Epoxy Table 101 Building a Coffee Table - Part One of Two

hey this scam in Blacktail studio and this week I am really excited because this video is the entire process of taking these three slabs and turning them into what might be my favorite table to date you can see here I'm just confirming the layout that it already made with this little template and then I'm gonna start cutting here in a second before I did that I wanted to confirm my size so I mean it about an inch bigger on all sides so that way I can trim it down to the exact size that the client wants in my past videos one of the main questions I get is what is a specific tool that I'm using so I'm gonna put a link to everything I can think of down in the description below like these Dewalt track clamps they're super handy and about half the price of the festival ones and it's also a festival track so I'll put a link to that too the other big question I got was how much does the slab cost and that is a totally fair question and sometimes the clients want me to keep that a secret other times they don't care these slabs for these three tables ended up costing me a total of about fifteen hundred dollars but the cool thing is there's gonna be a lot of slab left over when I'm done so I can actually make more tables from the remaining slabs so kind of a neat little bonus to have enough slab left over to make tables after this this here is a Festool track clamp it's it's fine it's not my favorite clamp but it is service purpose for this and here you can see I'm just finding any way I can to cut this last little bit off the jig so I worked a little faster than my track saw and then I'm just cutting them to that line with my bandsaw if you haven't gathered yet I'm basically just prepping these slabs to get them to their rough size so I can fit them in the mold and now I have a ton of epoxy waste and have everything relatively square but they will not be perfect yet moving on to just the cleanup here and any softwood you want to take it out because I'll actually give you a little bit of a spoiler later in the video I did not get all of this softwood out and you get to see what happens if you leave kind of a soft rotted piece in after getting the finish which caused kind of a disaster that I completely had to refinish the entire table top after being essentially done with it so you can look forward to seeing that later in the video but for now this is how I'm getting rid of all this soft loose wood my favorite thing for this type of work is a nice dull chisel but once I get all the big pieces I could take it outside because it gets super messy is actually my least favorite job of any part of these epoxy tables is strap these down and I'm gonna break out an angle grinder with a wire wheel and it causes a big mess used a lot of face protection gloves well you throw these little wire needles that will stick in your clothes and even stick in your skin it is pretty necessary though and it does do a good job of removing all the soft wood and leaving all of the hard wood and I also have my impact driver with a brass wheel and therefore getting into a little bit tighter areas moving on to making the form when I cut my sides I like to cut them at least an inch it's not 2 to 3 inches taller than the highest point on the slab so that we'd have to worry about any type of epoxy spilling over I think I cut these about an inch and a half taller than the thickest slab I have if you're curious this material is called melamine and it's available from Home Depot or Lowe's it runs for about 30 bucks for a 4x8 sheet so you can get quite a bit out of one of those $30 sheets and if you're careful with your mold release you can actually reuse it on projects sometimes the caulk I'm using is a 20-minute talk that I get from Home Depot's a water-based caulk that takes about 20 minutes to set up I'll do let these set overnight though is kind of really important I tried using them faster than I've gotten leaks before so fast dry caulk and the important thing about that is it comes apart a lot easier than like a silicone does I've talked about this a little bit in some past videos not everybody seals the edges of the pieces when they're doing these builds and that's okay I've had a lot of luck when I do seal them I do know some really good epoxy table builders that don't so it's kind of up to you if you decide to it will reduce the bubbles that use this is gonna be a black table so that doesn't particularly matter overall I recommend it but not everybody does it so it's kind of a judgement call some of the guys that don't steal these edges to say they get a little bit better bond with the epoxy kind of penetrating the wood and I could see that being true if you do decide to seal it make sure you use a fast drying epoxy you don't want to use one of these ones that takes three days to set up just to seal the edges you want something's going to cure and 12 to 24 hours when it comes to sealing the slabs with shellac this is something I wouldn't skip no matter what and the reason I do this is because if you're using any type of tinted epoxy that tends to stain the wood really bad if you any drips on the wood so I just basically paint the entire thing with this D waxy Lac and that'll prevent any of that color bleed from staining your wood you could use a different type of you know you could put like a polyurethane or something but that would take you know a whole day to dry and this dries in about five minutes and it sands off super easy so I really wouldn't recommend using anything else but a shellac you can use the shellac with wax in it but it doesn't it'll tend to make the epoxy not stick to it so that's why I always use the D waxed shellac and even though I'm using to do extra like I still go back and you want to scuff up the edges of all the epoxy you don't want anything shiny and you don't need to go completely crazy but basically the better you scuff it up the better a bond you'll get with that epoxy from your deep Pore that you're gonna kind of fill the entire thing up with you and this is just kind of an overall good rule for painting or anything is paint epoxy paint all likes to stick to rough objects okay we're almost to the fun stuff now that I'm kind of getting this organized I had a hard time remembering which way everything went and I think I got it there but yeah just kind of organizing everything make sure everything fit double check my size you see there that was the piece that broke off when I was cutting it and I actually liked it a lot better the way it ended up so one of the cool things about the epoxy tables is there's no really right or wrong way as long everything looks pretty natural you don't want any straight edges and everything seemed to kind of click together with this table so I was pretty happy with how it worked it is important to clamp down your work because it will flow if you're telling it all the way up and you'll actually see that I had a couple pieces start floating in the middle of the poor so that was kind of frustrating but this here is a little dam that I'm making and it's the same quick drying caulk that I used before and this is so I can fill it all the way at the top and it doesn't cover the entire slab in order to get that last little eighth of an inch if you know maybe one slab is just a hair taller than the other one or if it's not perfectly level okay this is the fun time and also the nerve-wracking time and you can see there I'm using eco epoxy they're two to one formula I mentioned this before in my past video some people were still a little confused only use the two two in formula do not use the one-to-one it doesn't work only use the two two one for these types of tables with every project there's things that you can be a little bit more relaxed on them things that you need to be a little more strict on and the epoxy portion this is when you definitely need to be very very strict make sure you get your ratios exactly right make sure that you mix it extremely well when you're doing your color though that's just a preference so you can see what I do here is I drop in a bunch mix it up and I use a cup and I measured that cup the height of my table and you'll see what I do is I look down and that'll get you a really good idea of the color of your epoxy when it's completely cured where if you look into a bucket it's a lot darker than if you look into a cup there so that's how I test my colors but again it makes it really really well get the sides get the bottom I can't emphasize enough get your ratios right and get your mixing right because there really is no way around it if you don't get it thoroughly mixed and then do your pour now this epoxy is kind of specially formulated to really minimize the bubbles which if you've ever worked at epoxy if bubbles are the biggest problem it doesn't mean it's completely bubble proof but it does mean that like the vast vast majority of them will pop themselves you see just the act of pouring will actually induce quite a few bubbles again ninety-five percent of those will pop themselves but I really try not to splash it in or really give myself any more chance to induce more bubbles that I don't have to when I'm pouring this and at this point I've done about thirty of these tables and I still make mistakes you can see here as I'm pouring this even though the woods clamped down part of it starts to float and it kind of caused a few problems for me it wasn't a complete disaster but I ended up wasting a lot of epoxy because I thought I had to keep adding more and more when really it was just causing the wood to flow and so when I push it down the epoxy completely submerged it you can see you're just in a second I think I show you by pushing down on it how much it was floating I do really like these kind of fat syringes for filling in the little holes and small cracks they do a good that and there you can see exactly how much it starts overflowing once I pushed it down as I was editing this I realized I didn't show the process of adding the mold release to the form and that's gonna be what makes it possible to for this melamine to come off of the epoxy because if you don't add the mold release this melamine will not come off so I'll add a link to one of my other videos where I do show that process if you do want to see that because it is definitely something you don't want to skip I am pretty fortunate to live in a place that will rent me out time on their giant plane of it also has two wide belt Sanders so I take it in there because for about 75 bucks they will let me run it through a few times and that saves me about a day of kind of router sledding or hand sanding to get it down to the perfectly flat perfectly sanded level that they give it to me at so pretty fortunate for that okay now that I got at home I can start all the fun stuff and this is gonna be where this slab really comes alive and we really get to make it look good because in part two we're gonna do the sanding the finishing kind of a medium screw-up how to fix that medium screw-up and attaching a super cool custom base I had made for this but make sure you click over to watch part two right now thanks so much and please subscribe for more

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 743,153

Rating: 4.8612962 out of 5

Keywords: river table, epoxy table, resin table, resin art, ecopoxy, how to woodworking, diy epoxy, diy woodworking, diy dining table, epoxy coffee table, wood porn, creative idea, resin table top

Id: g5iburlcAQw

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019