtie jig as i was developing this over the last couple months i got a lot of practice using this jig and i learned there's some pretty neat little tricks you can do like you can actually control just how tight each bow tie fits in there when you're cutting that negative if you want a little bit looser fit like this one was you can make several passes with the router and if you want a very very snug fit you can make just a single pass and no matter which one i'm doing i usually prefer to add some of the redwood dust or whatever dust of the wood that i'm working with and that will just potentially fill any tiny little micro gaps although when you're doing a jig like this it's really not that necessary and this isn't my favorite design of the jig i'll show you my favorite design here next those ones were essentially just structural but i have some incredible wood for the next one this is from matt's woodworks he built this sixty thousand dollar table and these were some off cuts from a 1500 year old redwood root and this thing is crazy it is incredibly hard it's like as hard as ebony and this redwood is about a softer softer than doug fur and this is the other design that i have this is where you can add a different size bushing and make a slightly smaller a little bit sleeker more modern bowtie personally i like the look of this bow tie much much more than that first bow tie that i showed you it's a little bit sleeker you actually get those sharp corners on it it's just a much cooler design in my opinion i would actually put this in like my personal dining table and if it wasn't clear how i did this instead of the white side inlay kit i just used a 3 8 inch brass bushing just one that most woodworkers probably have laying around and now to cut the recess i'm going to use a 5 8 inch and the important thing to know is as long as you increase by a quarter inch from the one you use to cut your bow tie to the one you use to cut your slot it will fit every time and that's why you can get a bunch of different sizes out of this same bow tie jig and again this is the design that i like i like the a little bit more modern a little bit sharper corners and there is one additional step that you have to take if you want to do this one with a 3 8 inch bushing that gives you a little bit sharper corners and show you that right here is it looks cool but that router still cuts a slight radius so you just have to use any old chisel and just make a little bit sharper and you don't have to take off much you can see it's just bringing it to a point and cutting it down so there is a tiny bit more work to do these a little bit more modern bow ties i think it's worth it but in the end it's totally up to you and why there's so much flexibility with this bowtie jig it's probably worth mentioning that anytime you're doing a structural inlay pretty much the worst wood you can use are the ones with the swirling kind of burl grains a lot like the ones i'm using here and the first problem which isn't the main issue is that they kind of chip out i was trying to use the hand plane here and it chipped out luckily above the surface so i was able to use the belt sander to get it flattened out but really they're more prone to breaking you want the really nice straight grain stuff and these ones are going to be mostly just for looks i have the bow ties on the back and that's going to provide all the strength but these ones do look pretty cool so i have very little experience finishing redwood and since this is kind of a once in a lifetime piece that i'll probably never have access to again i was extremely paranoid about messing it up so over the last several months i have frantically been trying all kinds of different finishes on different samples of redwood some of them have been pretty cool this is shellac it's not quite right for my shop and my setup this other one was actually shellac but it was a little bit bland it made me kind of paranoid about trying more shellac but what i eventually landed on is applying an epoxy base coat sanding it off and then applying the finish which we're going to use a hard wax oil gave a ton more depth and color to the piece a poster here where there's no epoxy base coat and it really looks kind of muted and bland so what we have to do is put a epoxy base coat down sand it all off and then apply our finish to really highlight the character and depth of this redwood before we get into the rather extended and meticulous process of finishing the top which is going to take a couple weeks i'll show you how i finished this underside in about 15 minutes and this product is called seal a cell and it's not a particularly beautiful finish but what it does really well is it seals everything up you basically just saturate it let that wood absorb as much as it possibly can and then you're done this whole youtube journey has just been an absolute whirlwind for me when i started this i genuinely never expected to have any significant amount of subscribers let alone something like the option for sponsors and the sponsors are something i've been giving a lot of thought to lately i started to wonder if it's worth a certain amount of dollars for a company to put their product in my video why wouldn't it be worth it for me to bet on myself and put my own product in my own video it's even more on brand than any company i could work with and one of those products that my viewers have been having a ton of success with is my epoxy table workshop it's like a three and a half hour long master class on how to build a wood and epoxy table in your home shop or garage as one of my viewers said he was really glad i didn't just repurpose a bunch of youtube videos it's all original content something i'm really proud of and if you want to check it out there's a link in the description after i got that top sealed with epoxy i was ready to start working on sealing this live edge which was kind of challenging because i didn't want to build any sheen on it so i didn't want to put any epoxy on this live edge so i used that same sealant cell because it's gonna seal it up really well harden it up and not really build up any type of sheen i absolutely labored over the decision over how to mount this because i was really afraid of getting a glare from the ceiling lights and wanted to be able to tilt it forward so the best idea that i could come up with was yes using a big tv mount and no i do not know if this is going to work and one thing you know about me is i will always show my mistakes so i'm gonna finish the top and then we're actually gonna use a tv mount to mount this massive redwood slab to the wall so let's see how that goes of all the aspects of this build the sanding was unquestionably the most difficult and i don't mean that it was physically difficult to remove material because this redwood is so soft that part was actually really easy what was difficult is keeping it perfectly flat because when you have these really really soft woods with all this crazy wood figuring you have a lot of different wood densities and so if you leave your sander in any one spot for just a micro second too long you start getting these little peaks and valleys we'll remove that softer wood and leave the harder wood and can really compromise the finish so i took my time i won't say that i'm the redwood expert at this point but i feel a little bit better going into my next redwood project if there is one and what i did was i sanded from i believe i started 80 grit and i sanded it up to 500 grit which is much higher than i normally go but it's gonna give it an amazing sheen that really looks more like polished stone than kind of a typical wood finish the finish i'm going to be using is called osmo 3043 and it's listed as a satin finish but we're going to build that sheen up way way past satin you can actually go to a pretty much a high gloss with it and this finish might be the prettiest finish i've ever used and i've used a lot of different finishes i will say the protection on it is fine so long as you don't look in the general direction of it and certainly never place an object on this and just to be clear i am saying yes this finish is horrible protection never use it on a table it's actually marketed as a hardwood floor finish which i think is comical but yeah i think it's absolutely beautiful i don't have an axe to grind with the osmo people they're nice people but it's just not a good durable finish so use it only for decorative things like these wall pieces the way i apply osmo and the way i learn to apply osmo is you basically buff it in with that white pad you just leave a little bit on there and here's what remained the next day which i wasn't too surprised at certain areas absorbed more other areas absorbed less and now i was going to come back with this 600 grit sand lily and start building the coats from here and i am going to give you the abbreviated version because i ended up probably doing about five or six different coats on this piece sanding in between of most of them but not all of them osmo you can actually apply without sanding in between coats if you want to and this was just kind of a lengthy process to get that sheen as even as i could i do really like this 600 grit a brunette abernath whatever it is from merca is sans the osmo really really nicely and here is just that second coat goes on really easy and unlike something like the rubio that i use where you remove all of it this stuff you need to leave a little bit of it on there and after it kind of dries overnight i have another tip that you'll come back i'll show you that final step to getting a really really even sheen with the osmo and that's this here this is the liquid wax cleaner and you just splash a little bit on there about you know 24 hours or so after putting on that last coat and that will really remove any of the unevenness you can see we got a pretty good sheen now and i was actually really really excited about this oh and if you do not regret the last 19 minutes and 30 seconds of your life i would really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button [Music] i was genuinely surprised on not just how well that worked but how easily it worked and there was one final step in this finishing process and i mentioned the osmo does not provide great protection and while i'm not going to be setting cold drinks on this piece i do want as much protection as i can and i also would love a little bit more sheen and so i'm using this black forest ceramic which i've been using for probably over a year now and you can see there just how much it bumps the sheen up but it's also going to bump the protection up just in case somehow anything gets splattered on it and just gives it a little bit more protection and it is a two coat process i don't know how much of it would be necessary just for mostly looks like this one but i did add this top coat as well again it bumped the sheen up even more from that initial coat only took me probably 15 minutes to do this whole piece and then i was done i mentioned at the start of the video that this piece was for my favorite client ever and obviously that client was me because i share all the same opinions with myself and if you're wondering this slab retailed for four thousand five hundred dollars the guys from geoveneer did send it to me at no charge but if you are interested in a similar piece be sure to check out their website and every week i like to give a little bit of credit to people who make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comment with the wrong name sam sam and that way people who didn't make it to the end of the video will be confused why everybody is calling me by the wrong name

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 2,544,146

Keywords: bookmatched guitar top, bookmatched wood, computer desk, custom desk, diy desk, do it yourself, do it yourself projects, expensive wood, figured woods, how to, how to build a desk, luxury desk, modern desk, most expensive wood, most expensive wood in the world, myrtle wood, woodworking, woodworking projects, bow tie jig, bow tie wood

Id: eu7ubm7g59E

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022