This Wood Used to Get Burned, Now It's The Most Expensive

hey this is cam with blacktail studio and this week we shop for some slabs we drop some slabs we make a pretty expensive table from one slab and i finally resort to needles stay tuned i don't often show the buying process of these really big wood slabs but i don't really know why because i think it's really interesting and it can be really useful if you don't have a ton of experience shopping wood like this and i can make a whole video or probably have a whole channel just on buying wood but the main thing you need to know is that wood needs to be dried to equilibrium and that's just a fancy word for saying it just needs to be completely dry and around oregon that means around nine to twelve percent so i have a pinless moisture meter here it's sensing the moisture down inside the wood and it was reading anywhere from eight and a half or so to 11 which is absolutely perfect for this environment and depending on where you are arizona might be six percent and florida might be 12 but it's going to be somewhere in that relative range i have to admit when i'm up at a big operation like gobi walnut i get pretty inspired because if you need help loading something you just grab someone if you need 10 guys to flip a slab you just grab them if you need a forklift or you need two forklifts you just go grab them and then i go back to my little one-man shop where nobody would probably even hear me scream if it got crushed under a slab and i have to admit i love it i still i do i absolutely love working by myself i don't really want to trade it for anything i could use help but then i feel like we might lose some of the charm of watching me struggle like this and i don't know maybe if i get a video person someday i'll give them like nature documentary instructions where they aren't allowed to intervene under any circumstance and if i'm stuck there like a turtle on my back under a slab they can't help me and speaking of a turtle and flip-flops i do have a story later in the video that involves losing an appendage and a turtle so stay tuned for that the slab that i went with is about 10 feet long which is right at about three meters and the wide portion is about 60 inches wide which is about one and a half meters down to the narrow portion is about 36 inches which is a little bit under one meter and the finished table is going to be 96 inches which is about two and a half meters by 42 inches which is right about one meter and i hope all of you international people are pleased with that because i did all that from memory it did take me about 11 takes though while i don't feel that i am yet a world-class woodworker one thing that i do feel that i'm pretty good at is working with clients and i know that a lot of the people that watch my channel have small shops or are looking to make projects like this for a bit of a side hustle or maybe a new career and one piece of advice that i can offer all of you is keep your clients involved i have yet to meet the client that didn't want to be a part of selecting the wood that didn't want to be a part of choosing the layout all of them really really like it and it also makes my life so much easier because we know exactly what the table is going to look like when we finish we don't have any surprises they don't say oh why didn't you do this or why'd you do that because we did everything together i gave myself about a two inch buffer on the length and the width to make sure i had enough room to cut it down exactly to size and some of you might have seen this video a couple weeks ago this is a really cool elm burl slab that i made a desk for these same clients a couple weeks ago so i'll include a link to that in the video description as well i realize that i am extremely fortunate to have access to all the tools that i currently have but this hasn't always been the case because i don't come from a woodworking background my dad didn't have tools like this i don't have a family friend or a mentor that let me use their tools like most of you i just slowly pieced my tool collection together and really hasn't been that long just a couple years and before that one of my favorite things was a jig that i made for my milwaukee traxxa which cost like 110 dollars so it enabled me to break down big slabs like this and cut perfectly straight lines but the jig only cost me about five dollars in mdf whereas this track saw cost me about two thousand dollars so i made a youtube short on how to make that tracksaw jig that i didn't invent it's been around for 30 or 40 years but it is really useful and really easy to make it only takes i don't know maybe 20 or 30 minutes and is essentially free so i'll include a link to that in the video description below as well if you're wondering what i was doing with the angle grinder there i was having a hard time getting this piece placed over as far as i wanted because there's kind of a big chunk jutting out from the bottom of the big slab so just use that angle grinder carved it down a little bit we're going to be using black epoxy so you won't see it down there at the bottom of the slab anyway and it allowed me to place this slab exactly where i wanted it there is no shortage of people out there who are sick of epoxy tables but one group of people who will never be tired of them are the wood suppliers and for the very simple reason about three years ago a slab like this would have probably cost me around 900 and today it was hard for me to find and i was lucky to be able to spend 2 700 on this slab right here and my wood supplier he tells me all the time he goes man he goes a few years ago these slabs used to get cut up into tiny little pieces and they could maybe sell the shorts most of it went in the burn bin or the wood chipper and today he said this is all people want they want these character pieces they want the big cracks they want the knots they want the voids and now he can actually charge for all that wood that he used to put in the fireplace and i do understand people not liking the plastic aspect of epoxy and the fact that it can be dangerous and you know it's going to be around forever it's plastic so i get that but at the same time there is the advantage that some of these pieces that would have been burned are now being able to be repurposed into really pretty nice pieces of furniture i have a lot of so-called rules of epoxy table making and these are different than tips and tricks because i feel like there's an endless amount of tips and tricks you can always get a little bit better you can find a little bit better finish technique or a little bit better method for sealing your edges or not sealing your edges or all kinds of things like that the rules i have are the things that you can't really come back from the things that can cause catastrophic failure in your epoxy table project and one of those rules that i have is to leave your slab as thick as possible as long as possible meaning don't plane it down before you do your epoxy pour because you might need that extra thickness in the end and so what i'm doing here is i'm breaking that rule and this is what i feel like everybody that writes rules breaks their own rules and i'm hoping i don't regret this in the end but what i need is i need a flat surface to pour the epoxy i don't want it really rocking in the mold so took it up to creative woodworking they're running it through their planer slash wide belt sander and giving me a couple of flat sides and it's still about two and three quarters inch thick so it should be plenty thick but we will see if i end up regretting that in the end this part of the build starts to get pretty fun for me because now i can finally kind of sort of a little bit move the slab around relatively easily and that's at least until i put about a hundred pound epoxy form on it with about 90 pounds of epoxy then it will be incredibly unfun but at least for now i'm having a good time and all i'm doing here is i'm prepping this to make a big mess because i'm going to be sealing both sides of this slab with the liquid glass deep pore epoxy i have sealed my slabs a number of different ways over the years and this is really my preferred method it's a little bit more expensive it's a little bit messier and a little bit more time consuming but i do feel like it yields the best possible result and what sealing the slab is going to do it's going to do several things actually one is it's going to prevent any staining this black dyed epoxy is really really easy to stain the wood so it's going to prevent any of that color bleed and another thing that's going to do is going to stabilize any of these little soft areas that i wasn't able to carve out and then it's also going to really seal both sides of the slab and prevent it from warping and twisting in the mold and that's one of the most important things and that's actually another one of my rules of epoxy table making is you need to seal both sides so when it's sitting in the mold the underside isn't sitting there sealed with epoxy and the top is bare wood causing it to warp and twist as it cures in the mold for a couple of weeks so i highly recommend using the same liquid glass deep pore epoxy seagull both sides and then try to do your pour about 12 hours later as that epoxy is starting to set up but not yet fully cured my dad and one of his friends happened to be up at my shop right when it was time to put this table in the mold and it was still quite heavy and i got in a minute i was pretty impressed that 70 some year old pops was still able to lift this really heavy slab i just had to put him in those comically oversized coveralls so he wouldn't get covered in this wet epoxy got it slid in there and now i'll kind of finish the form out while it's in place and i'll need to let this caulk here for about 24 hours before i try any epoxy pour because i've made that mistake before do not try to pour too soon after caulking your molds i've lost track of how many of these black epoxy tables i've made over the years but i'd say it's over 50 or so and every table that i've made up to this point i just got the black dye i squeezed a bunch into the bucket until i thought that it was dark enough and i just called that good and the problem with that is that i never really had a system where if i needed to do a small top off if i had to just say add one gallon or so i had no way of measuring that and so finally here it is here's my solution and needles apparently sometimes are the answer and this is one that i just got from walgreens and i didn't even know that you could buy a syringe without a prescription i figured that i had to get a prescription or go pretend to be a heroin addict to get the free clean needles and this cost me a dollar i got it at walgreens i think it's an 18 gauge one and it's three milliliters so what i did is i added three milliliters of this trans-tent dye for three gallons of epoxy and even i can do that math so if i have to do any touch-ups i know that it's one milliliter per gallon and i think one milliliter is actually 20 drops so you can even break it down a little bit further from there i mentioned earlier that i'm using the liquid glass deep pore epoxy and first off they have been a big supporter of my channel for several years now so thanks so much to them for continuing to support me but make no mistake i would not use a second or third best epoxy in a 3 000 slab of wood that i'm charging the client way more than that for so it just wouldn't be worth it to me to have a potential risk of something going wrong with a slab so i am very fortunate to have the very best epoxy support me and i continue to support them by telling other people to go buy their epoxy because it is the best one i've used it's my favorite one it's the only one that i've never had any adverse reactions with now depending on how observant you are you might have noticed i didn't actually seal the center section the part where the epoxy is actually going to be touching which is really the most important part that i should be sealing and i have a good reason for it and i'll try to explain it here and that is that i am doing this in two epoxy pours meaning i'm going to wait till this point when it's really just set up to do this second pour since it was such a thick epoxy pour that i wanted to seal that edge and give just enough time to prevent the staining but still get that good chemical bond where it's still kind of sticky and i don't have to go back and scuff it up so that is why i did this in two pours and why i didn't seal that center section until that first section was poured and i hope that makes sense if anything i ever say doesn't make sense feel free to ask me in the comments i am actually really good i read every one of those any question in there i pretty much respond to all of them so feel free to ask me any follow-up questions on that after i get my pore topped off i go back with the brush and i brush the sides just to make sure i have a really good bond and i kind of free any bubbles that are clinging to the sides and from there it's just a matter of waiting and you really need to let these cure for about two or three weeks it's actually another one of my rules of epoxy table making if you watch my videos regularly you'll know that i wear a lot of flip-flops in the shop and a lot of tennis shoes and this draws up a fair bit of controversy for a lot of viewers that really don't like that so much so that in a video earlier in the year i made a joke saying that if i lost a tone in the shop i think i'd still be able to lead a pretty happy life with only nine toes but that's when it got a little bit unusual because i got an email from a guy who said that he lost a toe noodling for catfish and first off if you don't know what noodling for catfish is it's kind of like fox hunting but for people from the southern u.s and he got his toe in a hole and a turtle bit one of his toes off and now he articulated that he can no longer shower or walk down a hill and i don't know exactly how that factor is in but i will take his word for it so i got a solution i think everybody can get behind because another concerned party was ariat workwear and while i don't know the area was turtle noodling going to lose a toad not be able to shower concerned they were just overall generally concerned for the welfare of my fee so they let me go on a bit of a pretty woman shopping spree on their website and now i have tons of boots i got some awesome ones for the yard i got some really cool everyday leather boots and i even got a carbon toe boot which i didn't know was a thing but apparently it's like a steel toe boot but super light so hopefully i'll be prepared for anything that comes my way although i didn't see a catfish noodling carbon toe boot in their library so for now i'll probably just stay out of the mississippi if there's any way you have access to an industrial shop like this to flatten your table after the epoxy is cured i highly highly recommend it because there is no match for the finish for the time versus something like a cnc or a router sled and even though most people won't have access to a big shop like this you might be surprised that there could be one near you and i've been toying around with the idea of creating like a database on my website where i have a website where people can kind of submit their own places where even if you're a smaller shop you could list hey i have these tools available and i rent them out for 50 bucks an hour i rent them out for 100 bucks an hour and that way if you're in cincinnati you might have a shop right close to you that you don't even know is available and i think it could be cool i don't know if you guys would use it but if you would leave me a comment let me know if i should go forward with that kind of national database of woodshop rental areas i'm using my track saw here to get it to its final dimensions and like i said before you don't have to use a track saw you could use a regular circular saw with a straight edge you may not use a circular saw with no straightedge i don't care how clean of a line you think you cut on that plywood nobody is good enough with a circular saw to cut this to the final dimension so use a straight edge and a circular saw or a track saw or maybe a really big table saw but just make sure you get a nice good straight cut and i like to do this table base mounting before i start my finish sanding because you're always going to kind of slide this metal around on the table and cause a few little scuffs so all that will be sanded out after it's mounted this table base is entirely new to me but it's already one of my all-time favorites it is a really cool contemporary design by a company called flowy line design and luckily for me the mounting system for it is essentially the same as all table legs meaning it's a quarter inch plate with some elongated holes that allow for this seasonal wood movement so all i have to do is mark my holes drill a bunch of holes with the correct size bit for my threaded inserts and a good little tip is use this little chamfer tool here a little countersink to ease those edges and that'll prevent these threaded inserts from kind of chipping out at the top and after that you just add a good steel threaded insert and i don't recommend using the zinc ones they tend to kind of strip away these good solid steel ones work really really well and from there it's just using some quarter 20 machine thread screws and just bolt it on just get it snug and then back it off a hair so that wood can move seasonally something else that i don't feel like i've done a very good job of explaining in past videos is how the sanding process works you can see those vertical lines are from that wide belt center they're really aggressive sanding and this is my rotek sander it's a very aggressive hand sander but the circular rotex lines remove those vertical lines so i rotax the entire slab remove all those now i go to my finished sander and that finish sander will remove all the rotex lines so it's just kind of going step by step in aggressiveness some of you out there are probably watching this video hoping to learn how to make an epoxy table yourself and i think that's great and i try to include as much information as i possibly can however it's kind of hard sometimes to really include every single step in one 20 minute video so for the past several years i've been hosting these in-person epoxy table workshops and they've been a lot of fun but kovit has really slowed things down and i figured in a virtual world like this i need something better so i have just started the process of making a virtual workshop where it's going to be like a three or four hour intensive workshop where we go through every single step of making an epoxy table and not just a black one we'll do colored ones and clear ones and every step i can think of and that way you guys can do it on your time you can do it virtually you can do it anywhere in the world i'm actually hiring like a film crew for this so it's going to be like a whole thing it's going to be a complete investment for me so i hope you guys like it i'm just starting with it i'm hoping to have it out by the end of the year and if you want some more information on that i'll include a link to sign up to my email list i don't spam you i also don't think i've ever even used my email list but that's how i will let you guys know when that workshop is actually ready this finish here that i'm using is called rubia monocoat it's a hardwood floor finish but it's very very natural feeling you get to feel all of the grains and i have a really nice big buffer here i don't think that it's entirely necessary for this particular finish it does save my arm a little bit of a workout but you could just wipe it in and wipe it off and that's what i'm doing here to remove it i just take these blue shop rags and just make sure you remove every single bit of it they say you can leave too much on but you can't remove too much so you just keep wiping until that rag is clean and i do two coats of this ruby monaco i do have a finished video on that if you're curious then i wait a week and now i've been adding this black for a ceramic finish which is just kind of that wax on top of your finish and it goes on very easy too also bumps up the sheen bumps up the protection just an extra layer of protection and something i've really enjoyed putting on my tables lately the week that i was finishing this table we were dog sitting my mom's 10 month old yellow lab who was adorable but also had a lot of energy and not every member of the family was as excited as the rest of us to have her staying there and that is why our cat was hanging out with me out in the shop and she rarely comes out here but she seemed to be out here the entire week and bonus credit to anybody who can tell me the name of the cat because this is actually not her first appearance in a video normally i take extreme pride in how i create my tables and since these guys were local i really feel like i let everybody down because this looks basically how i wrap my holiday presents for family members just a bunch of blankets and some plastic wrap wrapped around it loosely and it was fine for going across town but i don't know that i would have wanted to go much further than that and luckily for me they were able to help me carry it in and the installation went really really easily it was just set it on that flowy line base crawl underneath attach some bolts and that is it so i need a little bit of help opinion from you guys i bought a couple of these slabs from the same tree the first one about a year and a half ago because i had some clients that we found the deepest most chocolate brown slab we could find because the one thing they said is they wanted a walnut slab with no red hues to it and when it was fresh cut it was very chocolate brown and now this slab appears to have a fair amount of red in it but i'm colorblind so maybe i'm not the best judge of it so i need to know from you guys if i need to address this when it comes to their slabs so every week i like to give a little bit of credit to people to make it all the way to the end of the video so start your question or comment with red or not red to let me know if there are red hues in this slab and then i'll know that i have to do something about it for their table and i really hope they don't watch this video before i figure out what to do thanks so much

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 1,531,742

Rating: 4.9204164 out of 5

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, do it yourself, how to, how to build a dining table

Id: TOko1mG2DGI

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021