Making a River Table - Start to Finish

hey everyone mike from northern ridge designs and this video is going to be kind of a comprehensive tutorial on how to do a river table this was actually my first attempt at it and i think it turned out pretty well what you're looking at here is white oak with tropical turquoise epoxy if you like what you see stay tuned let's get started all right step one gotta select your piece of wood we're gonna go with a chunk of white oak as it previously mentioned and then we need to get it cut to size we want about a seven foot long dining table so we're just kind of taking off one end gonna square it up to the other end notice we're gonna make multiple cuts it's a little easier on the saw as well as the slab then we throw it on the planing table and this is where we realize just how crooked the slab is and it's gonna require quite a bit of wood to be taken off see we get out the hand planer power hand planer to get a little more taking off make the job a little easier on the router when you're making passes with the router you really want to stay well under an eighth of an inch per pass any more than that you're gonna rip wood plus it's just really tough on the router so we try to take about a sixteenth off at a time which ends up equaling a whole lot of passes we're using a two inch wide router bit it's meant for a cnc planing table but it works pretty well on this manual operation lost my assistant brian a cousin of mine helps on projects more of a cousin eddie i think i'll loving referred to him as cousin eddie okay so when you're done routing you're left with these lines from the router bit and they can actually be quite deep and kind of hard to get out so you need to start with a either a really low grit sandpaper or i like to go with is a grinder with a 50 grit metal sanding disc now you kind of have to be careful with this and keep it moving because if you stay in one spot too long you're definitely going to take off too much material but it does make short work of the round of the router lines okay now we get a little better look it just takes seconds in those lines are gone now the downside is you are left with some pretty deep sanding swirls but they're a little easier for regular sandpaper to to take out as opposed to the router lines okay so finish off the whole slab this really only takes a few minutes with the grinder wheel and you can see those uh those lines are pretty much gone at this point as i said the they're a little harder to see this the swirl marks from the it's such a rough grit sandpaper on that metal sanding disc so you really have to be careful when you sand make sure you get all those out so once we have one side flattened we're able to flip it over now we're going to flatten the other side vacuuming as you go kind of makes life a lot easier so once we have one flat side it was a lot easier to flatten out the other side now we're doing is measuring and making our cut for our river table so we're going to flip the inside out to make our straight edges on the outside of the table the inside will be the live edge okay now we have just a standard piece of melamine here and we're going to use that for our form so we're cutting off the edges short edges long edges using a kreg jig to make pocket holes to secure our form to the table we also put down block it tape any kind of tie back tape will work used for sealing up house house wrap we're kind of nervous at this point and neither of us had ever done a river table before so we're kind of wondering how this is going to work out make sure you seal all the edges okay now we have some quick coat epoxy this stuff sets up in about 15 minutes we're just doing the edges of the of the table because we don't want the deep pore epoxy to soak in now we've let that dry roughed it up a little bit we put the wood back in the form ports another layer of quick coat seal epoxy on there and then using that to glue our slab down to the table we don't want it to rise up or move when you pour the the deep pore epoxy and what we're using here is a deep pour it can be a deep port epoxy which can be poured up to two inches and our table's about an inch is seven eighths thick so it's worked out perfect for us it's going to take about three gallons of the stuff so it is quite expensive you want to make sure you don't have too much made but you definitely don't want to run short so we kind of aired on the side of caution here we made sure we had plenty you mix this up with a stick from this particular brand if you use a regular power mixer just incorporates too many bubbles so it makes it nice and slow then we're going to add in our tropical turquoise metallic powder we're a little unsure how much to put in it is quite concentrated so we just kind of put in one dollop stirred it around felt it was a little thin so we just kept adding more until we got a color that we like the looks of and as you as you're going to see when you pour it it looks pretty thin and doesn't look like it has much color but as you as the pore gets deeper the color and the metallic flakes really start to pop okay here's cousin eddie adding a little more color you want to pour this stuff this particular brand stone coat countertop epoxy you want to pour this particular brand of epoxy about a quarter inch at a time so that you can use the torch to get the bubbles out and then add more epoxy so here's i'm pouring nice and slow you can see that it's really quite clear you can see the block of tape underneath it's about a quarter inch deep so we're torching out the bubbles it is self leveling okay adding some more now you can see as it's getting thicker and we didn't let the we didn't let the bottom layer cure we're just adding right to it we just want to kind of torch the bubbles as we go but you can see the color starting to pop the metallic little metallic flakes are really suspended in the epoxy this close up here you can see the bubbles coming out okay four quarter inch torch pour a quarter inch torch now we're getting pretty close up to the edge uh this stuff will shrink up on you a little bit so you want to be right up to the edge if not pouring over just a little bit otherwise you're going to have to do a little extra planing it takes about 24 hours for this deep pore epoxy stuff to start to set up okay now once we have all our epoxy in about as much as we think we're going to put in coming through and just kind of stirring it up to sort of get a look that i want again this is the first time we've done this so we're just kind of playing with it at this point but it really started to take some neat shapes on its own we're based out of michigan and i think in the end it looks a lot like our state gemstone the michigan greenstone okay here we're just kind of topping it off making sure that we are right up to the edge we don't want to waste a bunch of epoxy you see it's starting to flow over and kind of a little bit of a low spot stirring it up some more okay on this video kind of time lapse you can if you look closely you can see that it's starting to swirl on its own that's the epoxy just starting to move around some of the metallic flakes settling and raising up so it's really taken on a pretty awesome shape by itself here with the time lapse really couldn't be happier with how it ended up it looks i mean being from michigan i kind of recognize this stone as like the isle royal green stone looks just like it so i was pretty we're pretty happy with how it ended up okay moment of truth taking the form apart and it actually came up quite easy we're pretty happy with how it popped right off the form we didn't use any release agent or anything it's just the house wrap tape now back to the planing table i want to end up with a perfectly flat surface you can see that the river table did indeed shrink just a little bit in the middle as we were shaving the wood off but it wasn't taking the epoxy off we wanted to make sure we had a nice flat surface we flipped it over and repeated the process so on the back side of the table a lot of people tend to skip this step we're going to router out a couple of deep grooves about 7 8 of an inch deep and we're going to put in three quarter inch square tubing we're going to epoxy that into a put into place to make sure guarantee that we don't have any warping in this table between the square tubing on the inside and then the metal legs that we're going to go with on towards the outside of the table we shouldn't have any sort of warping issues and this table should last for a very long time okay last set of router marks get those sanded off here our favorite little sanding tool just saves so much time but you definitely want to be pretty careful when you sand afterwards making sure you get all those swirl marks out from the metal sanding disc seeing a little bit of lip there on the river but that will fill in when we do our final epoxy we're going to coat this thing with stone coat countertop epoxy to make sure we have a beautiful hard food grade safe surface that's going to last a long time okay we used a quarter inch round over router bit on the top on the edges and on the bottom we used an eighth inch round over router bit okay this is our first seal coat we're going to do three seal coats and if you're interested in how to do seal coats check out some of our other videos we go into a little more depth on how to do sealed coats on wood we're going to sand it down and make sure that we get all the pores filled for our final flood coat okay this is our final flood coat pour the epoxy out in the middle using an eighth inch by eighth inch square trowel to trowel the epoxy around the table making sure we got enough product you need about three ounces of epoxy per square foot your final flood coat and i'm just making sure i get it all the way out to the edges before i start to spill it over the edge the eighth inch by eighth inch square notch trowel that really makes sure that you get a nice even layout but if you look closely you can kind of see the lines from the trowel i'm going to show you a step to take those out okay right now i'm just kind of mowing the lawn back and forth spreading out the epoxy making sure every square inch is covered before i centered over the edge okay so we're starting to push the epoxy over because eddie's coming through wiping off the drips all right what i'm doing here is i have a short paint brush high quality paint brush which made sure i got all the loose fibers out of it before we got started and i'm just going to chop out these lines basically we're just going to do a random pattern slapping the epoxy and it's going to knock out those square notch trowel lines and because epoxy is just naturally self-leveling we're not going to worry about any of those little dips and grooves from the from the chopping process they're all going to level right out nicely now when you start to torch it you can see the bubbles popping out and it's also going to help it lay out to a nice glass top finish okay at this point we're looking it all over making sure we didn't have any brush hairs come out any large pieces of dust anything that's visible now is a good time to get it out while the epoxy is still leveling out so i'm using a pick here to get a couple of pieces of dust that fell in it takes the stone coat countertop epoxy about 16 hours to set up so kind of want to make sure that you get it torched you have plenty of working time make sure you get a torch get all the bubbles out i'm going through with the brush on the edges just to ensure there are no drip lines and there's what you end up with if you do your seal coats properly with a final flood coat you get a beautiful glass top finish with no imperfections also really helps that river table epoxy come out in the middle the tropical turquoise is just popping almost seems to glow all right everyone thanks for watching make sure you check us out on facebook or instagram if you're curious what the final product looks like with the black metal legs attached also please hit that subscribe button if you want to see more updates from northern ridge designs

Channel: Woods and Workshop - Northern Ridge Designs

Views: 566,588

Keywords: woodworking, river table, epoxy, how to, wood working, oak, dining table, table, live edge, slab

Id: gML8tHrVO9s

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020