HUGE Mistake, I Lose Money on this $10,000 Table!

so when i decided to buy this building i knew i wanted to open up for more custom orders and what is a cooler opportunity than building a conference table for the business literally right next door the brothers over at east end plumbing and mechanical brought us not only a bottle of booze but an opportunity to help them finish out their brand new showroom with an awesome conference table they had a kind of an idea of something that they were looking for i put my spin on it they spun we spun we came to the conclusion that a larger scale walnut live edge table with their branding in the center would be perfect for what they're trying to do in this space so you can remember that sawmill we visited well it's time to make something out of these walnuts don't worry jordan i literally was coming to help you zero plan he just straight went for it i'm excited let's lay these out on some saw horses first out of me that was the most awful lifting technique i've ever seen let's start with them flat and then we'll start kind of doing a little bit more layout because we might make a curveball move here and i will address that down the line don't tell them they're supposed to follow along [Music] i quit this job you can't your name's on everything [Music] how far will it go you're done you're done it was a good one [Music] that's the keeper [Music] hi i didn't have any tools it'll be fine it's going to blow off anyway no i didn't have a chisel it was stolen would this one make sense to run both at the same time that's why i was kind of thinking you wanna do cup up or cup down i like cup down okay we'll do cup down i literally actually think i taught you that so i know we have no business doing it but what if we built a joint here big enough to push the slab across now put the longest one on the wall and like and it'll always have a shelf and we'll always keep it as the longest bark run jordan this one might be over four gentle it's cracking is that cheating i don't know there's no rules it's like it's because it's a new game it's like reinventing basketball in north korea i don't know that's a good role that's a good one can we get one of the fast measuring tape thing that's going on the wall did you just break it yeah oh that was fun that was good so this bark run here fifty and seven eighths not bad son can i sign it maybe we should make a little shout [Music] congratulations son first thing you've ever done been worthy of the wall now let's actually build something [Music] all right they're looking they're actually looking set jordan yeah these are some really good wood which is kind of surprising i'm loving it we're gonna get these things off of miss piggy here and then uh start messing with how we want to lay them out so we've got tony and art from next door at east end plumbing and these are their slides you guys know so we've got two these are called uh sister slabs right so they came out of the tree one on top of the other you can kind of see here if you look at this and you look at this just get a look at that oh yeah they're near they're open up like a book right option number one is the book match we take these two slabs we cut them straight line here bring them together and then the table will be oriented just like this okay keep that in your mind option number two no wow that's really i like that yeah you'll have display on both sides and we can also trim down one of these uh why but the choice is yours they're so beautiful i mean i i'm so much of this i like want to defer to your artistic you know kind of like how you believe the wood's speaking to you because it's just so freaking amazing it's some good stuff i'm personally a big fan of the book match because the book match is going to give you a really cool look of a mirror image of the grain on both sides this tree grew like this okay and we had to take a bunch of material off in order to get them flat but so when you think about it a book opening it's going to open like this now when you look at it this grain here is going to match as you go outwards so the movement of all of the grain coming down the tree as it moves both sides are going to move in same direction or same kind of flow you get all of these really cool natural inclusions in the graining of the wood that are mirroring each other on either side all of those same inclusions will still be there if you do it the other direction they're just not gonna like one will be here and one will be down there so just won't pop as much as far as like being right next to each other okay so we know that everything that you make is going to be amazing we at least put a lot of effort into that yeah they ended up going with the book match yeah which is much more traditional and i think you know being completely honest it's a more functional piece with the book match you're not losing almost two sides of it you're only going to lose that little bit all right so now that i have client approval on the way i want to orient the slabs we need to cut and create a seam in the center to actually book match them so the way we like to do this is with a chalk line this is a permanent red chalk line don't use that on things that you're not cutting and we'll kind of just lay out what we think is a good reference mark that's going to eliminate any voids so i've done a lot of this type of jointing hook matching slabs or doing big slabs that come together in the center and typically going with the track saw and cutting it straight down the center gives me a really really nice joint for some reason it didn't work this time we didn't like how it was joining up together i found the lowest spot on it made that my zero i'm just gonna have it flattened down to that spot we should be good we're gonna use the vacuum table because the other sides are perfectly flat and we got a new dust boot we broke all the other ones [Music] so an option number two was to put this sucker onto the cnc and then use the bit that is perfectly square to cut our joint and for some reason that still didn't work so we're struggling a little bit to get this gap to be perfect and we can't really figure out why so we're going to go back to traditional means which means i'm going to bear hug this thing over the jointer this should be interesting to say the least third option came to the jointer and that was still off i know that joiner's tuned up to be super precise um and as good as we can get a jointer like that still wasn't working oh god please work i mean it's way better than what it was this thing is kicking my ass all right so this is interesting got this sucker set up here and look at that so i know this blade is pretty good but what that's essentially telling me is that a ridge in the center so our last option was put this sucker onto the vacuum holders get it up on its side and use a hand plane in order to joint the crown out of the top see how it's going to come off the center there though so then you can come back in start to check that's already coming in the square line you're going to do something like this you want to consistently apply as much pressure as you can from what i've learned one two make sure you're measuring it from your reference face so this is our show face that's the face i need square that's the face i'm measuring on we still have a little bit here [Music] you've outdone yourself man we would work how many times have we tried this time i think we did it mark this and domino it so i can go take a nap this is exhausting we went with our standard practice here added a couple large dominoes in order to make sure that we had a nice strong joint in there and then that actually like quadruples the surface area of glue which gives us a great opportunity to not create any unnecessary weakness within this table this part here got a little squirrely when it came to glue up but as it does with these live edge tables and anything big we got through it and it worked out awesome only downside of this entire situation was the fact that myself jordan and sam all dove into trying and fix it at the same time and putting our brains together and when you're running a business you have multiple facets going you stop making money on those other things when the people that are in those departments have to go and put out fires in other places this situation right here highly compounded whole project itself started to pile up into the lost section for us and just another reason why you got to have good systems and processes and a good plan before you get to something this big this is dark type bond for walnut is it necessary no do we like it of course we do what makes this feel like playing with chocolate milk it's easy to make you just leave chocolate milk out for a while very thick chocolate crust it's really cheap too so much forearm strength glue applicator [Applause] the next day the table is dry we just got it out of clamps we're gonna get it on the cnc so we can go ahead and get this logo cut in some multi-pour situation with the logo on this thing but it it is one of the what i like to call fun moments in this project so let's get this thing on miss piggy one of the things i like to do is embed logoing or branding phrasing any sort of customization into a concept and that's kind of what we're doing here fortunately miss piggy she's a big girl and we can do projects just like this going on everyone jordan here the local total boat wrap we got the sticky stuff dispenser it's an actual name for it nice poor mat get some cups uh we're gonna do black and orange we're just gonna pour this on the cnc uh we don't have any really other urgent jobs and this is gonna be a two poor stage two stage pour process so there's their logo as you can see it has an orange circle with white lettering inside so what we're going to do is pour the orange circle with the black lettering and then come back after it's cured over the weekend and cut in the white it'll look crisp [Music] jordan i don't think that could be closer to perfect but can't say don't do it [Applause] [Music] all right it's monday it's monday um the epoxy's finally dried let it cure over the weekend so the next part is we're gonna cut out there's like a c logo here and then like an arrow hopefully nothing moved over the weekend one shot let's do it [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm taping off this is the bottom of the table we're going to fill these knots and crannies nooks and crannies with black epoxy and pour the white epoxy in the rest of the logo to kill two birds with one stone and let that cure so we use tie back tape and then we'll actually we have another big sheet that we're just gonna pull all the way over it how's the sticky stuff dispenser this sounds great [Music] so the bottom of this table is ready to rock and roll as far as finish goes so we're going to give it a clean wipe with the rubio cleaner squeegee some finish onto this and then get working on the top [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so we've got our rubio mix now get some on the surface probably more than we needed and i just squeegee this stuff around this part is always satisfying and we're going to do a little bit of a different application on the top but this is one of the faster ways of going about this [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we got this sucker sanded down to 80 grit what i do next is i come in with some compressed air and i spray the whole thing off what you'll notice especially with walnut is once you get the air down in there check it out until the grain starts to open up a little bit you can see how much dust was in it the intent of this is to just remove as much dust from the surface as possible before we go up in grits so we're not sanding the dust into the surface just quick spritz of this and then another sanding with 120 grit and i'll mark the surface with a pencil in order to know how fast i'm going across it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so in the crack filling process one of us missed all of these so i'm using a putty made by mohawk that's black it's a stick you kind of just morph it together and it reacts and then it'll dry within like 20 30 minutes so we don't have to wait a whole day to get back to work and it should work pretty well for this situation [Music] so rubio for us is typically tried and true but for some reason this project it just kicked our ass i wanted to try out using our new gem sander or buffer in order to put the rubio on so we went ahead and got the finish on uh and you usually do two coats of finish on a walnut slab we're looking for a consistent look across the table which i think we have so now it's more rubio we're going to use the buffer again buff it on wipe it off axon x off coat number two though we really were finding that we just didn't like the finish and by we i mean me i think what happened was i used a dirty pad or a bad pad and burnished the top of the finish in on that second run and it ended up leaving a lot of streaks that i was not a fan of i re-sanded the entire table then reapplied rubio again by hand wiped it hit it again with the red scotch brite we just couldn't get new pads for the polisher in but it's just another one of those situations that popped up that we were just completely not anticipating usually we can put finish like rubio on go ahead and start doing other things on other projects come back to it have have no problems it's really fast really efficient really good finish and this time it took me like i don't know four or five more hours of work in order to get this thing to be uh where we wanted it to be for the client and lo and behold that loses me money even if you do have a ton of experience with something it can always kick you straight in the groin so after close to two and a half months the base is finally in the client went back and forth a few times on what they were looking for um but i kind of dig what they came up with it is black painted large volume pipe with some stainless steel fasteners pretty awesome so we get this stuff off the truck and get this thing put together [Music] so now we got the base assembled they're really heavy of course john disappeared we're going to get these over on the floor lay the base out how we want then we'll bring the table to it mark it flip the table drill some threaded inserts and then this thing will be ready for delivery so let's uh let's knock this out sometimes the small guys carry stuff it's mostly due to patience we mocked up the base and by we i mean the green machine right here with his saint patty's celebratory shirt on it's looking pretty sweet what do you think it's actually real cool real cool something i should be doing [Music] [Applause] come down it's easy enough to move [Music] i think i gotta go smidge this way all right so for the threaded inserts and the reason we're using threaded inserts is because just using a screw truly wouldn't be the proper way to do something like this that screw can work its way out over time so what we do is essentially this is a woodpecker's um handheld drill press a couple other companies make them i'll link one down below that we've had for years one just has a better stop on it so i can line up over where i'm drilling perfectly up and down it stops perfectly comes out and makes really really quick work of this highly suggest if you do thread it in starts grabbing yourself something close to this it just makes it so much nicer here's a little tip for the insert we've got these ratcheting allens and it makes it easy to put pressure up and down you can put some ca glue in there you could put some epoxy in there because we're finished we're not doing either just for the sake of not getting anything in those holes so because the table has four jointing points we're gonna embed some c channel into the table itself to hold it nice and flat most of the things we build we build a base that has a plate on it that allows to hold things flat so we don't typically need c-channel so it's been a while since we've done this but this should help keep this thing from cupping especially with only having those four separate non-jointed points of contact so route this sucker in and then that's a wrap [Music] hi as i stated before this is going literally next door so a little different delivery for us we get to take the old ninja turtle over to the neighbors place and go figure the clouds just decided to come out for us gonna beat a little rain bounce the table i can see that part wheel bump it's your friendly neighborhood delivery guy all right i'm coming in at a 90 degree angle so we don't potentially lose it on that high bump ready i'm turning [Music] stupid ball i'm gonna ride the brakes the whole way down but i don't know if it's gonna stop it is time for you to go to your home yes ninja turtle this is what a a new shop looks like now we're going to drive you through that tiny door [Music] it looks pretty close to center bees down here be awesome ready up [Music] you might have to duck coming through the door jordan good spin it's home i think my favorite part of installs and doing work like this you get something in your eye while your specs are on your head all right gentlemen are you prepared yes we're prepared for the glory i wish it like lit up and we had some ex we can do fake explosions in post right it is absolutely worse you guys are so talented this logo is like subtle but it's still in your face the black and the walnut really pop and contrast together so you get a nice juxtaposition there with the coloring what do you guys think of that book match i'm so glad that we did it i like it that way yeah yeah where you guys did the inlay with the epoxy and this grain this just like looks like it was always there that's the blessing of working with live edge slabs is that this would typically be cut out if this was used for dimensional lumbers because you can't cut straight through it and then you have all these voids but filling them with epoxy and then being able to bring them to become whole and structurally sound gives a awesome look and we're big fans of it so you guys got some really beautiful slabs here what you do is an art i mean it's an art there's no other way it's such a fine trade what you do it's amazing we appreciate that i appreciate it we put a lot of time and effort into getting to a point where we can make stuff like this so yeah as you guys know it's it's all a culmination so this has been awesome really like i said i appreciate you guys taking a chance on us and yeah we're gonna have other problems we're gonna have other things for you for sure well let's get that sign up then and we'll call this thing a wrap it started to rain so we had to come back inside but that's going to be a wrap on this one we learned a lot of lessons on this mother sucker here and fortunately the clients still absolutely loved the project even though we may have lost a few dollars on it and it took a little longer than we anticipated if you guys want to see more ridiculous and cool crazy fun builds i got a whole playlist for you right here

Channel: John Malecki

Views: 559,455

Keywords: John Malecki, John Malecki Builds, Woodworking, How To

Id: 8uKxi6P5vt0

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022