Fire, Epoxy, and Free Wood

almost three years ago I had a really weird idea that turned into my most viewed video of all time but let's be honest it was kind of small and kind of looked like an accident so this time I have an idea on how to make it much bigger and hopefully much better this whole project started when I was up at Goby Walnut recently and asking if they could put my woolly mammoth Husk in their Kiln to get it dry for me and he said they just broke a slab of wood and asked if I was interested in it and being a bit of a wood expert I knew immediately what I was looking at Redwood [Music] just as I pointed out there we're looking at a big slab of Redwood and this one broke right down the middle and I'm going to be taking half of it which still measures about nine feet long if you include the tip of it and about 26 to 30 inches wide depending on where you measure and I once read somewhere by red I mean probably heard and didn't fact check this that women get a hormone during childbirth that makes them forget about the pain of childbirth and that is exactly how I feel about working with redwood the only thing worse than working with redwood is working with burnt wood and I'm gonna try to do both which quickly devolves into one of the worst projects I've ever done on that first burnt wood table I had a really happy accident where I accidentally surfaced off too much material and the exposed Corner that resulted ended up being my favorite part of the whole build so I'm gonna try to replicate that but in a controlled setting and to do that I'm going to be using these Cuts all discs I have a medium an extreme and a fine and they're all made of these little bits of tungsten carbide bonded to Steel I won't say they last forever but I've never actually had to replace any of my discs and they are much much safer than those blade style Grinders I've kind of since stopped using most of those especially the chainsaw ones and they do make a pretty big mess but luckily I got a little bit of space from the neighbors and I'm using the extreme disk here to just kind of hog away material and what I want to do is I want to leave Redwood on three sides and have the center section just be the only burned part so it kind of looks like it was partially burned and then Fades into Redwood most Woodworkers at their core are tool Geeks which is one of the reasons why I love specialty tools like this quetzal disc and it's also one of the reasons why I've started sourcing my own line of tools and the latest tool in that line is a solid Damascus marking knife and we did a limited run we put out to the email list and it sold out almost immediately so we are going to do another run and if you want to get on the pre-order list there's a link in the video description and legitimately hand Forge not from some big Factory in China and again it'll be a limited run Link in the description one of the things I love about redwood is how easy it textures and after I had it roughed out with a Cuts all I came back with that wire wheel and just exposed all the wood grain and this is going to have a big impact when I go to burn it because instead of seeing the scars from the cuts I'll you'll only see natural wood grain which is going to be much much better and I don't know how many of you guys keep up with the controversy in The Woodworking YouTube world but there's a bit of controversy going on about fires in your shop and I won't get into that one but I will say this is one method we all agree can and will burn your shop down so I did have a hose handy and a fire extinguisher and a cell phone so I feel like I was pretty safe but I would love to hear your feedback on how dangerous this is all right that first burnt wood table I made warped and twisted so badly it was barely usable and this time I went a little bit slower worked in smaller areas and it actually stayed shockingly flat so I was thrilled that this one was going to be much much easier at least so I thought about 95 or so of the work on this project is going to be focused on the top side but before I get to work on the top I need to seal the underside and the quickest and easiest way I know to do that is using this Sila cell it's not a particularly fancy finish but it does a really good job at sealing up that soft wood and this part you will see again this is some very very rotted wood so I'm trying to seal everything up with kind of a thinned out penetrating type of epoxy and a little bit of a spoiler I don't do a good enough job and when I flipped it over there's kind of a natural void that actually really liked on the top side and I poured so much epoxy down there but you will see this part again it's borderline frustrating but before I can get to that I need to seal the rest of it and this is just soaking it up like a sponge which is exactly what I'm hoping for at this point all right it's about 18 hours later and the penetrating epoxy has penetrated and kind of done its thing this area here was just squishy you could push it with your finger and it's basically as hard as wood right now there's no black stuff that comes off anymore but I do want to get it sealed even more than it is now because what we're going to try to do is prevent any bubbles so I want to make sure all this Char is filled in as much as possible because those bubbles are the enemy of these finished tables so one more session with the penetrating epoxy and hopefully that'll do it at that last burnt wood and epoxy table I did I had a lot of little tiny bubbles down at the bottom of the epoxy pour and had a lot of people comment saying should have hit this with the torch torch only works on the bubbles that are on top of the table the ones that are actually coming out of the wood that the torch can't reach is completely ineffective so if you see bubbles when this is all said and done it's not through a lack of torching it's just a lack of skill fun fact for the day if you're working with penetrating epoxy which I rarely do it starts to react even faster than normal epoxy foreign and this isn't the fault of the epoxy this is my own mistake but lesson learned what you're looking at these little bubbles already bad bubbles there's no such thing as good bubbles Scott um they're penetrating epoxy anywhere got shiny I left some pools yeah see you're wrong um so yeah if you have a shiny spot wipe it up if you don't want to have little micro bubbles you can see we get some there we got some here I don't think there's anything I can do about those at this point okay I got an idea oh my God um I think I'm gonna try this brush to brush off some of those little micro bubbles and hopefully not ruin the Char of the wood I wasn't really sure that this brushing method would work and actually remove the bubbles and as I got a little ways into it I was afraid that I'd actually made it much worse because if you can see all these scuff marks in the end the project will be essentially ruined and I was still reasonably confident I feel like epoxy can cover 180 grit scratches or so and I feel like those scuff marks are a little bit finer than 180. there's a strong possibility that I haven't properly explained to most of you what exactly I'm trying to accomplish with this build and in the end after it's all surfaced there will be Redwood on three sides and the Char only in the middle which is why I have this kind of funny Tombstone looking form because all I really want is epoxy in that Center section in the end and this probably isn't my finest craftsmanship but this is the I won't say best way but easiest way I came up with to create a form that will hold epoxy just in the middle I have one more step before the main epoxy pour and this is something I've been experimenting with a little bit over the years and just small sample boards I've never put this in a video before but that first burnt epoxy table I did it was really really hard to see the wood in anything other than bright light so what I've come up with is mixing this metallic black pigment and I'm just kind of basting the wood in this and this is still going to be very black but the metallic pigments in it are going to really refract that light and make that Char much more visible in lower light if anybody out there wants to try a similar project first off I highly encourage you I think it's super cool looking and it is challenging I can be a bit dramatic when I get frustrated but you can totally do this I have another old video on doing coasters if you want to start small and second this is not proprietary towards me I got this idea because I saw a guy on Reddit had done a small board like this and I was like that'd be awesome to try a big table so if you want to try it the most important thing get that wood sealed really well with a thinned out kind of penetrating style epoxy and then for this portion of the pore you want to use a deep pour even though this isn't a very deep pore itself you want that slow curing epoxy because you don't want any Bubbles and here I'm just brushing to get good contact and remove any of those micro bubbles well we got a small leak of normally I can patch these types of leaks although this is a pretty bad one but it's all this porous rotted wood oh no it's over there now and I don't know how to stop this one um I don't know that it's gonna leak the whole pour out or not so I got a bucket under it for now but now it's pounding I found a new leak that new drip makes me nervous you got another bucket I got bucks for days all right well see what happens uh you've got another one down here are you messing with me I'm not actually you might have two where all right so one right there again [Applause] well there might be one on this end too I think I just started another one oh that does anything this is a desperation move this is not going very well this might be a good time to mention that I teach a course on building epoxy tables so if you want to avoid disaster in your own epoxy table process don't forget to send them today we are running a extra special promotion it's a good time for that pitch right perfect timing guaranteed to work according to what's his name the flex Pace guy uh Phil Swift Phil Swift wouldn't let us down it hasn't let me down yet if I'm being honest ah where'd that come from there you are get in there this is my life I'm a fine fine Craftsman I am never shy about making fun of myself or admitting that I made a mistake but I get a lot of comments from people that say you've built so many of these tables how are you still managing to get leaks so frequently and for the most part it's because I'm trying to build weird stuff I have probably 25 videos out there where I build a black epoxy table with Walnut and if I were you guys I'd be pretty bored of that so I'm trying to kind of push my own skill set and make some more interesting content and more interesting Furniture which leads to a lot of epoxy leaks foreign set the whole table up on my slab rack for about two or three weeks to make sure that epoxy was fully cured and this form was attached a little better than I'd hoped some of that caulk attached to the Char and actually ripped out chunks of the wood so hopefully we'll be able to remove that through surfacing here at creative woodworking I was extremely nervous about surfacing this slab because up to this point everything has made sense in my head about what it's going to look like but you won't know for sure until we run up through this planer and I'm not shy about scrapping projects if this came out and it looked stupid you guys would never know I even started it I would make a video on it because there's no point in making ugly projects so you can probably surmise that it wasn't a disaster and yeah it actually looked pretty freaking cool so far in my last video I was building three tables that were headed to a really nice couple in Europe and after I got the tables finished and got them crated up we learned that it is very difficult to find a freight company that'll ship giant created to Europe so got an extra workbench for a few weeks foreign I got the table cut down to just under 96 inches or about 2.4 meters which will make shipping much more affordable and also eight feet is a very very big desk and for this bevel on the back side I put a 10 degree bevel which I've never done before and I thought it was just a little bit more interesting than a standard 90. these wax sticks are awesome for filling the unfillable holes and yes I'm sure some of you are going to take that the wrong way but what I mean is there's some very small pits in these tables that can almost never be filled with epoxy or CA glue but they are easily filled with these wax sticks and you do need to use a film type finish like an epoxy top coat or a varnish or a lacquer or poly something like that over the top of them but if you are doing that type of finish they are the best way to fill those little micro pits I've mentioned how horrible Redwood is to work with and how horrible charred wood is to work with and here's some of the reason that transition from the Char to the Redwood left a really unexpected seam so I kind of had to paint a line with epoxy there and the Redwood itself is just so soft that I'm having to baste it with epoxy to really firm it up before moving on to the top coat and before I can even think about the top coat I need a nice flat surface and to attempt to do that I'm using my block sander here foreign I'm also using a carbide scraper here to level out some of those high spots and if you don't have one of these scrapers it's a really good pretty affordable tool to add to your toolbox because it does a really nice job at leveling out the high spots Without Really affecting the wood or the epoxy [Music] some of you might be wondering why I'm going back from a block sander to an orbital sander to a block sander and I'm just trying to keep this flat basically the epoxy is incredibly hard the Redwood is incredibly soft and my power sander the orbital sander tends to round it over so when it was finished it would look all wavy and kind of distorted but I still have some really really aggressive Sandra lines from the wide belt sander when we get it surfaced so I'm just kind of tiptoeing through this trying to find the best way to get it flat and basically perfect [Music] I mentioned I'm trying to get this table perfectly flat and I do feel like that merits some explanation because these slab tables do not have the same tolerance for flat as something like a car panel so a car panel you can get essentially perfect that really nice mirror finish and oh traditional wood panel glue up you can get it pretty flat but probably not as flat as a car panel and these slab tables are the worst of all of them so we will get this as good as we can but just the inherent nature of a slab is not going to be anywhere nearly as flat as something like a car panel so in the end they'll there will be some Distortion but we will get it as good as we're capable of but I think I did a shooting job sanding there's these lines in it my sanding pattern it's not very good so I think I need to do another pass it's fair I can see it underneath it I'm pretty happy and genuinely amused that Scott has gotten comfortable enough with me to give me some of that Asperger's level of honesty which I genuinely need in my life and in my last video he made me redo some plugs and he got some really positive feedback from you guys as well so keep the feedback coming for Scott because he kept the hits coming here I think the this much overhang is kind of weird uh probably doesn't tapers down yeah so much here that I don't think I don't know I think these legs will be too close together how weird do you think that cantilever is it could be it could be the bug that becomes a teacher I feel like it looks like almost like an animal and this is a tail it does actually look a lot like animals not a big fish that's fine I I feel like it almost has to be end to end you don't like my my butchered hot look not particularly all right now that I've seen it I don't think I can see that let's try it your way good I think so well let's give it a little melt there I kind of like it do you still like it I like it a lot more now that I see it right set up I think it looks a lot less unbalanced yeah what do you think of the polished look on the black I feel like powder coating a bit better I don't necessarily disagree because I think the black with the black would look cool I had enough people shame me in a past video for some of my threaded inserts going in at 88 or 89 degrees so I finally created a little DIY drill press alternative to get perfect threaded inserts and for this Redwood I'm using CA glue with the threaded inserts which normally I don't like doing because I want to be able to remove these threaded inserts if I ever have to go back and resurface this table I normally don't want them epoxied in there however this wood is so soft that I really really do think it's necessary to have either some epoxy or some CA glue on there this is me getting way out of my comfort zone and I don't just mean cleaning which is also slightly out of my comfort zone I am trying to get a sterile shop to make a DIY spray booth and before you go using this idea for inspiration it's not a very good idea but it's the best that I could do I got those drop cloths hung up I got this from maxvac I think is the brand and it's actually a really really powerful air filter which will do a good job at circulating the air in there but I am trying my hand at my own DIY spray booth and again don't copy anything I'm doing because this does not go very well the tools I have for this is a Graco or Graco HVLP setup I spend about 14 on this paint suit which is actually a really good investment and I have a power cap that I'm going to be using as a respirator eye protection so can't use not having the tools as an excuse I'm even have a little tack cloth here to wipe everything down make sure not a single hair drops into it and at this point I was feeling pretty confident I look like a painter this kind of looks like a spray booth and I've seen this on TV before where guys just go back and forth I figure how hard can it be I talked to a friend of mine and he gave me some pointers on how many codes to do and what to do in between coats and here's how we ended up after one coat Chris from four eyes was telling me don't get discouraged after the first coat because it always looks bad but I'm super discouraged what looks bad there's so much dirt in it like I was wrapped up like a Hazmat in an ebola Zone and this looks like I dropped a peanut butter sandwich in a barber shop this is so much hair and stuff in it and I don't even have any hair um maybe this is normal but it doesn't look good so what's the next step I think we gotta take it out of here sand it lightly remove the all these Nubs which normally you don't have to do till the second or third coat um but it's just so many so let's get it out of here okay I have found a very distinct hierarchy of helpful versus annoying people in the comment section based on their given trade or Hobby and at the most helpful best comments I get are from Automotive people they have taught me so much and give me so many good pointers so if you know what I'm doing wrong please let me know in the comments and if you want to know the worst people that leave comments camera people I don't know why looking really really badly there's so much specs and dust in it that I think I think my fancy curtain is making it worse because there wasn't this much when we just sprayed the map a table in the middle of the shop yeah I think it's going to be a lot of spraying a lot of sanding spraying a lot of sanding spraying a lot of sanding and somehow I have to find a way to get less dirt and dust and hairs in here than there is now it doesn't have to be perfect because we can buff it out but this isn't gonna work [Music] if you're wondering that was actually not dramatized at all I had Scott edit from home for two or three days so I could just keep doing coats and sanding and doing coats and sanding and in the end I got it okay there's a bit of distortion in it there's a bit of orange peel but I think that I can actually sand this out I am starting at 800 grit and I'm going to be dry sanding only and I'll go into a little bit more on why I'm doing that in a second but here's what I'm trying to accomplish I'm trying to remove all of that orange peel and get it just a nice smooth frosted look and the reason I'm only dry sanding is I was told when you're working with a water-based finish you need to let it cure for like a month if you want to wet sand it and I don't have that much time so I'm using some different abrasives and only dry sanding it up to 2 000 grit but here's how it looks at 2000 and I'm actually pretty pleased with this I think it's a nice Sheen and I should be able to polish it up from here I added some painters tape to the sides to keep the buffing compound off of it and definitely not just an excuse to plug my marking knife one more time the compounds I'm going to be using is the 3M perfectit system and remember I am not an automotive guy there might be a better system out there I've used this one for a few years and it seems to work for me it does create a bit of a mess but you can see how quickly you go from that 2000 grit kind of satin look to kind of a borderline high gloss here and this is just stage one there's three stages total I'm told that the first two are really the only necessary ones for something like this but I'm gonna have a little bit of fun with it and just see how polished we can get it I probably should have mentioned this earlier if I actually wanted to generate any interest on this table but I'm going to be auctioning this off bidding will start at one dollar highest bid gets it and I'll even include free shipping in the continental US and if you're outside the US you can still bid on it but you just have to pay for shipping and if this ends up selling for 50 bucks and I have to spend a thousand to ship it across the country I'm fine with it because I have a lot of fun with these auctions and I think they're interesting to follow and if you want to follow the story and you don't want to bid on it you can click that link in the video description with the eBay listing and if you want to support this channel but you don't want to bid on it I would really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button I knew I didn't want a glossy Live Edge so I came back with a paintbrush and just brushed on a thin layer of a flat water-based poly and I was actually really happy with this Sheen and from here all I needed to do was wash the top down with some soapy water to remove all that buffing compound but that didn't go as planned I've got some comments over the last few months where people say that I always have these disasters and that I faked them for dramatic effect and to make the video better and here's a good example that I don't have to fake this stuff it just happens on its own I was cleaning this piece because it was almost done it was all the way buffed out and I was washing the soap and water to get all that wax off and the soap and water had a reaction with the water-based finish and it's completely orange peeled now and basically I start all over and I like to act like this stuff doesn't bother me but this one's done pretty good because this is going to be a lot more work but part of it I guess so this goes down as one of the weirdest things in my woodworking career about 30 minutes after that initial water disaster I looked down and I thought the Finish might look a little bit better than it did initially and then like an hour later it looked a lot better fast forwarded this morning the Finish is relaxed or whatever you want to call it back to its pre-watered damaged State and looks essentially perfect and I'm sure somebody out there knows how and why this happened I'm not going to question it but I'm pretty thrilled I don't have to sand this down and polish it all the way back up just to be safe I waited another week before moving on to the M3 application process and if you don't know M3 is the next generation of wood protection and before I started offering it for sale I tested it against every Nano finish I could find and nothing even came close this finish is compatible with any wood finish and a high gloss finish like this it actually won't give it any more shine but what it will do is give an incredible amount of protection and it's also a repairable surface too so there's a link in the description if you want to learn a little bit more about the M3 Nano foreign the guy that made these table legs is a super nice guy from New Zealand and this isn't sponsored I paid for everything I got from him but I promised him I would help him move the last of these legs apparently he made a limited number of these like 20 years ago and he's been holding on to him and he has like 10 sets left and he asked if I could help him sell that last 10 set so when I say limited there is literally only like 10 of these ever that will be made in the world and I think they're a really cool design I was originally going to buy all of them myself but I just can't store that many of them so I'll leave a link to his page in the description below anyway here is the finished table and I would love to know what you guys actually think of this design and trust me I need your honesty here because I might try other variations of this table unless everybody tells me that it sucks so at the very least start your question or comment with the words more or less for whether you want more of these tables or less of them thanks so much have a great week

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 2,594,648

Keywords: burnt wood, shou sugi, shou sugi ban, shou sugi ban technique, shou sugi ban table, redwood table, yakisugi

Id: PeyTvhmIfec

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023