Table Made Entirely From Denim

hey this is Kim with Blacktail studio and this week I try to take over a thousand square feet of denim 20 gallons of epoxy most of which ends up on my floor and turn it into one of the coolest things I've ever built and in the end I give it away to a viewer what really so there's a guy that makes denim into sunglasses with epoxy for the last eight years I've been learning how to make sunglasses out of denim I make a lot of things with epoxy so I figure we can cut these up little pieces or I guess kind of big pieces I don't want pockets and stuff in there and we'll make a table out of it okay easy enough sure my original idea was to get a bunch of used jeans from Value Village and if you're wondering why I didn't go to Goodwill it's because Goodwill is the worst anytime I show up there with a bag of totally useful Goods they act like I'm trying to donate one of my paintings to get it hung in the Smithsonian and they end up turning me away so anyway I only shop at Value Village now but this is my idea go to Value Village buy a bunch of jeans cut them into thin strips laminate those with epoxy and turn it into an awesome table however there was a problem with that I think we're gonna need a lot of denim is that not enough um no this doesn't doesn't look like enough this definitely will not be enough but I'm wondering how short I am so each one of these was .025 to 0.03 it's 70 layers do you know how much money that is so at like eight eight dollars a pair that's 1700 worth of jeans and I don't even know if that's enough can you just buy denim as it turns out the calculations that I was doing were for a table roughly half the size that I was trying to build so instead of Seventeen hundred dollars it was actually going to be closer to thirty four hundred dollars worth of Value Village jeans so instead of that I went to a bulk denim supplier online got 70 yards of this even thicker denim for about 550 delivered at this point in the project I was feeling surprisingly right at home because I am not a snob about hardly anything clothing related except for two the jeans that they wear and the t-shirts that I wear and one of the reasons why I haven't sold merch for the last few years is all of those print on demand suppliers just have horrible quality so I didn't sell anything and finally I'm working with someone who I actually know based here in the US that does really really high quality t-shirts something that I would actually wear so if you're interested in getting a Blacktail Studio t-shirt it's going to be a limited run there's a link in the description if you want to check that out but it is a very good actual high quality shirt that you'll enjoy wearing so here is the bad idea I have in my head at this point I have 50 sheets of denim cut I have a ton of this liquid glass D4 epoxy and the reason I'm using this liquid glass epoxy is it has the longest working time because this is going to take me all freaking day two it cures the hardest and three it Remains the clearest so it'll give me that truest denim color in the end I'm excited for this one be the coolest thing I've ever done ever done no I don't know I don't want to put too much pressure on it but I'm cool with going with the coolest thing you've ever done all right high pressure High reward but I am more sure that this is going to be the worst thing I've ever had to go through I knew this was going to be pretty uncomfortable however I had no idea how bad this would get I got this Rubbermaid tub here and I poured in I believe nine gallons of epoxy and I thought I would just dip the denim in pull it out kind of wring it out lightly with my hands however when I pulled this first one out I had a bit of a shock when I realized just what I was in for oh my God this is gonna suck dance my hands are too weak there is not a lot of information out there on working with Denim and epoxy so I watched every video from that mosfix sunglass guy and I learned I need to squeegee out all excess epoxy after every layer so I have to go through this entire process 50 times one everyone 50 to go 40 no only 49. yeah yeah what horrible idea okay I will be the first to admit that this is not the best way to approach this project if I was to do it again however this was deliberate I thought by not having the sides to the form I could just easily squeegee all excess epoxy into that tub with maybe a few drops here there but I found that didn't quite work as I planned oh God I'm gonna eat oh this is getting worse [Music] okay are you rolling yeah oh gosh how'd that happen I don't know um I would not be a very good Ebola doctor thousand dollars of epoxy in so far the confidence I had at the start of the video the guy was like best project ever yeah it didn't even look good not yet edit that out it's gonna look great that was the first time I got grabs I feel like I was in my epoxy Prime like in my mid-30s my epoxy golden years now [Applause] I thought it seem slimier than normal I'm sure somebody out there has always wondered how long does it take to saturate 49 sheets of denim and then carefully layer one on top of the other and for that person we are about five and a half hours into the project at this point and also use about 21 gallons of epoxy which I'm embarrassed to say most of that is kind of squeezed out or leaked out so again not a very efficient way but my first try and now this is still pretty bad even for a first try tentatively our top layer after these are run through the planer and this will be our last one cool now I get a lot of really helpful replies in the comment section and occasionally I get some really bad ones I will have people that suggest something like you should measure your epoxy volume using buckets of sand instead of a tape measure or you should divorce your wife because I don't like the way she reacted to that thing that you built both of those are bad suggestions and I usually don't listen to those very closely however I do get a lot of good suggestions and if you feel like leaving me a comment letting me know how you would do this differently just know I already know you're right almost every aspect of this was done incorrectly and I would not repeat it if I were to do it again this is bad this is really bad do you think we'll need to put more buckets and drip trays down I think most of it's pretty well squeezed out by now oh my God foreign I don't think this could have gone any worse holy my table saw is never moving again oh no I posted a clip of me being stuck like a mouse in one of those sticky traps on Instagram during this process and I had so many people reach out and they were just genuinely concerned saying how are you going to clean that up and oh my gosh I don't even know how I would begin to clean that up I generally was not that worried about it I have that kind of mentality of like a pickup truck is designed to get scratches into garage floor as designed to have epoxy spelled on it so even if my floor just permanently had epoxy it's kind of a nice color it wasn't dyed it was just that nice natural denim color so I wasn't losing a lot of sleep over it but Scott was a little bit concerned when he came in and saw everything and how bad it was so he really insisted that we try to clean it up and he said if nothing else would at least make an interesting video so I had this floor scraper and I was actually shocked at how well this epoxy came up which is a good lesson for if you're gonna do an epoxy floor you need to prep it really well because my floor was obviously dirty and this epoxy just flaked right up foreign [Music] top left me a ton of options for the legs because I think almost anything would look awesome with that denim I think you could use steel legs aluminum legs I think Walnut could look really cool this is White Oak but this isn't actually what you're going to see when I get these legs finished because I wanted something a little bit more unique even than that and something that really paired nicely with the upholstery theme and so there's a guy that a couple years ago he reached out and says hey I do high-end upholstery for automobiles would you be interested in collaborating on a project and we've kind of kept in touch over those years but I never really had an idea until this project and my idea is this to wrap these white oak legs in stitched leather kind of like a car upholstery almost like a steering wheel so I reached out to him and he's like yeah we can do that and he hasn't seen the legs yet so he's going to come by inspect everything but that is the plan to wrap these in stitched leather foreign if you build a Live Edge slab table or an epoxy table and you bolt some steel legs onto it The Woodworking snob Community will call you a hack and say you're not a real woodworker however you take that same top and you attach some nice curved solid wood legs like this that same Community probably still call you a hack but they'll add in but those legs aren't so bad so this is how I Stave off judgment from The Woodworking snobs this is based on an acrylic design we sell this three-piece kit on my website there's a link in the description and it's just a really really easy approachable way to make some nice curved legs which seem really hard but really you're just tracing a template with a router I went with a three-quarter inch round over bit for the edge profile I thought it would look really nice and also work really well with that leather being stretched around it however after I got it all routed I was really starting to second guess the design of these legs hang on a second with that do you think this is too thick I didn't like the way the Walnut one we did I thought they were too thin yeah and so this is only like three quarters of an inch more but now it looks a little girthy it's it's chunky I feel like it could be a little thinner uh I wish you weren't right but you you're always right uh yeah let's uh let's make them thinner I brought the legs down from 2.75 to 2.25 inches which was a much better finish size got back to the shop and went to work on building these mounting plates and aluminum would have been a lot cheaper and probably easier however nothing is cooler than brass with denim in my opinion anyway so I'm building solid brass mounting plates however when I went to drill these I found I had a chipped drill bit and I didn't know that yet but it led to a bunch of problems right knock it away why does it do that I fold it down now do I speed it up maybe all right stand back and record yep I spent an embarrassing amount of time flinging brass plates across my shop before eventually I figured out the problem with that previous drill bit was a little chip in the end which was acting like a Barb and just catching that brass and throwing it eventually I got it worked out and was ready to start talking upholstery with the upholstery guy so this is the upholstery guy Shaheen and no matter how much I pushed him he wouldn't take any money for this project I kept telling him he needs to be paid for his craft and he said that he really just wanted to be a part of this project thought it would look really cool and from what I can gather just did it for love of The Craft however I'm gonna make it up to him in the end you can see I had a slight problem with the mold release on the melamine attached to that denim slab there and I feel like I might owe an apology to a product from a previous video every monster sells this should be up there with Philip Morris and the tobacco community in that video I was using a new mold release for the first time and it didn't work very well so naturally I blame the mold release and this video I went back to using a mold release that I know works very well however I still had an issue which means the problem was with me so I can't rule out the possibility that the problem was with me on that other mold release as well my original idea for this table was to create a kind of Damascus effect using all those different layers of denim however I did a few sample pieces leading up to this and I know this looks super cool here however the finished process I was using it just didn't look nearly as cool when finished so I'm going back to a different design which is going to be to laminate a single sheet of denim on top of this to give just that perfectly uniform smooth denim look although I do love the way this looks right now as I was getting closer to finishing this desk I started thinking about what should I actually do with it when it's done should I keep it for myself should I just sell it out right on my website should I hold another auction should I do some sort of Charity raffle eventually I came up with what I think is the perfect solution have I told you what we're doing at the table yet you have not I think I want to surprise Shaheen when he delivers the legs and just give him the whole thing oh cool yeah he uh he wouldn't take any money no matter like how much I was like no you should be paid and then he doesn't want like a shout out he doesn't want to be in the video and he doesn't even like want business from this he's just doing it for the craft let's call him and see how far out the legs are and then I'll I'll hint to him about the table but he won't know this guy okay cool is it how you know it's not staged but he's not gonna answer please leave your message so Shaheen texts me back pretty quick after that with a progress photo and asked if there was a date that I needed the legs done by and we went back and forth a little bit and eventually I thought it'd be fun to needle him and say nice I found a landing spot for the desk too he's a super nice guy definitely a perfectionist though just trying to put a little bit of pressure on him but he doesn't know that he's actually the perfectionist and he threw a curveball right back at me and said oh perfect how does he know he wants it without it being done which I didn't have a response to eventually I just said I guess he could change his mind when he sees it which seemed to work well and put a little bit more pressure on him it's like it's not enough not enough Scott all right for once I'm gonna be honest with myself I just know this isn't going to be enough epoxy right now we just basically wasted some epoxy and some denim but if I keep going with this it'll turn into just a nightmare so I'm going to be responsible for the first time in my life and we're just gonna peel it up call it a loss and live to fight another day if you didn't quite catch what happened there I didn't feel like I had enough epoxy to completely saturate that Denim and if it didn't get completely saturated I could potentially have a big bubble in the middle or part of a delaminate which would obviously ruin the project so starting fresh with a little bit more epoxy and new sheet of denim but this next step is what makes me nervous because I've had problems with that melamine sticking to epoxy lately if this top sheet sticks to the melamine I'm going to be back to square one because I'm gonna have to go in and get it completely planed off again re-laminate this sheet which will just be an absolute nightmare so hopefully crossing my fingers I have it clamped down nice and tight but also don't get as stuck to that melamine like I did last time Scott and I showed up the next morning in our matching uniforms ready for the Moment of Truth and initially it did not want to break free and this made me so nervous however I wedged that under there and the entire thing broke free so I was so relieved that I could finally start making some progress on this top I've had my virtual epoxy Workshop live for about a year and a half or so now and it's gone extraordinarily well but I will admit it's an investment because right now the cost is like 149 and for most people that means if you want to spend that kind of money you need to be ready to build an epoxy table right now so I wanted to create a lower price point item that people could kind of dip their toe in the water and see if they even want to build an epoxy tables so I created a pdf version of my virtual workshop with lots of photos lots of illustrations tons of step-by-step instructions and this one only costs 14.95 so it is 10 the cost of the full workshop and if you've already bought the full Workshop or if you want to buy the full Workshop you get this included at no charge and if you want a little bit more information there's a link in the video description below there's probably not many of you out there but some of you that have been watching my videos long enough might actually recognize these Outlets back when I had a real job and had to go to work every other week and I used this same Hardware building my wife a desk maybe four years ago or so and these Outlets are by a company called Juniper design I'll leave a link in the video description and they're not super cheap but they're also not offensively priced they're made from a solid Billet of brass I believe and for that I believe they cost about a hundred dollars up to 170 dollars for the most expensive one and there's even a matching light which I'm not using in this desk but I did use in my wife's desk these Outlets are designed to be mounted right on top of a table so if you're looking at it horizontally they would sit proud about a quarter of an inch and I just think they look so much cooler if they're flush mounted which is what I did on my wife's desk and practically wise I could see why you wouldn't want that because if you spill a drink it could literally go right down into the outlet however I think the risk is worth the reward here and this is a little jig that I created it's just a 2.75 inch hole with the appropriate bushings on my router and a half inch router bit and here's why I like that flush mount look right there for the edge profile on the denim top I wanted something that really highlighted the fact that we literally did use 50 sheets of denim stacked on top of each other and didn't cut any Corners so to speak and for that I'm using a three-quarter inch round over bit which just looking at it from the top you'll see all those layers of denim also it's the same race we used on the table leg so it'll complement that perfectly I will admit early on in this project I was very very discouraged it was a very messy project and worse than that I didn't even think it looked very good early on and at this point though I am highly encouraged I think it looks really cool and I'm having a ton of fun I was already wondering what other denim projects can I do could I do curved ones could I do different colored denim it was so much fun and so much flexibility because believe it or not this Denim and epoxy actually works just like wood I was chiseling at these corners and I couldn't believe how sharp of a corner I could get with my standard wood chisel and the nice thing about denim though is not going to expand and contract like wood so I get even more freedom when it comes to mounting plates like this because I can have these perfectly snug foreign this probably falls into the what did you expect category but building furniture at a denim is kind of hard because as I've sanded the epoxy off it's now kind of got those ribs again where if I drag my fingernail across I can feel the ribs and I have done samples of this so I'm not completely wingy and I have a couple samples and I know it can look cool but I think right now what I need to do is seal this up before I really get into my sanding process and then we can spray it after that because I need that Sealcoat to kind of penetrate these ribs and give me something to sand initially I did some tests with armor seal and it worked really well the problem was I had to wait like a day or more between coats this here is a catalyzed sanding sealer which was ready to sand in like an hour which is my favorite thing so it's designed to be sprayed on however for this since I'm going to be sanding it off anyway I just brush it on with that foam brush and now I'm going to go through my normal sanding progression just like I would would I believe I went up to 320 grit before starting the actual spraying process [Music] I've never actually built anything with veneer myself but I got the feeling that sanding this denim was similar to sanding veneer because that top layer is only about .035 inches and I sand through it it could completely ruin the look of the table and I will admit there were a couple spots where I think I sanded a little bit too far and you could almost start to see that color change so something I got to watch a little bit more carefully on the next denim table I do and here's a tip I got from people after my last finishing debacle is really wetting everything down before I start the finishing process in my last video I did this DIY spray booth with some drop claws that I'm pretty sure actually made it worse than not doing the DIY spray booth at all so I'm trying something a little bit different but I'm also using a much different finish this is a catalyzed water-based finish so it drives to the touch in like 15 minutes allegedly anyway so I'm hoping that the still morning with the doors open and little air movement is going to be better with this catalyzed finish I have a heavy duty air filter going right now and also you should know this is a water-based finish so it's not like spraying a heavy conversion varnish out into the environment any particles that do get suspended in the air probably going to land in my shop or go in that air filter and any of that don't it's just a water-based finish so it shouldn't hurt anything either way and this is the sanding sealer it's by Renner I believe they were pretty helpful I called them a few times got a few questions answered they do require the sanding sealer coat and this is the top coat and I wish I could tell you how many coats I did I really can't remember I did several though I think I did two of the sanding sealer and probably at least three or so of this top coat thank you if you've seen some of my recent videos you know that I'm pretty new to the world of spray finishing but I will say that each project I do feel like I'm actually getting slightly better I needed that acrylic to cure for about three days before moving on to polishing so in the meantime I'm gonna get these brass mounting plates finished and always fun going from this kind of Mill scale look to a semi-polished look and started with 100 grit went up to about 180 grit just to get it a little bit nicer and make me look like I'm actually a decent metal worker which I definitely am not foreign after those 72 hours had passed I moved on to the wet sanding of this piece which was pretty cool that I could sand this 2K acrylic in just three days because a normal water-based finish they say you can't start wet sanding for like 30 days and I love efficiency so I sanded it with the 1500 grit and the 3000 grit before moving on to the polishing system and this is one you've probably seen me use before it's by 3M I'll leave a link to this one in the video description along with everything else that I used and I will say there are some flaws in this piece if you look close you'll start to see some of the imperfections but it actually looked much more like denim than I was anticipating and I was really really excited with how it looked it can be pretty hard to convey in video just how dramatic of a change the M3 Nano treatment gives a piece and a piece like this it'll give it that rich wet look and protect it from scratches but a piece like Walnut or Maple it is shocking the difference that it makes and not just a difference in protection which is significant but the rich deep contrast that it gives I have some side by side tests I've done I'll also include a link to the M3 Nano and all the information on that in the video description Shaheen saved the last few stitches so we could get something on camera here and these legs look even better than I expected they are absolutely Flawless and remember Shaheen doesn't know that I'm giving him this entire table so I decided to try a not so subtle line of questioning first as a professional like would you have chosen these two colors to go together for years like if you if this was your desk I was pushing hard for you to get that brown so yes okay good did your pick you guys gonna like it that picky guy you were talking about I think it's going to be Scott you met you met the guy do you think he's gonna like it I think so I think it'll be do you think do you think it'll be nice enough for him yeah I I know the legs are going to be nice enough all right Shane you want to take this with you or you want me to deliver it to you the table what do you mean it's for you no way yeah what really yeah I spent so much time on the legs to make it for you I told you it's for a perfectionist oh that's amazing if you if you want it wow I was texting my wife pictures of this the whole time were you yeah so I got a text from my wife I think that uh Emoji sums it up well man um this guy we do some cheesy wrap up now what do we what do we do today now what would Mr Beast do give you like a million dollars to go with your desk hey what I mean I picked the wrong YouTube channel you'd be both I like this denim so much I could see this being a whole new phase to my career like Picasso had his blue phase or his cubism phase this might be my denim phase and before some of you jump on there and type saying that I'm comparing Picasso to myself I would never do that Picasso was a horrible woodworker every week I like to give a little bit of credit to people who make it all the way to the end of the video so this week start your question or comment with your favorite brand of denim and that way I'll know you made it all the way to the end of the video thank you so much have a great week

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 1,983,577

Keywords: denim and epoxy table, mircarta furniture, table made from jeans, denim table, jeans table, epoxy table, epoxy craft ideas, woodworking projects, epoxy resin, blue jeans

Id: 1KZSGLEgmmU

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023