Red Oak Countertop for My Parents' Laundry Room

so a couple of weeks ago my dad asked if I could put together a countertop for my parents laundry room he has some old cabinets down there used to be uppers from the kitchen before and now he has them down there's just lower cabinets for storage and he wants a little bit of a countertop to put on top of there now he said just to use whatever I had because just a laundry room was in the basement doesn't really matter well this is what I have a piece of red oak yes 13 feet long and through here it's about 18 inches wide I cut this with my chain saw mill two years ago I have a video about that if you haven't seen that already but a couple weeks ago of my dad was in town also we went through the stack of slabs weari stacked them and we pulled out this one which was the first cut off that log I'm actually looking forward to using this because I haven't used red oak in a really long time and I'm kind of excited to see what this stuff looks like compared to my prior experience and I was just a beginner I went over some of the area on the slab with a plane just to kind of clean up the surface to get an idea of what the grain looks like and this is actually a really nice it almost has a orange tone to it so I think this is going to be a nice piece of wood I've also got some interesting defects I have to deal with here I have this really big hole which has some really cool almost cork like structure inside of there so I think for this project I'm mostly gonna try doing some casting I'll cast is an epoxy a clear epoxy so you can actually see down in there and I think that's gonna look pretty cool so slab was air dried outside and this current moisture content is around eleven and a half percent which is a little bit high for the indoor work what I'm gonna do today is I should have rough cut this thing down the size make it more manageable because this thing is extremely heavy extremely long stormy awkward to move around getting it in here was very interesting so I'll get it cut down the rough sides I can bring it inside to allow the moisture content to drop further maybe to 59 percent or so would be just fine for this and then I can work on the rest of the project my dad isn't looking for a live edge countertops listing is gonna get edged and this thing is awful ten quarter right now which is probably significantly thicker than he needs so feel at the milling process this is probably gonna come down to somewhere around inch and a half to two inches somewhere in there all right so this thing is all prepped and ready to go I'm gonna move this inside so I can dry out for a few weeks and this should be a lot easier now that it's a lot more manageable so I'll see you in a few weeks so this is one of those projects that you set aside for a couple of months and those couple of months turn into over a year so here we are back at this project finally once again this is been sitting aside for over a year now and this thing has come down to indoor equilibrium it's around 8% so it's good to go and it's been good to go for quite a long time and I'm finally getting back to it so one of the probably the most challenging parts about getting this thing all finished up from this point is going to be this void here I do want to cast this in resin and I want it to be clear and an issue here is that this is very weak so taking a closer look here we have this guy kind of floating out here it's already kind of Wiggly and loose there's not a whole lot hole not in there and if the planter knives hit that I'll just get torn out and just destroyed so we need to get some resin in here to strengthen and stabilize the locker thing in place before getting this thing totally milled up so wait to come up with a containment strategy to contain the resin in here wall lickers so we don't end up with a puddle of resin on the floor I think the easiest thing for this one is going to be to fill from the top so that means I need to take a look at the bottom and see how that kind of looks so pretty similar thing on the bottom also kind of loose and fragile one of the things I was thinking of doing was just surfacing the bottom of the slab getting the nice and flat and cleaned and then using tape up against that to kind of hold everything in place the bottom will be surfaced already and ready to go and then once the resin cures the top when he's playing to final thickness and it's good to go but I don't think I'd be able to joint this with others breaking all this apart so I think what I'm gonna have to do to contain this is clean up the area around the big not in this big hole with a sander is to get rid of stone the rough Sun mill marks I clean up the surface a little bit the letter K but I'm gonna use has a better chance of adhering and not leaking sometime I'm mixing up their resin and at this point I'm only gonna mix up enough resin to put a small kind of thin layer down to the bottom of that hole maybe even an eighth of an inch thick or so that's a pretty big void and I don't have a whole lots of pore in the bottom of that hole besides that tape the less resin that goes down in there the less pressure there is up against that tape there's less chance of the resin leaking past the tape which is something you don't want right now that thin layer will cure up and then they'll provide a full seal against the bottom of that hole and then I can pour whatever thickness I need you to fill the entire thing after that and at that point I want to worry about anything leaking because that first cup of epoxy is going to provide a perfect seal on the very bottom of this void since I have a vacuum chamber I'm going to use it to remove all of the air bubbles from the resin before I pour it that just helps put less bubbles down into the system there's going to be some bubbles created just because of trapped air in the void itself but because there's no air being introduced just from the resin itself kind of helps things along and you have less bubbles overall the vacuum chamber is certainly not required for this but it does make the results more consistent and makes things a lot easier and I will have less bubbles to worry about just in general so taking a look underneath looks like had just a little bit of leaking here not a whole lot it looks like there was a leak in one of those seams here right here on the tape but other than that it looks like the epoxy fully filled the bottom area here so that provides us with a much better seal to pour more epoxy into without having to worry about stuff leaking out even more so I'm gonna get ready to do this pour and I think to figure out roughly how much resin I'm gonna need I'm just gonna measure this out and just kind of approximate it as a cylinder so a five inch diameter cylinder that's about two and a half inches deep is how much I will mix up so R squared times pi times the thickness 49 cubic inches nice point five five so 2000 2000 hours of resin so I'll start getting that mixed up and as they go to do the actual pour I'll pour pretty slowly kind of pouring into that bottom area so I hit the bottom and causes to kind of fill up from the bottom because there's so many like pores and voids in there I want the resin to push up from the bottom to hopefully push the air out of the top that way when I go and actually surface this thing I won't have a whole bunch of voids within the actual slab so continuing on with the whole prep before flattening theme I do have these two areas down here that need some stabilization they will need some filling I'm especially worried about this because this is pretty loose so I do want to stabilize this before doing a surfacing this was not too much of a big deal but since I'm been doing this one anyway I might as well start on this one both these are gonna be done with the slab upside down so I got those areas taped off get this thing flipped over and start on some pouring and for this one I'm just going to use some West's system because I don't really need the long curing time I'm not going to fill a big crack all the way anyway I don't need that long cure time so the west system will be just fine for this and for these ones as well I'm going to tint these I think they look a little better with some of a darker color in them so they preserve the look of the natural shadow that would be there if you're just kind of looking at it straight on kind of as it looks right now so I was just gonna do one or two pours on this side just sticking the top side covered because the bottom side doesn't need to be totally filled because it's the bottom you're never gonna see it but I decided to go ahead and show a slightly different technique for filling in this case so this is actually my fifth pour and I'm using Westham epoxy which here is much faster produces a lot more heat which means you can't pour nearly as much all in one go so it need to be poured in multiple layers so for these pours to make it a bit easier for me they've all been the same volume so as I'm getting further and further up the pour list here the thickness is decreasing because this gap is getting wider as you get towards the bottom side or I guess in this case the top face of the poor so about every six to eight hours I've been coming out here and adding more epoxy on top and that's kind of disadvantage of a system like this because you have to layer it you do have to be keeping up with it and it's a much more involved process than a resin where you can just pour the whole thing at once and just leave it it's more of a set and forget it kind of thing but the layer is to give you a little more flexibility and options of things you can do so you can do different layers of colors or you can put things deep within the pour if you want to embed something in the resident as well so you have a few more options as well just another way to go about doing this so finally this thing is pretty much braid to go to mill flat and turn into an actual countertop finally after all this prep work so there's a couple of things going on with the slab right now for a flattening process there is about a quarter inch of Bowl in the slab right now which I'll be removing but more importantly is the twist so if I rock it like this you can see all the twists and what's actually happening here is that twist is being exacerbated by this big fill down here when I did that first fill that kind of bulge a tape a little bit so there's a bit of a bulge down there which is causing a little more of a twist situation so before I get to flatten this thing I'm just gonna take that bulge out get that material out of there so it's it's a little more flat as make the clotting process a little easier for me now be flattening this on my joint chair but my jointer is not wide enough to do the whole surface in one go this is about 15 inches wide in the jointer is 12 inches wide so I will three inch discrepancy there so I'll be doing my favorite named technique The Hangover method where I'll hang the material off the side of the jointer essentially making it really a wide rabbit and I'll give me flat reference area I'll remove the extra waste on the non jointed area to bring it down to the same level as the jointed flat area and then make another pass and feed that process until I get a nice flat clean of surface on the bottom so after a few passes I have a nice wide rabbit that's cleaned up all the way down and I have my extra material once again so at this point I'm ready to get to the planer and there's a couple of ways you can approach this if you have a piece of sheet goods it's long enough you can double side tape it down to this side up against this rabbit and putting that side down on the planer bed will reference this flat area make the opposing side flat and then you can flip it over once the opposing side the bottom side in my case right now is flat you can flip it over until this sides up and then that will remove this little bit of material along the edge now similar to that and the method you probably see me using the past is a little sled this tits in the planer this little hook here hooks on to the table of the planer and you're able to run your board with that rabbit up against the edge of this little platform that's the same kind of thing it's just it moves along essentially as opposed to being one piece that's attached to a slab now I don't have anything long enough because I don't keep any sheet goods there long parts that kind of stuff in the shop that I could stick down to here that's why I don't let's use that sled thing but on something this long it's kind of unwieldy so what I prefer to do on something this big is symptom in the the mood board anywhere I'm ready in the process of it I'll take this little action material down so it's flush the the rabbited area just like I've been doing and then I can move on to the planer [Music] [Music] and once I get the slab all planed down I can go ahead and clean up the edges we put the final width and then cut it down to final length so I've gone through and sanded the show side of the 220-grit and because this is red oak and it is very porous I want to do a poor fill on this and I haven't done this in a long time like since the last time I used red oak which was one and made our kitchen table in 2010 so I want to try a technique again because it's been so long it's gonna be poor filling with sanding dust using a varnish so this process is really simple it starts off with some kind of varnish a polyurethane works pretty well for this I'm using some armored seal so I'll put some of that into a mixing Cup and if using something a little thicker like a poly that's not meant for wiping on you can add some mineral spirits to make it a bit thinner and then to that mixture I'll add some boiled linseed oil the boiled linseed oil is going to extend the cure time so we have a lot more working time to be able to work stuff into the surface before starts to cure and the overall process here is going to be to wet sand the surface to create a slurry and then work that into all the pores now something you can do to make this process a little bit easier and more streamlined would be to use a sander that has a dust bag on it and collect all the fine dust from a sander that's gonna add a lot more of that fine dust to the surface and it's gonna allow you to sand a lot less I don't actually know where any of the filter bags for my sanders are since I never used them so I'm gonna be doing this all by hand so hopefully that goes alright the other thing is I'm standing with 400 grit wet/dry sandpaper something a little coarser would be better like 220 I thought I had some but I don't so I'm using 400 so again we'll see how that goes hopefully that is still coarse enough to create enough dust to make a slurry and work his way down into the pores the poor fill has had time to cure that took about three days to cure and it's been about two months since I did the poor fill told you this is one of those projects so this thing is have plenty of time to cure and actually this slab is still nice and flat hasn't moved at all which is always a nice plus has been sitting over on the shelf for this whole time so at this point I'm ready to kind of move forward get this thing ready for finish and just kind of finish up the finish prep I'll start on the prep on the bottom since this is the bottom of a countertop which is never gonna be seen this is just gonna be a utilitarian finish down here so I'm not gonna be too worried about putting up any tear-out or anything super noticeable down there this one establish a smooth surface that is not totally jagged or weird I'll sand the rest of the surfaces as well and also take the standards to the top to remove any excess of that pore filler basically just remove whatever is on the surface and leave whatever's down in the pores I also add a small round over to the side edges as well as the front edges I'm gonna leave the back alone because again that's gonna be scribed anyway so far that's gonna be removed one subscribe to the wall and the last little detail for a finished prep is going to be just to polish up the epoxy area a little bit just to bring back some of the glass-like properties of the epoxy make it less hazy and make it so that you guys can see down into the epoxy itself so for that area I'm just gonna stand to higher and higher grits we'll probably stop around a thousand grit or so which should be plenty since I'll be using a semi-gloss finish on this descent my glasses are gonna kind of knock back any extra glossy perfectness of the epoxy anyway so I don't need to go super crazy with getting that totally polished and ridiculous now this thing is all ready for its actual finished now and of course that poor fill also serves as so like a first layer finish like a seal coat so this is actually really smooth and looking down at the pores so we're all really nicely filled so we should end up with a really nice smooth and glass-like surface now this isn't going to be as exciting as so we did the poor fill because this is really just gonna bring back the color that was there when we did the poor fill so kind of as it was right now it's a little blotchy as I've kind of Sanderson areas more than others but this first coat of finish that I'm applying now is gonna kind of bring back the overall look of this piece basically back to the look we had when we did the poor fill since that was technically the first coat of finish so for this thing I'm just going to use my typical five coats of armor sealed type finish I'll leave a link to a video I did about that finishing process if you want some more details so I am super happy with the way this turned out the pour fill in here made the surface much more glass like which is a kind of a nice change from the typical kind of porous finish you get something that's well porous like red oak you know most things that I make I want to still look like wood so I don't mind the kind of porosity in the finish but on something like this and we're just kind of change of pace it's nice to see this kind of thing happening the epoxy fill down here the clear one that turned out really nicely having some depth there is really cool now the funny thing about this is that in order for you to actually see a lot of depth down there it does help to have the bottom kind of open to light so light comes up through the bottom and it illuminates the top well this is gonna be on top of some cabinets so it's not gonna be any under lighting so it's probably not going to look as gray as does now but it's just kind of cool regardless I think having that clear over there and having the contrast with the dark tinted epoxy for the cracks worked out really nicely so my parents are actually about to get here for Thanksgiving summer covers thing up and we'll see what I think about it this is this prolonged root man look at this or something seriously I don't have the guts look at all these look at all the that's beautiful Matthew look at that thank you that's awesome seriously thank you much appreciate thank you that's nice man my parents were really happy with the countertop my dad sent me a picture of it just sitting in place I'm not sure when he's gonna actually describe it or if you actually will subscribe to the wall but it does look good sitting there I was also really happy with the color in the wood and the way it really turned out I think it looked is absolutely amazing and the look of the red oak was totally different and a good way compared to the stuff that I have in my memory that I used back when I was a beginner that I had got from the Home Center so that's kind of a nice plus so actually if you want to see another project made from the wood from this log I'll leave you a link to James Wright you just finished up a dining table and the top is a pair of book-matched slabs from this log so you probably want to checked it out I thought it turned out pretty nice as well so thank you as always for watching I greatly appreciate it too many questions or comments about anything I showed today or anything here in my shop please feel free to leave me a comment supposed to be happy to answer questions you might have and till next time happy over cake

Channel: Matthew Cremona

Views: 410,386

Rating: 4.9242778 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodshop, furniture making, matt cremona, matthew cremona, fine woodworking, period furniture

Id: 2rLC5pBE1r4

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 27 2018