The Client Hated This Slab

hey this is ken with blacktail studio and this week i built a table so big i have to sell my old forklift to buy a new forklift and absolutely everything goes wrong with this build about a year and a half ago or so now i had this really nice couple reach out and say that they're building their dream house in florida they've seen some of my past videos they wanted a table just like one they'd seen with one caveat they could not have any red hues to it they hated the look of red hues in this walnut i said no problem although red is pretty common it's not exclusive to walnut so since we had time to buy a green slab that'd been fresh cut i found the deepest darkest chocolatey slab on gobi walnut's website and they said that color would be perfect however i bought a couple slabs from that tree and i recently finished one of those tables and it was as my wife put it maybe one of the reddest tables i've ever built so this is the problem we have a very red slab and i promised them anything but i get countless questions from people asking me why i don't use some sort of roller system just throw some off cuts of pvc pipe in the back of my truck and that's how the egyptians moved all those stones and it's good enough for them it's good enough for you and this time was going to be the time that i actually did this and i left them sitting next to my truck so now no rollers underneath my slab and i have to muscle it out by hand so enjoy so as you can see we are already starting off with some issues and moving these big slabs around or struggling to move these big slabs around that is nothing new that is something i struggle with on pretty much every project but the slab that is the wrong color that is a brand new problem for me and not something i've ever experienced before i did tell the clients about it so they are aware of the problem but we're going to take this just one step at a time and here we are choosing a layout and doing this via facetime making sure they like the layout make sure that i can at least get that part right this table is going to end up right around 108 inches long by 45 inches wide which i believe is right around 2.7 meters by 1.2 meters and to make sure that i hit that size and i don't have to tell the client that i accidentally built them a smaller table i always start off a little bit oversized which is why you see the two white lines there one is the minimum size and the other one is kind of my size with a buffer and this circular saw can cut i think almost three and a half inches deep but the slab must have been just a little bit over that because i couldn't quite get it and use my jigsaw on one section but for this part i went ahead and used the foot saw i have built enough of these tables that i can generally envision what they're going to look like pretty close from the raw slab but the clients have not built a bunch of tables so there is some trust that needs to go into this when you're choosing a layout because we only really had this one corner that could fill this void so if it didn't look right we weren't really going to be able to do anything with it and lucky for me the client loved this look i posted about it on the youtube community page and on instagram a bunch but if you missed it you won't be seeing this planner anymore because oliver machinery reached out offered me a better planner and instead of selling that one for like three thousand dollars on craigslist i decided to host a rock paper scissors tournament where the winner would win the planer so we recently did the epic gobi walnut it was a ton of fun the guy who won it was an actual woodworker with a small professional business that did not have a good planner so i thought it was really cool a ton of fun if you want to stay tuned on more contests like that follow me over on instagram or at least check out the youtube community page now if you're wondering what i am doing with all these samples this is phase one of hopefully keeping the clients happy these are offcuts from the actual slab of wood that their table is made from and they are pretty familiar with rubia monaco they've been using it on their baseboards and their doors in their new house so they chose three colors i chose two i did the charcoal which is what you see there and then just the pure natural color is kind of a control i even had an old epoxy serving board that i did in two colors so i could show them the slate on the left the charcoal on the right and all of these different colors here so they can look at it in their space see how it reacts with the light and what this table is actually going to look like if i could outsource one job this would be it the slab cleanup process it is absolutely miserable i have to get down on my hands and knees i get stuff flying up in my face i end up just filthy generally takes me almost a whole day it is a genuinely unpleasant process but it is something that is really really critical and if you don't get these cleaned up properly that epoxy bond could be compromised and your table could come apart down the road which is basically my nightmare having a table in florida come apart and have the client ask me what are we supposed to do to remove all the bark rot strands and just dirt from these slabs i use a number of different tools i really do like the angle grinder but it's not great at getting down into those tight spots i have these nylon attachments for my drill but they're kind of a lighter duty and better for kind of the non-marring bark removal of like a nice clean edge that you want to leave exposed and sometimes the best thing is really just to remove some wood and that's what i'm doing here is i got my die grinder i got this little cuts all burr on there and i am physically removing that outer layer because i couldn't get any other tool to get down in there get it cleaned up and careful there by the way and using the die grinder and here i'm switching over to the sphere i can actually carve away the wood and that's because i couldn't remove this with any of the other tools and this is going to ensure it's just a perfect epoxy to wood bond no bark no rot no anything like that getting in the way of an absolutely perfect timeless bond i'm told a lot of people watch my videos because they just want to zone out and watch something come together they tell me they're not a woodworker they don't want to make a table they just want to zone out maybe even fall asleep while watching something come together which i actually think is super cool and i'm honored by that but there are people out there that watch my videos because they want to learn how to make these epoxy tables and the only problem with the youtube format is that i have to make it super interesting for the entire time i have to cut out things that are generally important to the epoxy table making process because people will click off it if i leave it in a normal video so i finally made a virtual epoxy workshop that's like three and a half hours long has everything you need in there to make your own wood and epoxy cable step-by-step guide there's pdf guide there's buying sheets so you can know which products to buy everything is in there nothing is left out and i will leave a link in the video description if you want some more information on that virtual epoxy workshop one thing i'm not gonna forget this time these little pvc rollers so we'll see how well these work oh oh if you're wondering what that was on the way back from getting the slab surfaced i had the rollers in there i had one tie-down strap and i wasn't used to how well those rollers can move a slab around and the slab almost fell all the way out of my truck and i wanted to get better footage of it but i also didn't want to go full influencers in the wild and have a tripod set up there with me stopping traffic in the highway with a slab behind my truck so that was one lesson learned use more than one tie-down after i sealed every crack crevasse top bottom and sides i was ready to start building the form and this table is going to be bigger than a 4x8 sheet of melamine which isn't a big deal and i know there's always people that comment that say that you can buy larger sheets of melamine i don't have any close to me and this is actually a really easy way to do it so what i do i take that 4x8 sheet of melamine and i just added about a foot and a half to it put a little bit of caulk in between and then some of this tyvek tape on top just to be safe when i work alone which i guess is basically all the time i sometimes like to build a form around the slab when i'm working with an oversized table like this on a smaller table i can build a form and then just drop that smaller slab directly in the middle of it and it's not a problem for a big slab like this if i tried to build a form the exact size and drop it right down in the middle there's a pretty good chance it would just break one of the sides off and give me all kinds of problems so what i do here is i build two sides apply my mold release and then just kind of scooch the slab over it does make adding the caulk a little bit more difficult because on the outer two pieces you can really only caulk it on the outside but in the end i find that this system works really well the attachment of the sides is pretty straightforward i pretty much always use four inch pieces for the sides this piece went on just as you would expect with a couple brad nails and some caulk the next piece though i ended up scooting it right up against the wood since i didn't want to cut this 4x8 sheet of melamine it saved me a little bit of work of having to rip off those two inches where i could just scoot that side up right next to the wood and then i cut a piece in to fill that gap and to make sure it didn't burst open during the epoxy pour had this other piece of scrap that i used to overlap it for a little bit more strength epoxy is one of those sneaky products that you don't realize that is actually only made by a couple of manufacturers and the manufacturer of this super clear epoxy is actually super clear epoxy or fgci which is written right there on the label what you might not realize though is that fgci actually makes the epoxy for a ton of different companies and it doesn't mean it's the same epoxy going into each bottle because each company can give them their own formula they want them to make but what it does mean is that super clear epoxy can make the best product at the most cost effective price and yes they are a long time supporter of my channel so do your own research but it's one of those kind of fun facts like i didn't know the manufacturer of my new planer oliver actually makes the planners for grizzly and shopfox and laguna and powermatic they're all made at that oliver factory so kind of a fun fact if you didn't know about the epoxy i have probably mixed a thousand gallons of epoxy and this is the first time it ever occurred to me to get the bucket off the ground to straighten my spine out for the mixing process and i don't accept responsibility for not knowing this i blame you guys you guys are always quick to point out all my safety shortcomings telling me to put the rollers in the back of my truck somebody should have pointed this out to me years ago this next bit is something that i've never actually done in an epoxy table build before this was about a day later you can see the epoxy is still really soft but it's actually kind of slick and smooth i waited maybe just a little bit too long it's not sticky so i took the plastic knife and i just went and i roughed it up a lot and i wouldn't do this on a clear pore or a transparent pour but since it's black this is going to give it more surface a better grip and whether it's completely necessary or not probably doesn't really matter but i thought i would just do it just to be safe and make sure i got a really really good chemical bond from one layer to the next i get a lot of questions about why do i do these pores in multiple layers sometimes and why do i do them in one layer another time and it's not entirely obvious when you should and when you shouldn't if you don't have much experience with this so if you don't know epoxy heats up when it cures so some people think that a four inch pour would take a really long time to cure however a four inch pour is going to generate a ton of heat and cure really really quickly whereas like a half inch pour is gonna not generate much heat and cure very very slowly so i like to limit my pores to anywhere from inch and three quarters to two and a half inches at the most anything over that and i highly recommend doing in two pours this time for the trip across town i am still gonna use the pvc rollers i like the idea of those in theory as long as i'm able to strap it in so just to be safe i'll add about two dozen or so ratchet straps to make sure this makes it all the way to creative woodworking as long as i've been posting videos where i go up to this woodworking shop in portland to rent time out on their big industrial tools you guys have been asking me in the comments how can i find a shop like that near my hometown and for the longest time i was like ah call around a cabinet shop or use the yellow pages if those still exist and finally after enough people ask me enough time went by i got the bright idea of thinking maybe there should be a website with all this information and so i finally made that website it's different than my regular website it's called makerbook.io and anybody can go on there upload your space big or small you can classify it as a hobby shop semi-professional or professional so you can rent time out maybe pay for some of those tools you can either use the tools yourself on the person's project or it can be more of like a makerspace environment and you should do your own research get your own liability insurance anything if you're going to have people using your tools but i think it's a really cool resource to get more tools out there available to more people and really lower that cost of entry to start woodworking a couple little bonus tips for you here is once you get your piece surface it's nice and smooth for the rest of the project keep a piece of this styrofoam underneath it you get it from home depot for like 10 bucks a sheet and that way when you're sliding it around flipping it over you won't put any dings or dents in it and also this plastic wrap will really help minimize any warping that can happen when you're leaving it overnight and not working on it also there's the sheet of melamine from the project i can actually use that on another project so it's not a total waste it's not a one-time use one of product nice things about working from home or at least 20 feet from home is that i can work late and i usually do but one of the downsides to working when other businesses aren't is you can't go buy things from businesses and that's what happened here is i was in the middle that cut and my vacuum started making a horrible noise and opened it up and that sack was about as hard as a sack of concrete because you could not wedge another speck of dust into it so i had to go my old school way of cleaning it out with my dust collector like i used to do when i was broke and now i try to keep bags on hand but for some reason this time i was out of bags ideally when you're shopping slabs you want to slab near the center of the tree but not in the dead center of the tree and it's not that you can't use them but it has what you see there is called the pith which is that little round circle which is the heart of the tree and that pith is prone to cracks and checks and other defects and other instabilities so this one as you can see there had some resin filled up and those cracks but i still wanted to add a little more stability to it so i'm adding kind of a larger oversized bow tie and just in hopes of keeping that pit together a little bit tighter as far as making and installing these bow ties it's something that i actually enjoy but it is pretty tedious each one takes me about 30 minutes to do so time spent doing this means i can't be doing something else and this last weekend i went to like a woodworking youtuber conference in atlanta and if you're wondering yes there is a woodworking youtuber conference and my dad said he goes what was there like four of you there and apparently there's a few more than that but one of the things that came up with a number of people is they use cnc's and some people give them a hard time about it just like people give me a hard time about everything else but the only reason i don't use the cnc is because i'm too intimidated because i don't know how to program it i don't know how to run it and i wonder what you guys think if i had a cnc to knock these out pretty quick would that take anything away from the video versus watching me do it by hand or is the cnc just as cool as doing it by hand i am probably like a lot of you out there who have small shops or small businesses in that we have a hard time letting go it seems like nobody's gonna care about your project as much as you care about it and anytime somebody else gets their hands on it something goes wrong and this steel base is the opposite of that i said a lot of things went wrong in this project but this is something that i can just send to my guy in kind of southernish oregon and know that it's going to come back perfect he's a young guy he's super busy he doesn't probably need the work and it's definitely not in my best interest to share his information because that means he's gonna get too busy for me but i think people should be rewarded when they do really good work and it's not any type of trade i pay him full price for everything but his name is bryce and steel i'll include a link to his shop in the video description below because he really is that good this is a trick that i came up with a couple years ago because i couldn't find a router bit big enough to cut these chamfers or chamfers or bevels or whatever you guys are going to mock me for saying it wrong and what i do is i just overlap that track slightly and i run a 22 degree cut which makes for a really interesting edge profile and it is a lot more difficult than it looks because it's really hard to get all four sides lined up just perfectly so what i actually just did was i ordered this comically oversized custom made router bit that i don't even know that i have a router big enough to turn so we'll see how that goes i use a ton of the ca glue and activator to fill all the tiny little pits and imperfections in the wood and the epoxy and the black stuff is pretty cool but it's so thin and it tends to stain the wood and the gel does a really good job of filling up these holes so what i've started doing is actually start mixing them and i don't know that you can mix every brand with every brand and i think one of these is starbound and one of the other ones is p2p and they seem to mix fine so if you want a little bit better way to fill these dark cracks and dark pits without staining the wood you can try mixing it up i mentioned in a past video that one of the best tools you can get to put out a better finished product is a wife with ocd because she will come out and make you feel really really bad about anything that is going to a customer that isn't perfect and if you're trying to sell tables like this one that's thirteen thousand five hundred dollars you kind of need that and i'm not a very ocd person by nature but having her there to look over my shoulder and make sure that i spend enough time filling all of the little imperfections is really really critical and at first it kind of stings but i've met a lot of better woodworkers than me that put out really kind of marginal products and it's things that i know they can fix but they just don't for whatever reason and the reason probably is that wife and here's some more of those imperfections i came back noticed that they were really tiny so actually carve out a little bit of it and that will allow that ca glue to fill up that gap instead of just sitting on top of that tiny little hole and again it's just one of those things that if you want to get the top dollar get the most for your product just make it as nice as you possibly can i usually budget between one and two days to get all these imperfections filled and go through all my sanding progressions and if you're curious i generally start at 100 grit go to 120 150 180 and then i put my finish on and i get a lot of questions for people to ask why don't i go from 100 to 180 or why don't i just start at 180 and that's kind of a longer more boring conversation but the short answer is that's how the sandpaper is designed to be used it's supposed to go up by those grit increments also i get questions people ask why don't i go to 400 degree or why don't i go to 1000 or 4 000 grit and the short answer is you get better protection with this particular finish leaving at those lower grids if you use this on like a floor for example they recommend leaving it at like 120 grit now you might think that this looks a little shocking and this is rubio monaco this is one of their colors i've never used one of their colors on a full-size table before and yes it does look like black paint right now and i was a little nervous i was glad that i did those samples because those gave me a much better idea what to expect so i knew it wasn't gonna look like black paint like it looks right here but i i will admit i was slightly nervous at this point when i was making those samples i tried a number of different methods to get the desired look that we wanted and the look that we liked best was achieved by letting this finish sit for a day or two coming back sanding with a maroon pad like i do normally with my tables and then we add one coat of the rubio pure and this pure is just the natural no colors no dyes no stains added what this does was it leaves the color the look that we like but brings out that natural grain and really just completely evens out the sheen i mentioned earlier how hard it is for me to relinquish control and i wish i could take this from the slab to their living room without having to use anybody else and a couple problems with that is i am first off not strong enough to move this table on my own second off these particular clients are in florida so that means i got to ship it which i usually have to ship and it's something that's always really stressful so i build an absolute world-class crate i might not be a world-class woodworker but i built world-class crates and the styrofoam foam is something that i have really become fond of and you can actually cut it with a table saw but there is one potential problem anybody know what happened and if you own a saw stop there's a decent chance you've seen this before and if you don't know a saucer is a table saw that won't cut you and so if as soon as it senses conductivity whether that's your finger or apparently a piece of foil on an insulation board it'll stop all right i hope you guys appreciate what i do for you and i intentionally triggered this saw stop to show you just how this cartridge works and if you actually believe that you are a really really true fan but if you're curious here's what we got we got this little aluminum cartridge and as soon as it senses anything conductive like your finger it triggers and stops the blade basically instantly and i don't know actually why it triggered on part of the foam board and not other parts so maybe someone out there is smart enough to leave me a comment but sometimes the blade is lost this one i bet we'll be able to salvage i'll have to take it to my sharpening service get it straightened get it re-sharpened maybe replace it tooth or two replace the cartridge like 80 bucks so all in all kind of a bummer but lesson learned the first house i ever bought was a foreclosure down in texas and it was a disaster everything was wrong with it but it was 92 000 so i'm not sure what i should really be expecting and i had some plumbing problems i had two different plumbers show up to look at a job and both of them just looked at it and said nope i'm not doing it not for any amount of money and finally got a third plumber and he just looked at it and just goes yeah no problem and i was surprised and i said isn't this a big pain and he goes yeah everything i do is a pain and i really like that and that's the attitude i try to model myself after which is easier said than done but if you can just accept that this is the job we're gonna have things that go wrong yes it's 90 bucks yes it's a blade yes it slowed me down this happened on a weekend i couldn't get a new cartridge until monday but everything we do is a pain it will make you feel so much better you won't feel bad for yourself and you can just concentrate on the work you might be starting to wonder how i'm going to get this giant crate out of my little shop and that's a very very fair concern and this could end up being one of those winnie the pooh situations where it gets too big and then can't actually get out and i did just buy a full-size forklift and by that i mean a pretty much the smallest forklift you can buy because that's all i could afford and it's a 1994 yale forklift that i've got these big forklift extensions for so i actually again at this point don't even know if it will get it out of the shop i ordered these giant fork extensions from an online company that i'd never used before and i'm so lazy these days that if someone doesn't have apple checkout i almost always just leave because i hate forms that much but this supplier was by far the best price and even had same day shipping so i went ahead and i had been using robiform for a little while up to this point but this was the first real world test i was able to input the identity i had previously created generate a secure password and make payment in just a few seconds now that login information and payment info is saved on my different desktop browsers my pc laptop and my iphone it's everything that chrome and apple try to do but it works across platforms every time not only that but they've been around for over 20 years have one owner so no shareholders to answer to own their own servers which is probably why they've never been hacked as well all for about two dollars a month or 30 off that if you click the link in the video description there are always a lot of really good questions in the comments about these builds and i try to think of those in advance so you can answer them in the video but i'm going to do something a little bit different and this video i'm working on a blog just to tell the story about it because it's been like a year and a half in the process of making this table so if there's a frequent question that keeps coming up i'll make sure to include that in the blog i'll also try to answer it in the comments and if you want to know what this looked like side by side with the previous kind of sister slab to this table there it is one of them very red the other one kind of looks purple-ish in this camera which doesn't look so much like that in person but in the end i would love to know what you guys think and i always try to give a little bit of credit to people make it all the way to the end of the video so start your question with either better or worse to let me know what you think of this color

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 2,790,519

Keywords: black walnut table, contemporary desk, desk with drawer, diy desk, diy epoxy, diy epoxy table, ecopoxy, epoxy art, epoxy desk, epoxy river table, epoxy table, flowyline design, how to make epoxy table, how to make river table, liquid glass epoxy, live edge desk, modern desk, resin table, river desk, river table, slab furniture, walnut desk

Id: bq-8yHgjqv0

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022