How to make an Ocean Table // Concrete and Epoxy Resin

hey I'm Bob but I like to make stuff today I'm gonna make a table that looks like the ocean [Music] my wife absolutely loves the beach and I thought it'd be really cool to make her a table that looked like it was a cross-section of the ocean I've also never done any projects with concrete so I figured this would be a good project to be able to do both of those things okay let me show you how I made this I had a slab of heart pine to use for the legs and a big chunk of melamine to use for the form the floor for the concrete is usually made out of melamine so that the concrete won't stick to it when you take it out of the form to make the form I just cut down several pieces that were tall enough for the sides and a square for the bottom the size here was just kind of out of my head I didn't want it to be too big or too heavy but I wanted it to be large enough to act as an end table to make this form I just screwed in the pieces around the sides making sure to make them as tight as possible because I don't want anything to leak I ran screws in around the edge pieces and into the bottom to hold everything together I wanted the legs to be in set in the square so I've got some smaller pieces of melamine to take up the space where the legs would go each corner was made up of two pieces one the same width as my legs and a smaller piece to make up the difference in width on the other side I glued them up with some CA glue and then put them in place anytime you make a form for concrete you want to seal it up and in this case I'm using silicone sealant to seal up all of the seams the cut edges of the melamine also has to be completely sealed otherwise the concrete and the epoxy will stick to that like crazy it'll be a real big pain to get off usually when people make forms for pouring concrete on a melamine they're doing it upside down so usually this bottom surface ends up being the top surface of the countertop or whatever they're making but in this case this is actually going to be the bottom of this piece so it doesn't really matter what's here after the caulking dries I'm going to make sure to clean off all the way around before I pour the concrete I'm not entirely sure this is gonna work but here's my plan for pouring the concrete usually when you pour concrete you want it to be level and you want to be as flat as possible in this case I'm actually going for more of a beach look and what I mean by that is that on one side of this table I'm gonna have this much concrete and this much water or epoxy and then as it goes across I'm going to change those ratios so it's gonna look like it's deeper as it goes to the other side of the table we'll see if it works on the recommendation of my friend Venu ADA I got quikrete 5000 for this I didn't really know how much of this I was gonna need so I just put some in a bucket and added some water and mixed it to where I got the consistency that I wanted and then realized that I needed some more I just went back and forth between concrete and water until I had a good amount mixed to the way it needed to be mixed per the instructions on the bag then I lifted up one side of my form to get the angle that I wanted I started pouring in a little bit of concrete and then put the rest of the volume on top of it once it was all in the form I tried to pack it down as much as I could and then took some time to shape it so that it looked like a beach I wanted it to be really thin on one side and really high on the other side then I added some texture to the top so it wasn't too flat from me patting it down I took off the sanding pad from my orbital sander and then ran it on the sides of the forum to try to get rid of some of the air bubbles I could have spent more time on them I cut down this large piece of heart pine to make the legs basically I cut off the rough edge and then I set the fence to where I could cut some square legs this is a really cool old piece of wood that I think was used as a countertop at some point so it's got a lot of water damage and just dirt once I had all of the legs cut I just looked at them and picked which size I thought would look best on the outside and made sure to go back and sand off all the gross stuff all the dirt and everything on all of the sides I had some other pine panels that I had reclaimed from the same location these got cut down into strips to act as cross braces underneath the table in between the legs I chopped these down to length a little bit oversized because I wanted to fit them exactly underneath the table when I was ready to build the legs the concrete has been curing for about 48 hours and during that time I've had it covered up with plastic so that it didn't dry out too fast this is the first time I've ever done any kind of concrete in a forum so I don't really know what I'm doing but there is a friend of mine who does venue Aida runs a channel called homemade modern I'm gonna link it down in the description he says a ton of great projects and a lot of them have to do with concrete he pours a lot of concrete countertops and things like that so if you're interested in more detail on how to do this in the correct way he will be a great resource so go check that link out now it's time to pour the epoxy in this and this is another stage that I don't know if this is gonna work or not I do have a feeling that they're gonna be a lot of air bubbles that are gonna come up out of the concrete into the resin and maybe that'll make it look even more like water I'm not really sure but we'll find out before pouring the resin I removed all of the extra little bits of concrete from the side anything that's left on the sides of the form will be on the outside of the epoxy I cleaned out all the dust from that and then lifted my form in the opposite angle that I had done when I poured the concrete this will start to even out the overall surface following the instructions on the epoxy I mixed these in a one-to-one ratio now it's very specific about how you're supposed to mix these and how long you're supposed to mix them you should definitely follow the instructions exactly I added 10 drops of blue dye to this and I wasn't sure if that would be enough or too much but it ended up being a perfect amount once I got that fully mixed in I poured it over the top of the form I had to move the form around a little bit to get the epoxy to go into all of the corners and to completely cover the bottom surface it's pretty fluid at this point until it starts to set up once I had it fully in there I used a heat gun to lightly run over the surface to pop the air bubbles that rise to the top after four hours when that first layer had cured I had mixed up another batch with the same amount of blue dye and then poured it in I poured that second coat about an hour ago and I came back to look at it just a minute ago and it's cracking I'm expecting this because I'm pouring about the max thickness in a single level that they recommend doing and I'm doing it in the amount of time that they recommended but apparently it's too much heat and it's causing the top layer to crack now hopefully I can still fill that with the next layer and you won't even see it but you never know we'll just see how it turns out after about another six hours I mixed up another batch and then took my time to pour it first down into this crack I tried to fill the crack up all the way and then use the heat gun to draw any air bubbles out of the crack before I added the rest of it on top once I got the rest of this layer poured I was really happy to see that the crack pretty much just disappeared I let this one fully cure for another five or six hours and then added the final coat overall I used two gallons of epoxy for this and you can see how thick it was I could have easily added more to make it thicker and make the water effect even greater after that final coat I let it cure for two days to make sure that it was really hard and fully cured then it was time to take it out of the form unscrewing one panel I was really happy with how it was looking already I took off the other outside panels and the side pieces came off just fine the corners ended up being a little bit more trouble I think spraying mold release on the inside of the form before pouring anything would be helpful because I had to knock these off so hard some of the epoxy broke I also had to chisel off all of these extra pieces in the corner it ended up looking okay because the legs go in these corners anyway so you don't really see them but it was a lot of extra work that could have been avoided if I had sealed up these corners beforehand after I got all of these pieces taken off I just used an orbital sander to clean up all the surfaces now any time you sand epoxy it makes it cloudy and in this case I want it to be clear so the first pass was trying to get rid of all the residue and clean everything off I used some CA glue to put those corners back on as well the top edge of the epoxy actually ramped up a little bit towards the melamine so you had kind of a sharp edge that had to be sanded down by sanding this edge it also clouds the top a little bit but will polish that up later at this point I still hadn't figured out how to mount the legs to each other so I decided to use an X system underneath to hold the legs in position I cut down those pieces of pine to their final width in the final length and then had to turn them into an X and to do this I use the crosscut sled and set up a stop block on each end this allowed me to cut out the very center of each one of these pieces at half depth when these two set together they made an X but this is where it got a little bit tricky I cut down a piece of 2x4 to 45 degrees to act as a backer on my crosscut sled on each of the legs a drill line where I wanted these X's to intersect I set up a stop block and drew a line on the sled so I knew where to cut on each one of the legs holding the piece against my 45-degree backer I ran it over the blade to cut a bunch of different slots now what this does is cuts a flat dado at an angle in each one of the legs you can see what it looks like right here it ended up working out perfectly so I just repeated this cut on each one of the legs on both ends people often ask why I don't use a dado stack for stuff like this and in this case I couldn't use my crosscut sled and I wouldn't be able to use the stop blocks or the 45-degree backer it just doesn't make sense in this application after I got all eight of these slots cut I just cleaned them out and flatten them with the chisel I did a dry fit of everything to make sure that it all fit around the table and all of the joints were as tight as I wanted them to be it was really happy and a little surprised that it actually fit together perfectly the only fasteners in this entire thing are a screw that I added in the middle of each one of the X's coming up from the bottom side this may not be necessary but I thought it would be good to hold those pieces together I added a whole lot of glue to each one of the surfaces on each one of these cuts and then knocked all of the legs into place some of them were tighter than others but the glue will help it expand and the joint should be tight once everything was lined up and pretty square I used some straps to pull all of the legs inward by tightening these down it pulled all of the joints together I put the top in to make sure that I didn't make it too small to what the top wouldn't fit then I just had to let it dry then it was time to start the sanding process I used some spray adhesive to put some 400 grit paper on the back of a piece of wood and then started sanding all of the faces after this I used some 400 and some water to wet sand these same surfaces after this I wet sanded up through the grits to about 1500 grit paper after that it was time for polishing I bought some polishing compound which was actually really expensive and a couple of different options for polishing one was attachment for a drill it didn't work great and then I went to Harbor Freight and got the cheapest polisher I could find this thing was about 17 bucks I had two different types of polishing compounds so I tried them both and realized that I had to do them in the correct order and there were some places that just needed to be sanded more so I had to go back and sand and then re polish basically I spent an entire afternoon trying to get this surface as smooth and glossy as I could this is one of those things that I think could just go on forever and ever and ever and you could keep polishing and keep sanding but eventually I kind of got tired of doing it and it looked good enough happy with how it looked it looked like water and so I just wanted to be done when I got to that point and I was happy with it I moved on to sanding and finishing the stand I ran over all this one more time with some high grit paper just to smooth everything out and then used a couple of coats of Danish Oil this isn't a finish that I used very often but I put some of it on a test piece and really loved the way that it looked so I did a couple of coats wiping down all of the surfaces and I was really happy with how it made the green pop then I just dropped on the top piece and it was done this thing took way more time than I expected that it would because I had to do all of this stuff multiple times they also made it a lot more expensive than I thought it would be as well but in the end I really loved how it came out I love how this looks like a beach and it gets deeper and then the color gets darker over here just like it would in RO water I didn't get the top and the sides fully polished I put a lot of time into it and eventually just kind of got tired of doing it but the good thing is I didn't attach the top the weight of this is holding it in place which is perfectly good but I can pull it off later and do some more polishing or if there's ever a scratch I can always take it off and fix it not having done any concrete before there were some things I forgot to do after doing this multiple times the first time I did it I vibrated it really well and got rid of all the air bubbles but after doing it a couple of times I kind of forgot to do that so in the future I'll just have to remember to do some of those things to get a more solid pour down here and not have any of these gaps ultimately it looks really organic down here and so that's cool but it would be really cool to have a nice solid line to match the solid line on top the concrete looks kind of white here and I think that's mostly the polish that I was using on the epoxy that got on to the concrete so I should have sealed the concrete first before doing the polishing I think but I'm gonna go back and seal it anyway and we'll see how it turns out I also wasn't really sure how this wood would look next to this stuff I really was focusing on the top and I was gonna kind of figure out the finish of the wood as I went along I thought about painting it white to make it look kind of beachy I thought about doing a steel frame instead but realized that that would probably make it look really cold in the end I loved that the wood has an orange color next to the blue water and I think it's a really good matching I'm really happy with it and most importantly my wife is really happy with it I would love to know what you think about this one or if you've done anything like this I'd love to see it let me know down in the comments I've got lots of other projects of all types that you should definitely check out and don't forget to subscribe that's it for this one guys thanks for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 8,370,627

Rating: 4.8541741 out of 5

Keywords: ocean table, ocean, epoxy, resin, concrete, table, furniture, end table, wood, woodworking, reclaimed, maker, make, project, iltms, i like to make stuff, how-to, how to, diy

Id: xfqY0DTPlVg

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/fluffykerfuffle1]

wow

[u/IAMGumbercules]

Cool and all, and much respect to the guy being able to build it - but it seems pretty empty inside.

[u/Papa-Lazarou]

Here is a similar, albeit more expensive, concept;
https://duffylondon.com/product/tables/abyss-table/

[u/Caboozel]

Hey, It's I Like To Make Stuff!!!!! I've been following Bob since he really started churning out his content. He has some really great builds that any DIYer would love. I recommend checking out his channel if you get the chance.