This Wood Is Hated The Most (and I don't know why)

welcome back y'all and this week i'm remaking the round dining table that goes in our small dining room right off the kitchen now i built that table three years ago and around here that's about as long as it takes for me to get bored with a piece and want to build another one so this one is a 56 inch round dining table using this really wide cotton wood slab and i'm gonna build a base for it that's like nothing that i've ever seen before and probably like nothing that you've ever seen before it's gonna be a fun one and i'll get into all the design details and how i come up with these designs and why this particular species of wood is hated by so many but is the most beautiful wood that i've ever worked with [Music] okay so as you guys see there is quite a bit of cupping in this slab i mean it's pretty much a taco actually that's not even accurate because while it looks like it's doing this the whole way across it's kicking up on this side but if you look at it from underneath it's actually kicking down on this side so it's kind of got this little s shape going on it's 62 inches wide at its widest point which is five foot two inches the capacity of my cnc is only 60 inches so i can't just put this whole thing and flatten it all at once the only solution is to rip the slab into smaller pieces and then reassemble them once you get it flattened and the size of the slab is just one reason that i'm going to cut it down before flattening now the other reason is with a smaller work piece you can better isolate the area that has cupping or warping and end up with more material thickness in the end essentially if i were to just flatten this whole slab all at once with all that various warping going on i just end up with a pile of sawdust and honestly that probably doesn't make a very good video johnny makes sawdust i don't think y'all are gonna click on that also the reason that there is such a size disparity between the two pieces is because the smaller side had the most cupping so i'm trying to isolate as much of that as possible anyways i'm getting the slabs flat and coplanar on both sides and i have them so they are about a sixteenth of an inch apart in thickness and for me that's close enough the challenging part is running the slabs over the jointers so i end up with a tight seam that most folks won't notice when i glue the slabs back together so the smaller half was fairly simple but then i had to try to run this big boy over the jointer all by myself which was not going well luckily jeff jumped in to help as it took two people to push this piece over the jointer and then hold it square to the fence all at the same time now this worked out okay but i think i need a better solution maybe a bigger joiner i don't know something else i took a break from the slabs and started carving the plywood pieces that i'm using to build the base now i know these look like giant bow ties but i'll explain more about the design here in a bit okay before i can glue these two slabs back together i have to consider how i'm going to clamp them now since i cut away a bunch of that excess material before flattening i really don't have a parallel 90 degree face to clamp these back together so i have to cut some in and then add blocking then using this angle gauge i can set it to that unknown angle of the slab and then reference that to a 90 degree block in this case a 2x4 and real quick i'll just add some domino mortises and then i can attach those angle blocks that i just made i'm doing this with some wood glue and then i added some ca glue and hit it with some activator that's going to quickly set the ca glue and allow the wood glue to dry so this is a big glue up and i had to get some pipe clamps that were wide enough to clamp something that is almost six and a half feet wide anytime i have a big glue up like this i try to think of every possible scenario of how it could go wrong because once you get going you only have so much working time with the wood glue luckily this went pretty smoothly and these pipe clamps are super strong and they're able to pull those slabs together nice and tight okay back to the base design and i'm cutting the second round of these bow tie shapes so let's jump into the design so i can explain exactly how this is gonna work and what my process is so any good design that i come up with usually involves some bad ones first as a matter of fact i see it as a good thing when i come up with bad ideas now i know this sounds a bit counter-intuitive but hear me out maybe for some folks design work comes really easy really naturally and this is someone you might call a pure artist it's a happy little bush i remember he lives right here beautiful little buddy for many others design is a muscle that must be exercised regularly at least that's how it works for me i do this through a process of iteration failing and then repeat as long as i stick with that cycle i can usually end up with something that i'm happy with and it's kind of like playing wordle i've never guessed the word on the first try i've gotten it on the second try maybe twice but somewhere between guess 3 and guess 5 i usually figure it out okay back on task so to create a double helix spiral i drew up this bow tie looking shape and then rotated each layer at its center by six degrees so then i had to go cut out 35 of these pieces total and then i also cut out two spacers that will let me set that six degree angle for each consecutive layer you probably also notice that each piece has a half inch hole in the center and this is so i could place them over a half inch dowel and keep everything aligned as i put this together really was pretty straightforward putting it all together and i just used a ton of glue for each layer set it to that six degrees of rotation and then shot in a bunch of brad nails to hold it all together while the glue dries and then all i had to do was rinse and repeat 34 more times [Music] it's honestly pretty cool looking as it is with that step layered look but i'm going to be power carving this here in a bit and it's going to give it some smooth curves all right in the meantime back to the cottonwood slab glue up and let's talk about this species of wood for a minute now cottonwood is one of the most hated species of trees cottonwood is a form of poplar maybe if you don't have big cottonwoods near you you're unaware but cottonwood trees get their name from the flowers that release hundreds of these cotton puff looking seeds that kind of float off in the wind to propagate the species the problem is the trees release a ton of these seeds and it literally when they're falling it looks like it's snowing the cottonwood seeds end up covering everything and it's just really messy to clean up now i don't have any cottonwoods on my property but i do have something similar i have these big calorie pear trees otherwise known as bradford pears and these things are really pretty the first few days of spring but then create a huge mess of white flowers they stink they smell like something's rotting and we are lucky enough to have three of these big pear trees over our pool and then i found this article that lists the six most hated species of tree it has cottonwood and bradford pears in their top six as well as another tree that's really abundant on my property the hackberry so yay i win awesome like i said cottonwood is a poplar tree and that means it's on the softer side of hardwoods the wood is a bright light color and it has dark veining and different color variations throughout these trees grow really fast and get really big and due to the large size you end up seeing a lot of compression figuring and curling in the wood translation cottonwood is really really beautiful now it's not a traditional species of wood to build tables from like you would see with walnut or oak or maple but i think it's far more stunning than any of those other species but that's my opinion cottonwood is all over the us but it's very abundant around me here in oklahoma and neighboring texas i got this slab from my friends over at vintage reclaimed lumber and they've really helped this area and myself personally get acquainted with using cottonwood as a species to build furniture with and if you ever find yourself here in oklahoma city make sure you stop by vantage reclaimed lumber and then tell them johnny build sent you for 10 off [Music] did you all know that two out of three guys will experience hair loss by the time they're 35 well keeps offers clinically proven research back treatments to stop hair loss and improve hair growth so skip the doctor skip going to the pharmacy because with keeps you can get quality expert care delivered right to your door at about half the cost of going to a pharmacy keeps has a network of expert medical advisors prescribers and care specialists to help make your hair goals a reality oh didn't see you there and each treatment plan comes with a year 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pours and i'll be using total boat thick set fathom for this one and three quarter inch deep pour now before pouring i taped everything off and then sealed the slab with some total boat gleam varnish that helps prevent the epoxy from staining the wood then i covered that leading live edge with some high performance epoxy and this helps to seal that edge which then prevents air from the slab leaching out into the epoxy while it cures so i'm just building a makeshift form with this piece of bendable quarter inch mdf which is normally used for concrete forms and that's where you find it like in the concrete section of your home improvement store this pour takes two gallons of this total boat fathom deep pour epoxy and then i tinted it a smoky black color or you can just see it just come get a shot of it working its way in there see it i'm not worried about this at all this is going to hold i'm worried about it spreading out but if we can get this to kind of gel up where it is then we'll be good look how translucent it is you can see the the red tape that's exactly exactly what i wanted it's gonna look like like glass with some in it glass wash if you guys are wondering why i'm wearing this silly looking hat it's because i'm about to do a whole bunch of power carving on this base and it's going to create an insane amount of dust now i'm going to be using this turbo plane attachment on my angle grinder to do this the idea is to create sort of an organic flow of the whole piece going down we're just going to wing it jump right in and do it [Music] so [Music] my shop has never been so crazy dirty and dusty okay back to the final pours and i'm doing these in two stages since the biggest container i have in my shop is only a gallon this total boat fathom is really easy to work with but you do have to make sure that you have a fairly dust free environment so i waited to finish all that power carving before pouring the rest of the epoxy and total vote has been a long time sponsor of this channel so make sure to check out those total boat links down below and i've also got a 10 off discount code for you there as well putting the uh helmet back on because this bondo is some nasty stuff i don't want to breathe it in the power carving is all done and this thing looks amazing like i am really really pleased with how this came out essentially when it's all done i want it to look like one solid piece and i don't want to be able to see any of the plies i'm going to be using bondo like i said i'll probably do multiple coats put that on with a spreader don't want to breathe it in because it's nasty so uh time to mask up okay the finished process the guys at vrl are gonna put on this twisted base we'll cover up the plywood pretty well so i focus more on making the surface a smooth continuous curve with that bondo and then also filling any gaps [Music] i cut a few rounds on the cnc the larger one is 32 inches and then the second one steps down to 28 inches and there's going to be a set for the top and for the bottom next i added a round over before assembling the remainder of the table base which i can take over vrl so they can put that finish on it now if you saw the charity table i built a few months back you saw me do a very similar technique and that time the guys at vrl did what they call a textured bronze this time i'm gonna go with what they call textured black i actually wish i could explain how they did this technique but i don't know and it's proprietary so they won't tell me but they did say that if you're in the area and you're looking for someone to do this finish they will do that for you for a price obviously okay back to the shop to finish up the tabletop i can de-mold that slab and then peel it off my epoxy workbench and i've got to sand down all the excess epoxy on the top before i can put it back on the cnc to run a last flattening pass on the bottom and then the top i also cut in a quarter inch deep recess for the base and there's an extra half inch of clearance in all directions that's going to allow for any seasonal wood movement the base was all done and i ran back to vrl to pick it up and man this thing looks awesome it looks like some sort of giant auger bit that's 100 years old i'm really really happy with the way this thing turned out i do have to add some attachment points which i did by drilling a large hole with my forstner bit and then drilled a smaller hole within that this also allows for any wood movement and then i can add threaded inserts to the underside of the tabletop before sanding i added a quarter inch round over to the top and the bottom and then i sanded through the grits up to 220 and i recently picked up this jim sander off of ebay and this is my first time to test drive it and if it looks like it's jumping around a bunch it's because i didn't realize that the pad wasn't seated all the way down around the spindle i just thought this is how this thing runs but after i finished the table i realized what happened and luckily this didn't affect the finish at all for that epoxy edge i wet sanded all that epoxy up to 2000 grit and then buffed in odis oil to finish the entire tabletop [Music] jeff came to the shop and helped me put the whole table together and this project was done [Music] [Music] this was such a fun project to build and it's really rewarding to see such a crazy design idea kind of come together and be executed in a way that looks even better than what i imagined and i really like how that dark black textured base contrasts so well with the light color of the cottonwood slab now go ahead and tell me cottonwood isn't beautiful i dare you look at all that 3d figuring and the chatoyance man don't sleep on cottonwood y'all alright let me know what you think of this build down in the comment section and make sure you get subscribed if you haven't already thanks for checking this one out and i'll see you back here next time

Channel: Jonny Builds

Views: 943,360

Keywords: avid cnc, cnc, do it yourself, epoxy, epoxy table, epoxyresin, how to, jonny builds, live edge, live edge slab, most beautiful wood, most hated tree, powercarving, resin, resin art, resin pour, resin table, river table, table base, wood, woodworking, woodworking projects

Id: Yo6G1N95J9Q

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022