Round Epoxy Table Build — How to Woodworking — How to Make a Round Table

hey this is Kamath Blacktail studio and this week I'm going to show you how I made my very first round epoxy resin table with this English walnut graft enjoy this table like my last couple started at gooey walnut and this was not actually out of a burl but these burles make it really interesting pieces for a round table if you do want to do a round table like this and they were pretty stocked up this day I was in there mine was out of a graph piece that top section there that you see there this Claire a lower section but the graph was the top and here's the excel piece that my table came from black walnut grafted to English walnut which is what gives you this kind of funky shape there and it's not good for a lot in the friend of mine actually bought that slab and just gave this to me so free woods always good after I got to cleaned up with the angle grinder I started just trying to estimate the rough centre since it is an odd shape so I started playing around the tape measure eventually marked I could guesstimate was the closest thing to the center with a little screw hole and I got this line so I can just draw it to rough shape so it'll fit and a round mold once I got my lines drawn I just cut out the rough shape with the jigsaw this will not at all be the final shape just to get it close and you saw that correctly a second ago that was landscape border that we're gonna make the format of it is really flexible very non-stick and so we'll see how well it works here I will mention I do mess something up really badly in this project I won't I want to spoil it for you so maybe it's the border maybe it's something else you have to keep watching to find out and since this border doesn't make a perfect circle again I'm just kind of getting into the rough shape so that way I have the minimal amount of waste in the end anyway moved on with some tin snips there to cut that landscape border then I used some caulk with a really nice camera angle there to seal it up I had a couple of those quick clamps there to help keep it watertight and just let it set for about a half hour my original plan was just to used the single slab in the middle and use the rest epoxy and it just didn't seem like enough so I had these other slabs laying around to cut the graft piece off of them just kind of filled in that circle a little better and in the end I was pretty happy I did that as I was making this video I realized I keep talking about graphs but I haven't actually explained what it is and you may be confused by that because I was really confused by that for a long time so a really quick oversimplification of it is one species of tree grafted to another species of tree and I believe it's the black walnut has better roots in our environment so they start growing a black walnut tree when it's pretty young they slice it off they stick an English walnut to it tie it tie it around there they grow together they graft together become a mature tree with English walnut nuts which is what the farmers wanted around here with the black walnut root stock but what you get is this really distinct line between the two species where they grow together and that's the graft line okay for those of you that are left watching back to the build a slab was two and half inches thick so it wasn't that light and I got my line sketched on there and I again I just got the jigsaw just getting pretty close to it you don't have to be perfection right here because we're gonna trim it to a perfect circle when it's all done just to get it in the mold once I get this fit in there I was pretty happy with the layout I was kind of torn on if I wanted to put another piece on the right side but decided to leave it as is went to cleaning up this other graft piece using my angle grinder my restorer and the wire brush there got the sander out smooth out some of those wire lines and moved on to epoxy for the seal coat I'm gonna be using a chill epoxy this is their diamond fast which is a fast drying epoxy that'll harden in about four or five hours and it will seal everything in there and give a perfect bond when I do my main deep pore and when you're doing these seal coats just hit every little pit and valley in there anywhere that could trap air because as it cures you what you don't want is one of those air bubbles just seeping out at the wrong moment and becoming encapsulated forever the shellac is more just kind of sealing any little dust and dirt in there and also prevents any color bleed if you are using any dark dyes this white die for this epoxy really shouldn't hurt too much but kind of a habit of mine to seal everything with the shellac once both those pieces are nice and dry I got them in my mold there and I'm gonna seal everything here with again this is my fast drying caulk that I like to use dries in about 20 minutes I do recommend giving it about a day between first putting it down and doing the deep pore though moving on just scuffing up that epoxy coat there the restorer made actually really quick work if you have a big flat area with a nylon wheel to make sure you get a really really good bond between the main epoxy poor and the epoxy that I sealed the slab with after I get it all good and vacuumed I like to come back with a microfiber towel and that'll get the last little bits of dust that that vacuum just more pushed around and sucked up and here I'm using an aerosol mold release I'm not a huge fan of this one you see how airborne and gifts which can really contaminate your slabs if you have them in the same room so if you do use this move your slabs anything else is gonna get epoxy on it out of the room otherwise it could compromise the bond I will show you an alternative to the aerosol later in the video though since this was a round table with a really funky looking slab I didn't have a great way to estimate the volume so what I did was get the total volume if there was no wood in it and then just made my best guess on how much epoxy would be needed the epoxy I'm using is it chill to buy polymers technologies it's a deep core formula takes about 72 hours to fully cure and you can pour up to two inches thick in a single pour like other deep pore epoxy this one comes in a two to one formula and I have 12 liters here so I'm just gonna mix all of it at once so I don't have to worry too much about the ratio since it comes in 12 liters here but you do want to be really conscious of getting that ratio just right with any epoxy that you're mixing I personally like to mix bucket of the resin and the hardener and then the rest the resin on top of it to help get the most complete mixing if you've been told something else by manufacturer I'd love to hear in the comments below though because that's just kind of my own gut intuition I wanted to do a white table and I wanted really white and this is a pretty potent dye here this is an eco epoxy white die but I added quite a bit to it I just kept adding kept adding really wanted a pretty bright white my mixing style has evolved as I've been more of these tables I used to just go in there on high and mix it as fast and as frothy as I could but you're really inducing more and more bubbles and you don't want to add any more than you have to so keep it on low just go nice and slow moving on to making the damn portion of this and all I'm doing here is giving a slight barrier that when I fill the epoxy all the way up it won't flow over the entire table which will just save me a couple liters of epoxy you may be noticing the other small pieces of wood that aren't quite as tall as these main slabs and I'm putting those in there to give my legs my table base something to mount to my salsa I'm done I don't really like drilling into the epoxy so I've filled those in to help give me something to mount to here's a tip that the polymers guys turned me on do is let your bucket sit for about 15-20 minutes and let all these micro bubbles pop themselves before you pour it in you've probably seen a lot of social media videos where guys just splash the epoxy in there and it does make a cool effect but there's no need for it and you're just giving yourself more of a chance for some tiny bubbles to form in that splashing so I try to go just as nice and easy as you can all these little epoxy tips I'm giving on the mixing on low and letting the bucket sit for 10 minutes and pouring slow those aren't specific to the chill epoxy this is a good practice with any epoxy you're doing especially these deep poor epoxies you can see here this 12 liters didn't really fill nearly as much as I was hoping for so it'll take probably about twice as much epoxy when it's all said and done I didn't need to wait two weeks but I got a little sidetracked with other projects so it took me about two weeks before I can come back for the second pour here's a little time-lapse of watching those bubbles pop just give you an idea of how many actually disappear in that ten minutes a little bit more of a splash then I was hoping for I told you guys to go a little bit slower but sometimes it's hard with heavy bucket but kind of a satisfying pouring montage here so enjoy that for the next couple seconds once you get your epoxy topped off up this was my first step in figuring out a really helpful tip you don't need to use gloves you actually shouldn't use your fingers and gloves what works a lot better is a disposable brush and what you're doing is you're just brushing it into every tiny nook and cranny and here I'm using the gloves but a brush works much better and what that does is it stops the tiny bubbles from clinging to the sides because that's where you're gonna get most of them they just kind of tend to hold on to the side so this will really minimize that after three days the epoxy was rock-hard and I was ready to see how well this landscape border worked and I'll admit I was pretty nervous that it wasn't gonna come off but it peeled off just like butter and I was actually able to save it so I'll be able to use it on my next roundtable project so this wasn't my big failure for the project it worked really well and actually do recommend using that here's my Lea Neilson chisel plane using to peel off this caulk the it's not great for planer blades to go through so they prefer it if I can get as much of this off as I can before I take it to of my industrial shop it was held down pretty tight and actually wasn't the epoxy that was sticking it was that caulk from the edge that was sticking so I had to use the pry bar in there and then the wood wedges but once I got it freed from the caulk it came right up really nice and now that I got it free I'm gonna take this and a couple other smaller projects up to creative woodworking in Portland an industrial shop I like giving them a plug here they're not paying me or anything they're just really nice people they're nice enough to let me rent some time out on their big industrial tools which saves me days of work just to pay them for a half hour and after just a handful of passes we got it nice and smoothed out coming home to do my first round of epoxy touch-ups and there weren't very many there were these little bug pits that took a little bit of addressing but overall not much in the way of tiny pits to fill and most of that was using that glove trick or the brush trick as it should have been oh and I promised a really good screw-up so here it is you guys should enjoy this one it was pretty dumb basically my idea was to mount my festival router to my Festool track there which it does go on and go around in a circle and it would cut a perfect circle you'll see the problem I ran and do here in a second though so this festival attachment is to go up and down the track and you guys can and should make fun of me for this because it's not meant to stay in one place and so what you see there is it starts to work down the track as it's supposed to I don't know why I thought I could hold it on there secure enough but we put this huge gouge and the underside of my table which I did come up with a solution for and in the end it actually turned out pretty good but here's a bad fix to a even worse idea so now that I got on there more or less secure I made a pass about half the depth and that allowed me to come and trim the rest of it with my jig saw and then eventually a flush trim bit so if you ever have a mess up in your shop know that you're not alone I'll show you how I fixed it which in the end it actually turned out pretty good but again here I'm just using the jigsaw to cut close up to the line and then we'll cut it absolutely flush with a flush trim router bit and normally I wouldn't do this on a router table like I'm going to I would just do in the handheld router but since I did have that area that I screwed up I didn't want it to catch the wrong track and make the project even worse and you can see there a light a second ago it's not nearly half the depth of it's only about a quarter of the way down and like I say I wouldn't normally go with this technique because I would be a little bit worried of kind of bending the bit with this thick table but she's going nice and slow trying to go really really easy on it and overall got a pretty much a perfect edge on this for the edge after I got it all a perfect circle I wanted to do something a little more interesting so I went with a 22 degree bit and someone common and one of my other videos when I called it a bevel it's not a bevel is a chamfer so putting a 22 degree chamfer on this table and what I'm doing is I'm doing it in three passes just a small medium and then just a final finish pass at the router to hopefully get as clean as cut you'll notice I'm getting a lot of these epoxy flakes on there and I have this attachment that I'd never actually used because I didn't really see how it would work but decided what the heck let's try it this time and I'm kind of embarrassed I didn't use it before because it got all of the epoxy flakes after that so if you have this router don't be afraid to using the attachments I host a resin workshop up at go B walnut and Portland Oregon where I teach people to make tables like this so I took this table into kind of using as an example on how to do some finishing and sanding techniques but here's kind of an overview we did a tour of the showroom here here's a bunch of slabs and Erin the owner talking Erin's giving him a tour of the mill it was a horrible snowy day only time we get that in Portland but back in the workshop decided to show the class how to touch up these tiny pits with the clear CA glue and activator where as you just barely touch it up add some activator and you can sand it and scrape it almost immediately in less than 30 seconds you can see here I use a tiny all or a paperclip works well I've tried this activator with a couple different CA glues and it seems to work with all of them so if you have an off-brand I should be fine just using a random activator but yeah I can sand it less than 30 seconds let the class do a lot of the sanding here so they could get some hands-on experience you see didn't get a lot of footage because I was too busy teaching the class but Cole my assistant here was running through the grits he went from 100 120 150 180 220 320 dot all the way up to 400 before we added the finish as far as the finishing goes I decided to use a new kind of Ozma at least new to me it's their 3043 formula and it's a little bit more of a building formula than the stuff that I've used before and James over at lux edge turned me on to it so my hope was it worked a little better on filling those tiny imperfections on the epoxy which I've had a hard time doing with white fun finishes before and once you wipe it on what you wanna do is you want to buff it and you can do it by hand or you can stick a white scotch brite pad on your orbital this is a gem polisher it's a kind of a reconfigured floor sander it runs really quiet it's really powerful and you just buff and you buff and you buff and you keep going until you get basically all the squirrel marks off and what a nice little tip is that James at lux edge told me is you flip your pad over to the clean side and you buff the rest of it off with that and then you just leave it you don't wipe anymore you don't wipe it off you just let that set overnight moving on to the base I'm going to use for this this is a local Portland company although they still ship to mixes is that hard to drive across town in Portland sometimes called symmetry hardware steel table legs com they sent me there's really cool quad base they make I really like it I thought it was a perfect fit for this table you don't want anything too gaudy for a base in my opinion when you're doing a top that's kind of gaudy assembled really easy build quality was perfect it was perfectly flat perfectly balanced head leg levelers so definitely check them out if you're looking for a table base as with all my tables I'm doing threaded inserts here so I got the basic exactly where I wanted it and I'm gonna use the same bit that I'm gonna drill the inserts with to mark my holes a couple tips I can give from experience is use your drill on low and use one of these colors if you have it if you use it on high and just use tape or don't use a color I've run this all the way through a table more times than I care to admit you do want to make sure to use the exact drill bit size according to manufacturer for your particular threaded inserts though and I'm using the EZ lock threaded inserts I get a mom Amazon putting a little dab of CA glue just to secure them in there in case you take this apart a million times these could work loose I don't think they would but it still gives a little bit of lubrication and make sure they won't back out over the years once I got these threaded inserts in it's just a matter of getting the base back on there bolting it down and this project is done well not totally done I still have a photo shoot to do then I'm totally done okay quick is a relative term this my super chief backdrop setup here and you can see it's not catching it's not stopping it's just running away from me is so frustrating eventually your loss of curse words which is why the volumes trimmed down I gotta figure it out end up taking some decent pictures though if you'd be interested how I take these photos I'm considering doing a tutorial so let me know in the comments below if that is some that interests you or if I shouldn't waste my time as I'm not really a professional photographer I was pretty happy with these photos though for a guy who doesn't know what he's doing in a garage overall pretty happy and again thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video please subscribe for more just like it thanks again

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 2,996,369

Rating: 4.7918587 out of 5

Keywords: epoxy table, diy, woodwork, how to, how-to, woodwork ideas, diy 101, rivertable, river table, resin table, round table, pdx, luxury, asmr, how to make round table, woodworking, round epoxy table, epoxy, how to woodworking, make a, diy projects

Id: lNbo30X3A7Q

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019