Might Get Some Backlash For This

welcome to Four Eyes Furniture I'm Chris and today we're going to spring a leak lose power and hopefully build a really nice table let's get to it love it or hate it Walnut is the goat so it might surprise you to learn that I've never worked with a walnut slab but a couple weeks back we went on the hunt and eventually stumbled across this beauty on the GL veneer website and even though it was split in half due to a giant crack we decided to give it a shot and take her home and just like I've never worked with the Walnut slab before I've also never worked with a rough sawn slab and honestly it's not really that different other than that rough slabs are quite a bit dirtier so we started off with some brushing and blowing to remove the bulk of the caked on dirt but eventually that wasn't aggressive enough so we switched over to a nylon brush in a drill and as you can tell from these shots we haven't cut the straps on the slab yet at this point which was probably dumb on our part but if you're wondering why that is it's because we wanted to get some potential thumbnail photos that were post cleanup but pre-strap cut which was going to be a very small window but eventually we wisened up and cut the straps and actually that's not even true we were kind of forced into it at this point and that's because we needed to be able to move things around to figure out the layout of the slabs for the dining table and while doing that after a little preliminary brainstorming we pretty quickly realized that we were going to need a layout frame and I don't think that this shot does a good job of visually explaining what we were thinking and talking about here so I'm going to draw it and try to explain it better so we're going for a rectangular table not a Live Edge but we were thinking we might get creative and maybe you know rotate our frame and get this portion of the table from this section of wood then take an off cut and kind of Nest it down here on the other side but with this one it felt like we were doing that just for the sake of doing it and actually prefer the way that it looks like this and with all the cracks and the holes it's already going to look rough enough so no need to gild the lily which by the way if you're not familiar with that phrase gilding the Lily basically it means to unnecessarily try to improve something and I feel like it's a term that needs a modern update so how about no need to put Ranch on the pizza maybe point is lilies don't need gelding Pizza doesn't need ranching and this slab doesn't need extra cutting and if you've got a better Modern update for that phrase leave it in the comments something else new about working with refs Labs is that they're thicker than surface slabs this one for example was about three inches thick which meant that none of our saws had the cut capacity to reach all the way through so I guess lesson learned on this one and actually I was talking to the guy at GL veneer Dan and he was telling me that they have a pretty fancy machine for slab flattening I'll see if I can get him to send me some footage that I can put in right here and either way next time I will definitely take them up on that service and actually I'm going to throw a link to their site in the description so that if anybody's interested they can poke around and browse their inventory see if there's anything they like anyway all of that is to say with this one we had to just cut as deep as we could and then resort to other methods for getting rid of the last eighth inch or so that we couldn't reach with the saw and this doesn't really leave the prettiest Edge but that doesn't matter right now since we're leaving everything oversized now here we ran into a legitimate problem you can see that this slab has a really big bow in it which we thought was fine because it's still way thicker than it's going to need to be in the end but when we took it to get flattened on a wide belt sander after sending it through a few times it was actually too much for the sander to handle and we had to stop so we weren't really sure what we were going to do but thankfully I was in the neighborhood already and I decided to pay Big John a visit and thankfully he was able to throw it on their wood whiz which is kind of like flattening on a CNC except that instead of having like an inch and a half diameter cutting head it has a six inch cutting head and instead of being controlled by a computer in G-Code it's controlled by Big John needless to say he really bailed us out here every now and then we'll get a comment from somebody saying that they're disappointed that we're making a lot of slab projects now and on our last video we got one where the person basically said that they hope that this is just a phase and that will quickly get back to the Woodworking and design that made them such a fan now I'm not complaining it was actually a very respectful back and forth that we had but anyway here's the gist of how I replied to that and I'm interested to hear your opinions so this was on the modern desk video here's what it looked like if you missed that one and I said that I legitimately don't understand that critique and I don't know how you can look at that piece or watch that video and say that there's not enough Woodworking and design there in my mind the only difference between that and the old way we would have done it is that instead of using a slab we'd make a panel top and honestly as the person who's gone through the labor of both of those processes several times now I can tell you that making a slab top involves way more quote-unquote woodworking than making a panel does now I'm about to be very blunt so I hope that you'll appreciate the honesty even though I'm sure we'll get some backlash but the thing that prompted this change in Direction was that for lack of a better way to put it we're not satisfied with where we are and I hope you don't take that the wrong way it doesn't mean that we're not appreciative of the success that we've had but when I read a comment where somebody's telling me that a video was one of the best woodworking videos that they've seen on YouTube I don't think oh awesome we're on the right track I think then why don't our views back that up and I'm not saying that we're the best and we deserve the most views but we don't want to make a video that 50 000 people love we want to make a video that a million people love and that doesn't mean that we need to abandon our style and those first 50 000 people it means that we need to grow and evolve our style to find those other 950 000 people so if you're a long time viewer don't worry all of the Woodworking and design that you've come to expect from us is still going to be there but we're trying to go big and maybe that's an unhealthy Way To Think but it's the truth all right the hardest part of these projects or at least where I feel like we struggle the most isn't figuring out the layout of the slabs it's not building a water type form it's not even getting a good high quality finished result and this might sound really stupid but it's actually figuring out how much epoxy any given pour is gonna need so I mentioned this in the last video but a lot of you recommended that we check out Blacktail Studios epoxy Workshop which we did and in it he's got a chapter where he goes over his method for calculating this which I think strikes the perfect balance between doing some sort of elaborate water displacement experiment and completely not giving up that said we're not doing that and that's because a couple chapters later he mentions the idea of having a backup project basically a useful place that you can dump your extra epoxy and we decided to take that idea to the extreme so we've had this one cooking for a couple months now and you'll probably see in a video either later this year or sometime next year now speaking of the actual epoxy itself we're using a product from Total boat called fathom thick set and in the past whenever we've used it we've had to wait about 48 hours between pores but one of the upsides of it currently being 105 degrees is the hit by the next morning it was cured enough that we could do our second pour so I guess the upside is it's like having a kiln but the downside is if you live in the kiln quick tangent are drills supposed to do this that clanky hears the Chuck loosening when the drill stops and it never caused me a huge issue in the past but this time it did force me to have to go fishing for my epoxy stirrer anyway and as you can see here I definitely fell on the not giving a side of the spectrum with this part and mixed up way too much epoxy but honestly this time it was intentional I figured if I kept doing pores like that last one on our extra epoxy project there's no way that it would be ready by 2023 let alone 2033 also a fly decided to off himself in that last pour and I wanted to be able to give him the proper burial that he deserved taking the slabs out of the form has become the most nerve-wracking but also kind of most exciting part of a build for me and that's because we've had our share of issues in the past but as a veteran of five of these projects now I'm gonna claim that just tape is plenty for getting things to not stick which is ironic and you don't need to take my word for it because as you can see here this one popped off super easy no need for chisels or crowbars or anything like that even Dolores was impressed maybe not but anyway as you can see behind me here that base piece is still in great condition for the next project so very little waste doing it this way actually here's another Pro tip or maybe this one's a PSA dust collection and epoxy dust collection are two very different things as I was making this cut I discovered that so I decided to take the cover of my tracksaw off and sure enough I had a big epoxy noodle clog so I guess the message here is if you can avoid cutting through pure epoxy do that but if you can't just expect clogs either way with the slab nice and dry and cut into an oversized rectangle it was back to the wide belt sander once more and it seemed like all of our troubles were finally behind us until the next morning when I walked into our shop and discovered the roof leaking thankfully by pure Randomness no water got on any of our tools so crisis averted now I know the main reason that people watch these videos is for entertainment purposes followed closely by background noise to fall asleep to but I know that there is a small handful of people watching for information so for those people I want to try to give one blatant woodworking tip in each video and in this one I want to talk about how I cut out large rectangles that I think gives me the best chance for nice square corners and I know this sounds really simple and obvious but here's what I do start by cutting one of your long edges not a short Edge then measure the width you want and mark it on both ends of your top and make your second cut as a parallel line then use a square to set up a cross cut and cut both ends to whatever length you want and I think that the reason that this is better is because it eliminates the compounding of Errors so let's use an extreme example where you would be using a square that's off by one degree instead of 90 degrees it's 89. so a lot of people will cut out a rectangle like this instead and if they did here's what they'd end up with versus what they'd get by cutting it the way that I did again this is an extreme example and it's an oversimplified explanation but it's something to think about and no I did not learn that one from the Blacktail epoxy course so cam if you want to throw that gem into version too she's all yours though honestly what he should add is a chapter where he teaches people how to flip slabs the right way because clearly I was having some trouble with that which is kind of off-brand for me because I do consider myself sort of a man's man just kidding but actually that does kind of bring up an interesting topic Stay With Me so while I don't consider myself a man's man by any means Sean neither I'm sure he won't be offended by that I do think that most of the furniture we build or at least where we naturally gravitate when designing is a bit more on the quote-unquote masculine side and what I mean by that is basically modern minimalist angular pieces so I guess my first question is why is modern furniture considered masculine with this one and I know you haven't seen the full design yet but even just seeing what we're doing here which is making these large radiuses in the corners we're going for a very different much more rounded and soft look and I don't think it's necessarily a feminine aesthetic either if anything I would say it's probably neutral but anyway yeah it's kind of weird to think of furniture as masculine and feminine and by the way when I say that I don't mean it in a stereotypical way like when I say masculine Furniture I don't mean a baseball glove seat and a moose head and by feminine Furniture I don't mean a pink makeup vanity with a fluffy stool I mean in a more nuanced way like for example for whatever reason modern minimalist Furniture seen as masculine and something like Farmhouse Country Furniture is seen as feminine and I think both are great Styles and totally acceptable for anybody to like and honestly if you build stuff that falls anywhere in this range like 95 of people are going to be your potential customer and while I don't think we're going to be making the full-on leap to the Joanna Gaines aesthetic anytime soon or ever I guess with this one maybe we're just trying to slide a couple tick marks to the right anyway I'm getting way off topic here so to bring it back in these shots I'm just cutting in grooves for some c channel and sometimes we'll get questions about this mainly people asking if it's for strength and the short answer is no the table is going to be plenty strong without it and the actual purpose is future proofing the slab against any potential cupping bending or twisting that kind of stuff and we're just going to cut the grooves at this point but we won't actually install these until later for now we just want to make sure that they fit nice all right here we're going to try something new for us and that is doing a brass inlay detail along the bottom perimeter of the table so here Sean has a 6x6 plate of brass and he's using the CNC to cut out four of these little J shapes and we're making these perfectly match the radiuses that we cut onto the corners a couple minutes ago then he's also going to take some brass strips and we'll attach those to the Little J's to make big JS and to attach them he's going to do some soldering now I've literally never soldered a single thing in my entire life and I think Sean has only ever soldered for function as in like Electronics but not for Aesthetics like he is here so I'm sure those of you who know how to solder and are watching this are probably wishing you could reach through the screen right now and grab the torch from Sean and say let me show you how to do that but unfortunately technology isn't there yet and for those of you who actually do want to learn how to solder fortunately you're on YouTube right now so easy now you also might be asking yourself why are the J's so long in One Direction and so short on the other and as you're gonna see the brass doesn't go all the way around the entire perimeter but kind of like this instead and the reason for that is that wood expands and contracts this way across the width so if we did try to do a full perimeter during the year the top is going to change but the brass isn't and something's got to give and the brass is going to break apart but doing it the way Sean is doing it here we've basically got four independent pieces that can freely move with the table regardless of where in the world the table is or what season it is okay I've got a confession that power outage that we had a couple minutes back was fake and I'll explain why we did that in a minute though I'm sure you'll put it all together before I even have to but in any case let's take a minute to thank this video's sponsor ecoflow for sending us out their new Delta 2 to try out so you might think that the Delta II is just a battery but it's actually a lot more than that I guess the best way to describe it is a portable lightweight power station that you can take anywhere to power pretty much anything and while it is small and light it's 1800 watt output lets you power all of your family's devices simultaneously and even keep your largest most essential appliances running during a blackout with no fear of overloading thanks to ecoflow's X boost technology on top of that it's the fastest charging power station on the market it can go from zero to eighty percent in just 50 minutes and up to 100 in 80 minutes or if you're out camping or on the job site with limited power you can even charge it using the optional portable solar panels and get up to 500 watts to charge in as little as three hours and you can manage and control everything right from from your phone using the ecoflow app so the reason that we cut power earlier is because we wanted to see what it would be like to actually have to rely on this thing so we used it to cut our radiuses cut our c-channel grooves our notches for the brass plus power some lights and all told it was over a solid day of Woodworking and even after that it was still at 49 capacity so honestly I didn't think I was in the market for something like this but after having it for a couple weeks now it's awesome I think I'm going to get way more use out of it than I would have imagined and it's great to have around in the event of a power outage and if you're into camping or something like that I think it's a no-brainer so check out their lineup I've got a link in the description where you can find out more and thank you again to ecoflow okay let's get back to the build now a couple minutes ago when we cut our radiuses you might have noticed that it exposed a bunch of tiny cracks you can see those in this shot right here so we needed to take care of those before we could move on and once that was dry Sean could install the brass for Real by spreading some epoxy and screwing everything in and then do some rough sanding to knock back any epoxy and clean up any discrepancies all right let's turn our attention to the base for a couple minutes so like I mentioned with this one we decided to go for a very rounded and much more simplistic look though as you're gonna see while we work our way through actually building the base a lot of the details and the fit and finish are actually really tricky so I'm going to point out any of the obstacles and what our Solutions were as we come across each one so the legs are going to be a cylinder that tapers from a four inch diameter at the top to a two inch diameter at the bottom so the first thing that we needed to do was create four leg blanks that are just slightly thicker and wider than four inches and about 30 inches long at this point and we don't have access to any chunks of Walnut that thick so that meant gluing two pieces together to make each blank from there we can mark the center of each leg blank and draw a circle on the ends so that we can see the biggest part of our leg and then we can use that Mark as a guide to remove the corners of each leg blank so that when we go to turn these on the lathe we're not removing quite as much material so I know that the legs look really plain and simple but once you get to this point you're basically just sculpting as opposed to setting up cuts on a saw where you can be super accurate and precise so for me this is a lot harder but I guess that depends on a person's particular skill set anyway the workflow for these was to start by roughing things out to take a piece from an octagon to a cylinder and then we made ourselves a couple of guides that we could use to dial in the largest and smallest parts of the leg the top and the bottom and then you just try your best to connect the two with a straight of a taper as you can so once you've done that with one of them finished the next challenge is to try to make three more that are as close to matching as possible and there are definitely slight differences between any two of our legs but it's one of those things where yeah it would be great if they were all perfectly matching but at the end of the day all that really matters is that they pass the eye test and they definitely do the next obstacle was figuring out how we were going to cut joints in the legs so looking at the base design again you can see it's very simple and if you were to look at one of these aprons from the end they're going to look like this where you've got a curved bottom so that means that we need to cut a mortise with a round bottom to perfectly match the apron and there are a lot of ways that we could have done this but we decided to try cutting it on our CNC so we made this jig that'll help us hold everything tightly and in the right orientation while we clear out the cut so once we would clear out one then we needed to rotate the piece as close to 90 degrees as possible to cut the second joint and we couldn't really think of anything much more elaborate than eyeballing it with a square but again we got everything close enough to get the job done in this shot you can see that we have these two little shims here and here and the reason for that is again no two legs are exactly the same so we needed to set up each one so that we made sure we were cutting at the proper angle which if you look at it from this view you want that face that we're looking at to be perpendicular to the bed of the CNC so that we're drilling straight down into it now I know that we could have come up with non-cnc ways to get this done but honestly this felt like the way that was going to give us the best result and also even using the CNC this was by no means easy but whenever you put a CNC in a video it seems like you run the risk of getting comments from people telling you that you're not a real woodworker so if seeing this makes you lose respect for us and you think we're just a couple of hacks that's fine all right so even though we've cut the recesses where our aprons will go we still have to actually make the aprons and again this was just a matter of Milling up a bunch of oversized Walnut strips and in this case we're going to need six total two long ones that'll run the length of the table two short ones that'll run the Whip and two even slightly shorter ones that'll go at the center for extra support and to make it so that we're not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole we used the router table with a half inch round over bit to make the apron's u-shaped along the bottom like you saw in that drawing a couple minutes ago and actually speaking of those drawings do you find them helpful enjoyable distracting or some other adjective honestly tell me I personally kind of have fun making them but I can see where having too many could kind of pull you out of the action but at the same time I think that they can do a lot of explaining that's kind of hard to see and just shots of us cutting stuff so let me know all right with everything cut to final size before we could glue everything together we needed to take care of a couple knot holes and cut the legs to their final length I guess kind of sand them to their final length and we knew that this glue up was going to be pretty messy so we decided to bust out the Rockler project mats and for this particular glue up we did it in three phases first we glued together two pairs of legs with the short aprons foreign next we glued the two long aprons into a kind of ladder shape with the two stretchers and then we could put the whole thing together being a YouTuber has a lot of perks and I know I was kind of complaining earlier in the video but I genuinely do love it and I'm extremely grateful to get to do this so one of the perks is that from time to time brands or people will send us stuff which is awesome but I do think that sometimes viewers will think that we get everything for free which is definitely not the case take the c channel that I'm installing here for example bought and paid for it just the same as anybody else would funny story actually a week later when we got it and opened it up it had a postcard and a really nice note inside which we really appreciate and totally don't deserve and I don't know what the guy who sent its intentions were or if we thought we were going to give them a shout out in the video or something but I hate to break it to you Shane we're not doing it So for anybody else that tries to get a bright idea and thinks we can be bought with their nice gestures or especially their money forget about it it's not happening all right at this point in the project we're definitely on the home stretch which is why the next step is such a gut check moment now we knew we definitely wanted to put a large round over on the top side of the table the problem was we weren't sure how large so we decided to play it cool and start with a half inch round over so Sean worked his way around the top in a couple passes to get to full depth and after seeing it we both agreed that it looked really great and we were happy with it but we couldn't help but wondering could a three-quarter inch round over be better I mean that is pretty big but we are going for a rounded look so what do we do we went for it at the end of the day while it would certainly suck quite badly to end up doing it and regretting it because there is no going back I think it would suck even more to not go far enough and wonder what could have been like at the end of your life you're not gonna sit there and regret the one time that you decided to have an ice cream sundae after dinner you're gonna think damn I should have had a Sunday after every meal of course if you did that you'd be like 37 on that death bed but you get what I'm saying and as luck would have it we actually like the three-quarter inch round over even more so cherry on top all right here you can see that we've got a little problem I'd say maybe an eighth of an inch problem or so and I would like to say that there was an elegant solution but there wasn't but with the top nice and flat we could finally put the top on the base or I guess in this case it's the base on the top to figure out exactly where it was going to be placed and then to actually attach everything we're going to use what are called table buttons and you can see here what they look like basically it's a block with a little tab extending off of it and a hole for a screw and to make them Sean took an off cut of Walnut and cross cut a few strips then he could cut a rabbet to create the tab extension and then drilled and countersunk a few holes and then finally cut them into individual buttons and probably the main thing that you need to think about if you're doing something like this is that you want to make sure the grain is running lengthwise along the button and not across it like you can see here otherwise the tab is just going to get really weak and it might snap when you go to screw them in anyway while Sean was doing that I had grabbed to the base and I used a domino to cut in a few mortises and here I'm cutting the slots for the buttons that go along the long aprons to pretty much fit the button but for the short aprons I'm elongating them and that's so that after the top is attached it can expand and contract freely without breaking anything apart of all the technical questions that we get in our comments Far and Away the most frequent questions have to do with finishing and I think it's because people kind of hate finishing and I get it I'm right there with you I hate finishing too and anyway I think that people are hoping that there's some kind of magic product out there that gives you perfect results and is insanely easy to apply and the reality is there isn't that's why finishing sucks so the most common of those questions is what are you using when it should probably be what's your process so I will tell you this one is Rubio Monaco but I think it's actually kind of a disservice to answer like that because it makes it seem like it's a magic product I think there's a saying that painters use something like it's 90 prep work 10 painting so I think what I'll eventually do is just break down and make a here's how I finish video that way I can just refer back to that video whenever people want to know but because I know that people do like seeing this part I'm just going to take this moment to say thank you for watching this video whether this is your first time second time or 19th time we appreciate it and we thank you for it and if you want to send that thanks back hit the Subscribe button notification Bell or like button or make it a hat trick and hit all three and also thank you to my new and returning patreon members I know you say it in every video but seriously thank you so much for all of the support that you've given me and if anybody wants to find out more grab a field notes booklet and a four eyes t-shirt and even get discounts on our woodworking plans I'll throw a link in the description so you can check it out see if it's right for you and as always no pressure I started off this video by saying that Walnut is the go the greatest of all time and that wasn't my personal opinion but rather the general opinion within the woodworking community at least from what I've observed over the past 10 years basically if you pull a thousand Woodworkers and ask them their favorite species of wood you're going to get a lot of different answers but I feel pretty confident that the most common answer is gonna be Walnut as slabs go it's dark it's highly figured and at least in my limited experience it's easier to work with than other Woods so does it deserve the title in my opinion no and I think the three key words in that last sentence are in my opinion goat debates are dumb because they try to take an opinion and present it as fact and sure with sports you can try to back it up with stats to prove that Jordan was better than LeBron or vice versa but at the end of the day you can't just count rings and make a claim and if you could here's your greatest wood and basketball player of all time thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 1,460,810

Keywords: black walnut table, diy epoxy, diy epoxy table, ecopoxy, epoxy art, epoxy river table, epoxy table, how to make epoxy table, how to make river table, liquid glass epoxy, resin table, river table, slab furniture, total boat epoxy, live edge table, live edge slab table, dining table, river dining table, slab dining table, epoxy dining table, modern dining table, expensive wood, bookmatched wood, river table epoxy, foureyes furniture, blacktail studio, Walnut Slab

Id: ghWhFRk16S8

Length: 31min 57sec (1917 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2022