I Turned Down $7,000 For This

at this point I'm basically a used car salesman let me explain so about six months ago a couple reached out and they were looking for a circular extendable dining table so a table that goes from this to this and I don't know if this makes me a good or a bad custom furniture maker but I basically got Right to Work planting seeds so that I could talk them out of their idea and into mine and it worked so basically they put their trust in me which means now the pressure's on because if you give a client a disappointing version of their idea that's one thing but if you give a client a disappointing version of your idea that's bad so I have to deliver with this one okay let's back things up so this is another claro Walnut slab which is the same kind that I used on these two projects I would say arguably the prettiest slabs out there but when we went on the hunt at GL veneer this one was a little harder to find the clients Brian and Haley are looking for something about 60 inches wide the problem is most slabs in their budget aren't 60 inches wide and most slabs 60 inches wide aren't in their budget until I found this guy and I'll admit that in the rough this one looked a little bit more boring but we took a gamble on it so actually seeing what the wood was going to look like took a while and that's because the rough slab is pretty wavy in fact here's three hours of flattening played back in 10 seconds and if watching and hearing that sounds boring imagine living it but the good news was the wood looked amazing basically identical to the other claro Walnut slabs now at the top of the video I mentioned how I talked them into a different table than what they wanted when they first emailed me and it might sound like that was kind of a selfish thing to do but I was really doing it because I thought it would be something that's better for their space and also a little bit less expensive so when Braley reached out initially they wanted a 55-inch Circle that could extend to about 86 inches but there's three problems with extending tables first they're more expensive second they limit design options and third if the top is a slab there's always going to be concessions it's either going to look cool when open and Goofy when closed or goofy when open but cool when closed so we landed on doing a 60 inch circle instead and then we needed to pick a layout and my first idea here was something like this where there's three exposed live edges I thought this would have looked really cool but having kids they weren't that into it and they said they preferred more wood and less epoxy so just filling in the live edges with epoxy wasn't an option either so if it's more wood and less epoxy that Braley wants then it's more wooden less epoxy that Braley gets I guess what Braley doesn't get in the epoxy's case anyway to do that I'm going to draw a new Circle and then cut that part free getting pretty close but not too close to my chalk line and you can see here I've got a pretty small epoxy section left but for Braley I can do better basically I've got this wood boob that's keeping things from really closing up so we'll do a quick little reduction there we go back's feeling better already now speaking of reductions going from a table that's a 55-inch Circle when closed and an 86 by 55 inch pill shape at its biggest to a table that's a 60 inch circle at all times might sound like a pretty big reduction but it's really not first I know five inches might not sound like much but going from a 55 inch circle to a 60 inch circle is actually a pretty big difference when you think about the area of the top in square inches now I won't bore you with the math but here's the equation if you want to bore yourself that said assuming you don't want to do the math and you also don't want to take my word for it Here's a thought experiment imagine your ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend who is five inches bigger than you now five extra inches sounds like a lot seven whole inches anyway the important thing is whether it's the 86 by 55 inch pill table or the 60 inch round table eight people is pretty much the max you can fit either way also side note I don't know if these graphical things that I add in help you to understand what's going on better so if they do let me know by clicking the like button on this video and that will let me know that they're helping and if they're not then click the Subscribe button and that's that's how I'll judge that so I'm sub now we got a problem that we need to fix basically I need to start turning this thing into an actual Circle but to do that I need the two chunks to get connected so what I'm about to do is make a couple of what I call Band-Aids to stabilize things before I pour epoxy and the last time that I did this I got several comments from people saying that I should have used bow ties to do it and to those people I say you're wrong well maybe not wrong but you're telling me to do extra work for no benefit no matter what shape I make these Band-Aid bow tie Pac-Mans whatever these are a temporary solution their only purpose is to hold things in a fixed position until we pour epoxy and after we've done that they'll serve no purpose they'll have become redundant and they won't be visible except for on the underside and even if Braley or whoever is planning to lay on the ground underneath the table every night to look at the underside for some odd reason a bow tie looking better than a Band-Aid is subjective I mean if you're going to winter formal sure a bow tie is objectively better but if you're a background dancer in a Nelly video then a Band-Aid is better and actually now that I think about it a Pac-Man and ghosts on the underside would have been pretty boss live and learn all right now a second ago you saw me squaring up some Corners with a chisel but after doing one I decided to abandon that and instead cut a little round Edge onto my Band-Aids which I got all set up and then forgot to film but basically I used this little Craig jig which comes with a bunch of templates for various radiuses and then after doing that I put a small chamfer on the underside so that my glue has somewhere to escape to and then I glued and banged my Band-Aids into place and here you can see the difference between chiseling and rounding over the Band-Aid I think they're equally fine and you won't see them anyway if you're a regular viewer then you know that for the past few months I've been working on designing a mechanical pencil and countless designs and five physical prototypes later it's finally ready so it's available now for pre-sell I'll have a link in the description and if you're interested you can go there and see some pictures and learn more about it here's a quick little preview for anybody who's only mildly curious I guess but needless to say I'm really proud of it and that's it no more updates for now in woodworking it's pretty rare that there's ever going to be only one way to get something done but of all the ways somebody might cut out a circle I would guess that the way that I'm doing it here isn't the most popular the most popular is going to be using a circle cutting jig and a router something like this but rather than using one to cut out my slab I like to use one to cut out the base of my form and then use that to template route my circle and the reason that I prefer this is I think that there's just less that can go wrong if you're using a jig and something slips you could accidentally cut inside or outside of whatever shape you're trying to make and in this case if you accidentally cut inside that's not good and while it would suck to mess up and cut on the inside when you're making the form it's pretty fixable or even replaceable but if you do it on your slab that's a bigger problem and once you get to the stage where your template routing if something goes wrong it's pretty much always going to happen to the outside of your circle I mean I guess you could have something go wrong to the inside but you'd have to really be trying to mess up all that said no matter how you do it at some point it's really just a lot of routing and a lot of sawdust but look at that finally made it through just kidding I actually had to do one more pass where I cut a chamfer on the underset of the circle and this is kind of similar to what we did with the Band-Aids basically I need a little relief spot for the caulking in my form to go otherwise it's going to hold the entire slab up off of the form by about a quarter of an inch which would waste a lot of epoxy and again I'm not going to bore you with the math but it's about three gallons and here's the math if you want to bore yourself Oregon you can just take my word for it actually that just made me think of something kind of interesting or maybe depressing depending on how you think about it but cutting that champ for a couple seconds ago will probably be the closest that I ever get in my entire life to being rich if you think about it like this so it only took me about three minutes to cut that chamfer which means that I could have done that 20 times in one hour and doing it saved three gallons of epoxy which means that in an hour I could save 60 gallons of epoxy well a three gallon kit of epoxy costs about 400 bucks which means technically I was making eight thousand dollars an hour for that brief moment and that equates to a full-time salary of over 16 million dollars per year now the bad news is I don't think anybody's hiring a full-time caulk relief cutter but the good news is now this entire slab is only going to use about a half of a gallon of epoxy rather than three and a half gallons so yeah I might not get rich anytime soon but hopefully I shouldn't go broke either and speaking of the epoxy here I'm using the same technique that I always do where I start with a thin layer of the slow hardener which will cure in a few hours that way I can make sure I don't have a leak and then the next day I use the thick set fathom which will cure in a few days and here comes my complimentary warning to anybody with Trypophobia which is a fear of clusters of small holes and yes it's a real thing the comment section has let me know many times and for everybody else here's some satisfying bubble popping and I guess a test to see if you have trypophobia now speaking of satisfying stuff the last time I built a circle table this was easily the most satisfying part of the build for me which is very cleanly and easily peeling off the plastic garden engine actually it came off so clean last time that the material that I'm using in this video is actually that same material this time though not so much that was until I found a sweet spot and then it was satisfaction City until it wasn't then it was then it wasn't then I hurt my hand and whatever it is what it is but it did have me feeling less than optimistic about the next step which is removing the base of my form and if you saw that last Circle table you'll know that it did not go well but this time thankfully unlike the garden edging satisfaction City all right so at this point my circle is still oversized by about an inch and I decided that rather than using a circle cutting jig to make it smaller I'd try cutting it with my CNC which trust me I managed to screw up a lot and here I don't really have much room for error so to make sure that I nail this I need to find the dead center of the circle so here's a little trick that you can use if you ever have to do something similar first draw any random line across your circle then find the center of that line and Mark it and then from that Mark and draw a perpendicular line that goes towards the center of the circle now if you just repeat the same thing once more wherever those two lines intersect is the center of your circle that's a theory at least and in real life you're probably not going to have perfect intersections I didn't but I just took the average of three and called that good and now it's gut check time so I fired her up and let her up and it worked out really well have ever introduced you guys to my wife Dolores here she is and we'll come back to her but for now let's take a minute to thank this video's sponsor foreo who's a Swedish beauty Tech brand and you're probably thinking why the hell would a Swedish beauty Tech brand want to sponsor one of Chris's videos I asked myself the same thing and then it hit me they probably know that I am a terrible Gift Giver true story when Dolores and I were dating I bought her car tires as a gift practical sure but not exactly heartwarming so if you're a terrible Gift Giver like me pay attention here I know Mother's Day Has Come and gone but there's always birthdays holidays or that time you accidentally got a little too chatty with Becky from accounting and foreo has our backs with Innovative products like the UFO 2 which can turn a 20 minute face mask routine into a two minute routine providing an instantly nourished and healthy glow from the very first use Dolores even told me it was the most satisfying two minutes I've ever given her now this thing literally has too many features and benefits to list them all but to put it simply and in my own words it's designed with Cutting Edge Technologies so that it can shrink pores reduce puffiness diminish signs of aging massage and relax face and neck muscles and best of all it's an awesome gift that you can give her and it prevents you from doing something dumb like buying your tires for Hanukkah also never discount that whole shrinking pores thing take it from me women hate large pores actually don't take any woman advice from me that's a bad idea but this is a good gift idea so when it's time to give a gift check it out and right now you can get a 21 discount on the ufo2 and masks using the link in the description trust me now and thank me later all right so at this point the slab is really starting to take shape and if you're wondering what these fine dust spots are this is the one bad thing that I found about Clara Walnut slabs they have these bug holes in the sapwood areas and they're kind of a pain to deal with and that's because every time you cut you seem to find a new hole to fill but I suppose you could argue that they give the slabs more character and actually make them prettier I will say though for as beautiful as this slab turned out which you'll see in a little bit this is one of those rare instances where in my opinion the base design is actually going to be the star of the show and I'm excited to show this one so let's talk about that for a minute so when it came to the base design Braley didn't really have anything specific in mind which is honestly the way that I like it ultimate it always ends up being way more work but it's also a lot more fun and a chance to get really creative so to kick things off I came up with three very different designs just so that I could get a better sense of their style and from doing that option b was out in other words they want some kind of central pedestal table and not legs on the perimeter so from there I figured I'd give them a couple of riffs on each option here's the alternative versions I came up with for option C and here are the Alternatives I came up with for option A and I'll be honest I'm not sure how many designs in we are at this point but even still I'm not looking for them to pick one of these I still consider all of these unrefined ideas and really I'm looking for a definitive direction that they're leaning anyway after all of that they were pretty definitively leaning towards the option A options in particular this one so option A version a and now I'm considering that the rough design that I can work off of so after a few more days of Designing and refining I presented them with four more options that I would consider a baseline for building and this is the one that they picked so that's option A version a B I guess subtle kind of because as it turns out I had one more idea that I came up with in the background and because I'm a glutton for punishment I decided I'd show it to him so I'm calling this spindly versus chunky and when I showed them they were completely torn they liked both and said they'd be happy with either so I did what any hard-headed I know the right way Furniture designer would do and I took it to a community pool so you guys picked and this is what we're building now I really think that this design is going to end up looking awesome but building it was really repetitive because basically I'm just making the same shapes over and over so kind of a the whole is greater than the sum of its parts outcome hopefully probably the most extreme example of this that I can think of is the spiral staircase that my buddy benue Ada built in his Loft it's pretty much just a single shape repeated over and over hundreds of times but it's pretty impressive and I would say that the most similar thing that I've ever personally done was the cantilever coffee table and building that one it was this same workflow of tracing out your shape cutting outside of the line on the bandsaw and then using a router with a template bit to cut out the shape so that's exactly what I did on this one six times now the one thing that I kept going back and forth on for this table was whether it should have six or eight legs and after making six this way I was pretty sick of this workflow so I decided I would let fate decide so for the two remaining legs I tried doing most of the cutting on the CNC and here I have basically zero margin for error so I was honestly 50 50 on it if this was even gonna work and I don't want to jinx myself but I feel like I'm finally getting decent with this thing and that might sound like a weird thing to be happy about but at least for me the CNC is by far the most stress-inducing machine in my shop people always think you just push a button and walk away but really what you do is a bunch of work to prepare your piece and then a bunch of work to prepare the cut and then when you finally do hit start you pray that you did everything right because if you didn't it all goes really wrong really fast now I don't want it to sound like I'm blaming cnc's I'm blaming the operator so me that said one thing that cncs aren't good at no matter how good the operator is is cutting joint faces so on these pieces that would be here and here which is why I left everything long on the CNC and that brings me to my first of two candidates for MVP of this project or I guess mvt and the first candidate is the Craig ACS and that's because I had to make 32 crucial cuts and this turned what would have been a headache into a pretty easy 30 minute job and I'll talk about my other candidate in a minute okay so at this point I've got eight legs but I need a way to attach everything together so my idea here was to build these two sort of Hub pieces and this sounds like it would be pretty simple but unfortunately it's not as straightforward as you would think or hope it might be or at least that I hoped it would be and that's because there's two problems the first is that they need to be two inches thick and I don't have any wood that's that thick so I'm gonna have to glue chunks together to build up a thicker piece and the other problem is grain Direction which is why what you're watching me do here might look needlessly complex but is actually needfully complex basically if I just cut out a chunk of wood for the Hub the grain would go like this which would a look funny but also Roman numeral two become really fragile here so my solution was to create a bunch of 4x4 blocks where the grain is running at a 45 degree angle then I can glue them up into chunks where all of the grain comes outwards from the center of the Hub which honestly also might end up looking kind of funny but at least it should be stronger and also Pro tip here's why you should invest in a couple of these Rockler silicone project mats a lot of glue and while that glue's drying I'm gonna go ahead and make myself another template for that Hub shape and here to make it I'm using three quarter inch plywood where I would normally use quarter inch MDF and that's because I ran out of quarter inch MDF and was too lazy to go to the store but I get asked a lot why I make templates instead of shaping the actual work piece and the answer is because it's a lot easier to shape something that's thinner and softer like normally quarter inch MDF and also because you want to make multiple identical pieces so it's way easier to just shape something one time rather than every single work piece honestly a lot of times making templates for a project is the hardest part of the project and that's why in all of our project courses that use templates like the Glenn chair the Pico console and a few others for anybody that wants to skip that step if they're willing to pay a little more we'll actually cut them out and ship them to you as I said I've got a few candidates for mvt on this project and the next one is probably the most polarizing tool in my shop and no it's not this spindle sander any guesses CNC maybe good guess but no cnc's do get a lot of love and hate but the most polarizing tool in the workshop has got to be the Domino some love it some hate it personally I love mine but for those of you who aren't fans I get it and I know that a lot of people who watch these videos aren't super into Woodworking and you might not even know what a domino is so for you it probably might seem really strange that a tool can be polarizing but to kind of oversimplify it basically it's an expensive tool that kind of only does one thing but it's really good at doing that one thing and the thing that it does is something that was traditionally uh kind of complex woodworking technique so basically people argue about value and lack of craftsmanship and honestly there's bigger problems in the world but all of that said the reason it has to be an mvt on this project is because I counted how many of them I used on the base and the final tally was one metric butt load actually I guess the Domino kind of does two things whenever you're assembling it's kind of like having an extra set of hands also having Dolores around is kind of like having an extra set of hands which is why I'm making her my third mvt for this project good job Dwarfs anyway after she helped me get the first four legs on the bass wasn't at risk of falling over anymore so I could handle the rest on my own which is why after careful consideration I'm giving myself the fourth mvt for this project good job okay let's talk about everybody's favorite topic money people always want to know what a table like this would cost so I'm gonna break it down so this particular slab cost thirty three hundred dollars and honestly when I first found out that we needed something 60 inches wide I thought it was going to be more and by the way if anybody's interested in using the sister slab I'll put a link to it below or actually better yet if you want me to build you something custom using it find me and we can talk anyway then the Walnut base was another 1092 dollars so at this point we're at 4 392 dollars of wood also they're not a sponsor but lately I've been buying wood online from a place called woodworker source which I really like and I recommend that is unless you particularly like being called hun by a 65 year old lady behind a pay counter at a lumber yard I do kind of miss that all right other costs so there's also epoxy and this table didn't use a ton but I'd say it was still around 80 bucks then there's a lot of consumables so Hardware finish all that stuff let's call that another 100 bucks for a grand total of four thousand five hundred and seventy two dollars so that's how much a table like this would cost if tools were free which obviously they're not so to hire somebody like me to build a table like this I would say I have about 60 000 in fixed costs plus I have another 4 500 in monthly overhead so all of that is to say that my labor on a piece like this is gonna be about six thousand bucks which means if you want a table like this expect about 10 500 out the door now earlier in the video I briefly mentioned how the pivot that we made from the extendable version to this version saved really about seven thousand dollars and that's mostly slab and labor costs if we had done that one the slab and wood for the base would pretty much double plus you'd need more Hardware more epoxy and quite a bit more engineering work and labor on my end and all said and done there I would guess that you're going to end up around 17 to 18 000. so bottom line is custom furniture is expensive but you do get to use it for like 20 years which means you can have about 22 000 meals off of it which means that it really only costs you about 47 cents per meal which as it turns out is the exact same price as a single Chicken McNugget so on second thought custom furniture is pretty cheap what you're about to see me do here is my standard finishing practice which always starts with two coats of Rubio monocoat and without Fel every time I do this I get questions about why I would put on two coats of a product that's called Mono coat so here's the thing I'm sure you'd be fine with just one coat in fact I would bet that if I took this thing home and started using it it would be fine with zero coats of finish just sitting in a house nothing really that bad is going to happen probably that said obviously one coat of monocode is better than zero and in my opinion two coats is better than one it definitely looks and feels nicer after the second coat so to me Monaco is a name and I guess maybe a very light suggestion but by no means a decree so when the clients reached out they wanted a circle table that could extend into a pill-shaped table and I promptly talked them out of that idea and into this circle table instead and cost myself a few thousand bucks a potential profit along the way now had they really wanted that pill-shaped extending table I'm sure they would have said no we really want a pill shaped extending table and either I would have built them one or I would have passed on the project and somebody else could have built them one but they didn't say that so based on that plus how open they were this whole time about letting me play around with the designs I have to believe that the main thing that they wanted was for me to build them a table and they were just going to trust me to come up with something good so I guess that begs the ultimate question did I come up with something good if you guys have seen any of my past videos you'll know that I'm pretty critical on myself but I have to admit that I really love this one not only am I proud of the design but I actually think that I executed pretty well on the design honestly I would say that I think this is one of the best pieces that I've built yet but at the end of the day really there's only one opinion that truly matters so Braley what do you think uh I thought we were doing the extending pillow shape table thanks for watching and I'll see in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 866,756

Keywords: 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, walnut table, round table

Id: X8Ly-BgyHPs

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023