Shockingly Expensive Wood I Make Into a Desk

hey this is cam with blacktail studio and this week i buy some ridiculously priced wood i get burned by the record-setting temperatures and i probably have to turn off the comment section stay tuned so i randomly stumbled on an instagram post from a wood supplier just south of me that i'd never been to before but they posted the most unbelievable myrtle wood burl slabs i've ever seen anywhere in my life and as unbelievable as they looked they were also priced just about as unbelievably but as everybody knows something is worth what someone will pay for it so i threw a couple posts out on instagram and my youtube community page and just said hey does anybody want a desk and someone commented they're like yeah i do so i ended up driving down and paying that ridiculous price this guy was awesome to talk to because he was super salty but he was also super knowledgeable so i learned quite a bit in my short time chatting with him there and he's explaining that these slabs are not kiln dried they're actually air dried only so i'm testing the moisture on them they're definitely within limits and i actually had to take my wife's car to come pick these up because we had 114 degree weather which is insane for western oregon it never gets that hot which led to my next problem that you'll see here in just a minute or two i just can't seem to put my finger on what exactly this natural void reminds me of but for some reason i am really really drawn to it the client had even originally asked me if there's any way we could have a hole through some portion of it so they could run some computer wires and i thought this would be a perfect way to incorporate kind of a really organic wire management solution without having to cut any big holes leave everything looking as natural as possible i just wanted to make it a little bit more symmetrical before the glue up so i busted out the electric die grinder and a couple of different cut saw bits you might not have noticed but when i was at the shop buying these slabs he used his big awesome twenty thousand dollar martin jointer to give a nice fresh joint on both of these slabs so i could take them straight to glue up so all i needed to do was mark a couple spots for dominoes bust out the domino xl and put a few of them in there to help with lining it up and if you didn't know dominoes they claim actually don't add any strength which seems hard to believe but that's what they say they say that the domino only assists in lining things up so don't add more dominoes to add more strength the dominoes are really just there to help line it up and all of the strength in the joint comes from the actual glue since i had the brand new fresh jointer edge that he had put on with his martin jointer for me and we're in the middle of this heat wave i wanted to get this slab joined up as quickly as possible because tiny little fluctuations in the wood would make for a much less clean seam so i wanted to hurry up and make sure i got it glued up as soon as possible and that's what i'm doing here was really really uncomfortably hot in my shop but i thought i could just knock this out really quick get it glued up and then have that peace of mind and let it set for a couple days let the shop cool down but i ran into a problem you can see here start getting into panic mode normally the dominoes just slide together and this was probably about three or four minutes and the glue had basically seized up you see i'm feeling it right there it's just already completely tacky there's nothing i could do the slab was frozen in place right here well first time that's ever happened glue set up on me too fast i guess i couldn't quite get it in a 90 degree shop so i don't know maybe pool day try again tomorrow or maybe maybe a few days make no mistake i am not blaming this on the temperature this was a mistake that i made and it's a hard lesson i had to learn especially with some really really expensive wood and i'm not a big quotes person but there is one quote that i absolutely love and i'm paraphrasing it slightly but it says good decisions come from experience experience comes from bad decisions and i really really like that because this was my way of gaining a little bit of experience and so what i did i let that heat wave chill out just a little bit let it cool down in my shop i think it was in the mid 80s here which was still pretty warm but much better than being in the 90s and worked on fixing it unlike in life everything in woodworking is essentially fixable it's just going to be how much work you want to put in to do so and this really wasn't even that bad i had to cut the old dominoes off with my track saw went over to my jointer which is a pretty good one but it's not nearly as good as the one that he used so i had to make sure i had that fence perfectly square to the table put a couple new domino holes in it had the shop in a reasonable temperature it wasn't great it was still i think in the high 90s outside so yeah i was pretty nervous doing this again if i had to cut this apart you know a second or a third time that's when we're gonna be start messing with the size of these slabs so when this finally went together right here i can't tell you how relieved i was and what a weight that was off my back just a matter of getting a couple of clamps on it at this point and you can see i used a couple of shop rags to kind of keep me from damaging that really nice live edge and now i can let this set overnight these slabs come from a myrtle tree and if you've never heard of myrtle wood before don't feel bad because this tree is actually only native to the oregon coast so basically everywhere in the world this wood is extremely uncommon except for oregon and the coast is loaded with these myrtle trees the rest of the state doesn't really have any of them so i see a fair amount but they're still not super common and you might be saying wait a minute i had a crepe myrtle in my yard at my old house and first of all so did i at my last house we bought a crepe myrtle and i had to google it but a crepe myrtle has no relation to a myrtle tree for the record and if you're a close follower of my page you've actually seen myrtlewood before because i used it for my black tail sign that i hang up in my office and it was in my old shop too so myrtle was a really cool wood and i hope this kind of opens it up as another potential wood for some of your projects i am still not super happy with my live edge cleanup tools and here i'm using a pretty soft wire wheel on my angle grinder and this thing throws these little wires everywhere so make sure you wear goggles you don't want to catch one of those in the eye but i end up looking like this every time i use it right inside i do like this old porter cable restore that i have and i have a soft wheel on that but i think i need to look into some sort of walnut shell blasting or something like that because i think there's got to be a better way to give a little bit cleaner finish when removing the spark because when you have something live edge you want to keep it as natural as possible you don't want any gouges any scars so i really need to find a better way to clean it up and after i got it cleaned up as good as i could i went to kind of smoothing out some of these little burl nubs because you don't want these catching on your sweater catching onto something when you're sitting at your desk or just overall poking you when you slide in close to your desk so i took all these down with some sandpaper and my fine wrasse just to give it a little bit smoother feel sometimes i definitely see a place for letting the kind of natural cracks and voids speak for themselves in a tabletop for a desk though i really prefer a pretty smooth surface you're going to be writing on it you're going to be shuffling papers around you're going to have little objects little tacks and paper clips and things like that so i really prefer a pretty smooth top and it does take a lot more work i spent several hours with these little kind of dental tools fishing out all these little imperfections and if you're wondering what that shellac was for that was to seal it because i'm going to fill these tiny little voids with a black epoxy and that's going to prevent any of the staining by having that shellac down there first after i spent a few hours filling all of these little tiny annoying pits and voids i was ready to start work on the underside of the table and i personally almost always prefer a recessed table base and one of the questions i always get when i do this is what does it do for you is it add strength somehow why do you recess it is it just for looks and that's exactly it it is just for looks it does absolutely nothing for the table in fact if you're going to change table bases down the road it could actually hinder you because now you're really kind of locked into having to mount it in this recessed area so make sure you have a table base you want to keep on there for a really long time and if it if that is the case then i highly recommend recessing it it just looks a lot sleeker if you look down the profile table you don't see a quarter inch mounting plate you just see the nice sleek legs i don't add c channels to the underside of every single table i make in fact the last desk i built was actually quite a bit bigger than this one and i did not add c channels to it and this one is a little bit smaller and i am adding c channels to it and so some of you are probably wondering why that is and this isn't one of those hard lessons i've learned i actually don't have physical evidence for why you should do it one way and shouldn't do it another way but i do have kind of my hunch and my reasoning for doing it and the main reason is that these slabs were air dried they weren't kiln dried and the moisture was just a little bit higher than they would be than on a kiln-dried slab they ranged from about 10 to maybe 13 even i think 14 in some areas so this was going to a different climate it was going to be in the philadelphia area i really wanted to mitigate any chance of any warping or cupping and the sea channels won't prevent absolutely everything if this slab was totally improperly dried which it wasn't it was properly dried it was just air dried and so having these c channels in there is really going to just kind of help negotiate with a slab to keep it flat and that's not my term that is paul from canadian woodworks he came up with that term and i really like that they're just negotiating with the slab to help keep it flat a year or two ago i had a real problem in that i wanted to cut a deep bevel or chamfer in the side of a table but nobody seems to make a router bit with a cutting depth of over one inch and even if they did make a router bit bigger than that i probably don't have a router powerful enough to push that bit so what i came up with was using my track saw slightly overlapped on the slab and this enables me to cut a really easy bevel or chamfer of any slab up to maybe two and a half inches probably even a little bit more if i use my larger mafel saw i have a really really important woodworking trick for you that i'm embarrassed to say i'm not sure that i've shown in a video before and i didn't come up with this this is something a much more experienced woodworker showed me but that is to wrap your slabs in plastic when you're done working with them for the day so when i'm going to bed for the night i wrap it up in that painter's plastic i put a blanket over the top of it just kind of weight that plastic down and that really mitigates the wood movement and that bowing and cupping that can happen with slabs like this i was just doing some math and as of today september 1st 2021 i am on pace to hit 1 million subscribers by the end of the year actually a little bit before the end of the year which would be absolutely crazy and i don't want to jinx it but that would be really really amazing if i could hit that goal of 1 million subscribers by the end of the year so if you are enjoying this video if you think that i've earned that subscription don't do it for charity but if you do think that you want to see more content like this i would really appreciate if you would hit that subscribe button right now because if i do hit a million by the end of the year i promise i'm gonna do a huge giveaway it's gonna be a bunch of cool stuff with way more than one winner oh and yes i was diverting your attention from that particular inlay there because i completely botched it and i was able to fix it but stick around for another minute or two to see how that turned out because that particular inlay was very very bad i don't know what it was about working with this particular wire management void but i found it really really satisfying but also really really frustrating felt like every time that i had it finished something would go wrong and i had to start all over from scratch i tried larger tools and that seemed to be actually too big for the void i tried smaller ones basically every tool in my toolbox i threw at this thing and luckily for me after enough perseverance i was finally able to finish it off i still had a few more little touch-ups to do just to make it absolutely perfect and these were done with ca glue and activator and unlike the epoxy that really takes at least a day between working with it the ca glue with activator is ready to go in about 10-15 seconds so i do the epoxy for the slightly larger touch-ups and then i switch to the ca glue for the really small ones all right now we get to see just how bad this first iteration of the inlay looks and this is something i probably should have seen coming i normally don't use epoxy for my inlays for the exact reason why this one didn't look good also my inlay wasn't super tight so that didn't contribute to making it look any better but you'll see right here just how it looks and that is absolutely unacceptable that is not going to make it out of my shop looking like that really didn't want to redo this but i did not have a choice i was not gonna let that go out like that so what i did i went to my more traditional inlay method i've got a regular square of this matching myrtle wood used a trim router which was a little bit sketchy using this tiny little eighth of an inch bit hogged out most of the material with this then went to my chisels cleaned up my marking knife line went right up to the line trying to be as sharp and as careful as i could be and then the big difference is i'm using wood glue instead of epoxy and wood glue always gives you a much more discreet inlay and to fill any tiny little micro imperfections i'm just using a little bit of myrtlewood dust mixed with some white oak dust just to kind of mix up that color slightly normally i try to limit my failures to one per video so i don't get too judged by you guys but this was my second failure on a relatively small project but in the end here's how it looked and i'm actually pretty pleased with that i was still a little bit nervous when i was sanding it down that what if it doesn't look good again but that actually looks pretty good and i'm really really happy with that if you spend enough time around woodworkers you'll start to hear the same wood species names get thrown around when people start talking about the world's most expensive wood species and those woods are generally like african blackwood some species of ebony some species of rosewood maybe like a figured bubinga but one that i had never heard of and this one actually comes up on some lists if you google it and this was from watching an amazon show that had nothing to do with woodworking is sandalwood and i had heard of sandalwood and i didn't think it looked very pretty and so i couldn't figure out why sandalwood was so sought after and apparently as i learned in this documentary is they use it for making different fragrances and the wood is so protected now that it only grows in a few national parks and if they have to cut a tree down because it's dead they even save the sawdust and chainsaw clippings so they can sell those as well so kind of a fun fact about the world's most expensive woods that you might not have heard of sandalwood the reason i bring up the world's most expensive woods is that these slabs are right up there with the most expensive wood i have ever even seen on a per board foot basis and per board foot basis basically means pound for pound one board feet equals 12 inches by 12 inches by one feet and for comparison walnut might start around ten dollars a board foot then for the nice stuff go to twenty dollars then for the really nice stuff it might be like forty or fifty dollars a board foot and then if you get into something like that exotic ebony or bubinga i've seen that for like ninety dollars to a hundred dollars a board foot these slabs combined were three thousand nine hundred dollars which if you do the math they were five feet long by about two and a half feet wide by an inch and three quarters thick so that equals 170 dollars per board foot which is really just staggering that i paid that even though it was a ton of money to spend on these slabs i do not regret it in the slightest in fact i feel incredibly lucky that i got the opportunity to work with such rare such incredible wood and in that youtube community post where i found my buyer i think i even included the price of the wood and just said hey these slabs are really expensive they're 3900 i can do a desk all in with legs and everything for ten thousand dollars and yes that is a staggering amount of money in itself but it really isn't the markup that i would normally have using would like this so the client believe it or not getting a ten thousand dollar desk actually got a deal so the client was really happy i was happy the wood supplier seemed happy although he told me he goes if nobody bought these slabs i would just cut them up into guitar blanks and probably make twice as much money it just might take me two years so it's kind of funny that even at 180 of board foot he still probably could have made more money in the long run i still rely on a ton of other people to help with my woodworking projects i outsource a lot of the big slab flattening or table flattening to the creative woodworking up in portland i outsource all of my steel leg fabrication to actual professional fabricators however i now am able to do all of my finishing in-house which is really really nice because i like this particular style of finish so much more you actually get to feel the wood grain it's not like a clear thick plasticky coat on it you can repair it on site and it is also quite durable so if you have some questions on how to do this finish if you're curious how can i get a perfect finish in a really really dusty shop i have a step-by-step blog and video that gives all the steps to get an absolutely perfect finish in a dusty shop this particular spot seemed to really really soak in the oil and i don't know why it was so much more saturated than the rest of the slab but it did take a little bit more and anyway after i had the entire slab oiled i got a couple of blue shop rags and then i just buffed all the oil off possible you don't want to leave any of it on there and that's different than some finishes but this particular one you want to remove all of it and my wife came out when i was doing this and she told me not to wipe it back to front but she doesn't even would work so i don't know what she could be referring to the last two tables that i've built including my personal dining table i've used this black forest ceramic and my personal dining table was really kind of the beta test if i was going to use this on customers tables and so far it has performed extremely well it does add a good bit of protection and it also ups the contrast and adds a little bit more sheen so i have been really happy using this and in my last desk i built i included a link to purchase this for the black forest guys and apparently they sold some units and dylan from black force reached out and said that he wanted to sponsor this video so i thought that was really cool that they are supporting my page because i'm generating some revenue for them so i am happy to keep pushing this product for them if you guys want to show a little support for my page definitely check that link out for yourself this stuff is not cheap but it does go a really long ways and here you can start to see how that contrast and sheen gets bumped up by using this system and you can actually continue to bump the sheen up by adding multiple coats this one i did two different coats of the base coat and then i did two different coats of the top coat which in the end just slightly bumps the sheen up but it does add contrast and just overall makes it look much much sharper this same ceramic coat technology has been used for several years on automobiles whereas instead of waxing your car you now ceramic coat it my dad is quite the car geek and he actually had his car ceramic coated several years ago and he said he has not waxed it in like three or four years and it still beads water like new so my understanding is the black forest guys essentially formulated a ceramic coat that is designed to be used on wood whereas their traditional ceramic coat is not supposed to be used on wood the legs i'm using here are one of my personal favorite styles they're called a wishbone leg and it's just a really timeless classic style and the manufacture of these is flowy line design which i have used a bunch of times before but i've never got to use his stainless legs so i showed these to the client actually showed the client a lot of different table legs and these are the ones he landed on so i was thrilled to get to use these and if you want a link to purchase these i will include a link to those in the description below as well so here is how everything came together we have the black forest ceramic we have the stainless steel legs here is how that inlay ended up which i don't know that is perfect but i also don't know that i can do a better job than that all in all i would say oh dear now i think i see what everybody else saw why didn't anybody just tell me i oh man i hope youtube's algorithm doesn't catch this hang on a second okay my wife is the legal expert and i ran this edit by her to see what she thought and she insists that i am not as funny as i think i am and to just post the video so this week start your question or comment with the one word you think best describes this table keeping in mind youtube will block you if you post anything inappropriate so start your question or comment with the one word that best describes this table and i will know you made it all the way to the end of the video and i promise i will answer all of your questions or comments first as always thank you so much for watching have a great week

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 1,489,071

Rating: 4.8804436 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, modern desk, woodworking projects, myrtle wood, luxury desk, bookmatched wood, bookmatched guitar top, figured woods, do it yourself, how to build a desk, computer desk, how to, custom desk, do it yourself projects, diy desk, expensive wood, most expensive wood, most expensive wood in the world

Id: 4n1bve8qDtM

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/iPostOnlyWhenHigh]

“I just can’t seem to put my finger on what exactly this natural void reminds me of? But for some reason I am really drawn to it.” (1:12)

I think you do bud. I think you do.