Use Half the Epoxy In Your Table Project

hey this is game with Blacktail studio and this week I'm gonna show you a pretty cool trick to use half as much epoxy in your table project where you can take a thin slab like this and essentially double the thickness to one like this the main reason I wanted to try this project out here is because I had some really cool off tests from some of the prettiest English walnut I've ever seen and you see in this table here and I wanted to make use of every last bit of it but I didn't have a whole bunch of it left I just had this one kind of long chunk and it was kind of thick but it wasn't very wide so I wanted to figure a way how to incorporate this and make an entire desk out of it using a one pretty small piece like this for those of you that are new to my videos I'm gonna take you through the entire process of how to make one of these epoxy resin tables if you've already watched my videos or if you just want to see this edge trick you can go ahead and skip straight ahead to the six minute and fifty second Mike and that'll get you right to that edge trick but if the rescue I will show you everything I know on everything I can teach you about making one of these tables from start to finish you can see so far all I've really done is gotten each side flat and cut it slightly oversize it's gonna end about sixty by thirty and so now I'm taking it over to Risa and resawing is just basically sawing in half and you do need a bandsaw to do this properly mine is capable of thirteen inches which is pretty good for a small shop bandsaw if you don't have one you really got to go kind of beg or borrow to use one if you do want to cut anything over you know just three or four inches which is about what a table saw is capable of I do have plenty opinions on which tools are best and I try to include links to everything in the video description to all have things like the blade I'm using here that what it whatever that green thing is which is actually a bow products feather pros pretty neat little tool to help with resize but you can see there a cool thing about the book match is it makes just this almost mirror image of itself in the end and it's just a really cool effect that you can use anything from drawer fronts to entire tables like this I'm use my jointer here to get a nice perfectly flat edge before the glue up if you don't have a jointer you can actually make some jigs with your table saw or even a circular saw to get a really nice glue joint so don't think that you have to have a jointer for this part and here I'm just marking some kind of arbitrary points for my dominoes and again dominoes are super nice but you can actually use dowels for this which are much much cheaper the dominoes are definitely better but dowels work almost as well the Domino is a luxury tool I think this one costs about a thousand dollars now which is a huge investment if you do any amount of joinery it is definitely worth it if you don't do a ton of joinery then you can get by with just doing some dowel jigs from time to time but what I'm doing here is just a quick test fit to make sure that I went deep enough with my Domino's it's not going to stop when I get right in the middle of my glue up because I've done that before and that can be very time-consuming to make right you see there we've got a perfect fit so it is gonna be ready for glue they fit so well it can be really hard to take apart sometimes though for glue I'm using the tight bond three which is a little bit more expensive than the normal glue but it dries just super hard and it's actually and it's waterproof too which I hope this table doesn't get exposed to any water but it is kind of my go-to wood glue if you're looking for a good wood glue the rest of this glue up is pretty standard we're just brushing it on the other side we're going to fill the other Domino holes with some glue snug it up and I am gonna use parallel clamps familiar parallel clamps they just clamp at much less of an angle they're not perfectly parallel but they do prevent this glue up from kind of gluing an angle so they're my go-to you don't have to use them though a pipe clamp would work almost as well and I did take this table up to my resin table workshop a couple times a year about four times you actually now I host a workshop at goby walnut in Portland and people come from all over the country and actually we had our first Canadian at the last one and we have somebody from India actually coming to the next workshop so if you're interested in learning how to do this hands-on how to actually work with table yourself we build a table in real time we start with half of a project do the epoxy pour and then we finish it previously started project through the second half of the class so it's a pretty fun time a lot of cool people good chance for networking I'll include a link in the video description if you want some more info on it but it's definitely pretty fun time if you want some more experience on how to make these resin tables yourself this is a good time to mention that you do need to plan a little bit ahead if you do want to try this epoxy table trick to double your thickness because what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be cutting a thin strip off the edge flipping it over gluing it on the underside which is gonna cut any transparency you have in your epoxy and and so if you're gonna do like a transparent blue it probably wouldn't work very well I'm using a jet-black resin so it's gonna work perfectly well for me so you do need to choose a good solid color that isn't gonna have any transparency to do this trick the way that I'm doing it anyway and since I normally work out of my house and I host these workshops up at go be walnut what I do is that'll leave it there for the three days for it to cure because I don't want to have it sloshing around in the back of my truck so once it is cured I get it back to my home shop and then I can continue on with the process going through here I'm using these dental syringes which are a pretty nice little tool for filling small cracks like this and I'm using a faster drying epoxy I'm not using that three-day slow cure epoxy that I used for the entire table this one will dry overnight so I don't have to wait another three days to a week just and you know fill some small cracks here's a good trick for seeing it was hard enough I use a plastic knife and it shouldn't dent it it can scratch it a little bit but it shouldn't dent it now that I'm ready to disassemble the mold you'll see that what actually sticks to the mold is not the epoxy it's the caulk that I used around the base of the melamine there and so that's why I'm having to actually pop this off of I did use a mold release I'm not sure he caught that earlier but you always want to use a mold release when you're doing these epoxy pours these little wood wedges are freeing it from a little bit of caulk that had stuck around the edge once it's free can pop it up you can see they're nice super black epoxy if this is your first time watching one of my videos first off welcome I really appreciate you watching it if you like what you see I would really appreciate if you hit that subscribe button up in the corner it really helps my channel out lets me make more content and it doesn't even cost anything and for those of you that have watched my videos before you probably notice that I did go to my regular industrial shop where they let me borrow their planer for about 30 minutes so that's how I got it nice and smooth out flat moving on to the sanding process which if you would like more information on the sanding process I actually have a blog but I've done a couple different posts on the sanding and finishing aspect of how to get a perfect finish even in a dusty shop so I'll include links to have that in the video description below too if you want kind of a in depth deep dive how to finish a table in your shop even the epoxy tables which can be some of the hardest to finish in a dusty shop anyway at first then Oh better part of a few hours filling these tiny little imperfections with that CA glue and sanding and filling the imperfections and sanding I get it all the way up to the 320 grit and now I'm actually ready to start that edge trick that we talked about at the very beginning I ended up marking my lines an inch and a half and so - the blade thickness it'll be just under an inch and a half probably but one an inch and 3/8 so I'm just basically cutting a strip off here just actually taking a couple passes but I thought I'd save you time with having to watch cutting another strip off the other side make sure you do left side then right side not the 90-degree sides first cuz that will screw up the length of your pieces so cut the two side pieces now you can cut the two end pieces and what you're left there is with four pretty thin strips again I'm going to my fast drying epoxy this is a West system epoxy a little bit of black dye in it to match the black dye that I used in the regular table and when you're clamping epoxy don't over clamp you can actually squeeze out too much epoxy and compromise the bond so just kind of nice and snug you won't I feel to leave some of that epoxy in there the part you do want to take some time on is these end pieces you want to cut them and you want them to be really just as tight as absolutely possible you want to just have them barely snug in there and that's gonna give you the tightest fit and I did use wood glue on the wood portions epoxy on the epoxy portions you didn't want to get that black on the wood and I'll show you how I screwed something up here at the end that I got all the way to the finished point and had to completely redo it but I'll show you that at the end and just to make it look a little more interesting I decided to add a 30 degree bevel I was gonna say a bevel but it's actually chamfer everybody likes it correct me if I say the wrong thing but I'm adding a thirty degree chamfer to the edge of this table just to make it kind of a little bit more modern looking and there you go you have a thirty degree chamfer that ended up looking pretty nice and to smooth these edges out it just took a little bit of sanding I used a firm pad got the hundred grit here and just taking out those saw marks and you might wonder why I didn't use a router and I couldn't get a router bit big enough to cut that tall of a chamfer so I had to use my tracks out there you can see we have this sanded up to the 320 it looks pretty good at this point and it will be ready for finish because the finish process can be so in-depth I'm gonna skip it in this particular video but I will include a link in the video description below on a full deep dive on how to get a perfect in your own dusty shop I'll talk more about this plywood piece in just a second but there was something that I messed up that I just couldn't ignore anymore I had it all completely finished and there is this black epoxy seam that I just couldn't ignore I thought it was gonna go away I thought I could hide it and I can't so now I have to do something that table is completely finished and I have to do something to cover that up and it's not the most elegant solution to put the boat-header I generally like to have a bow tie where it would be more traditionally necessary like a knit crack but it's all I could think of to cover that particular blemish up and what that was was just a little bit of black resin that was left after planning it and when I flipped that edge over it basically doubled the thickness of it and made it really really visible so I had to get a little bit creative with my trim router there on how to route that out getting the chisels out and I probably sound pretty repetitive but I actually have a really detailed video on these bowties and another video on the inlay process if you want that I'll include a link to that in the video description as well too but this was the solution I came up with to cover up my screw up and some of you probably noticed that it looked like the table was actually finished when I started this process and you are absolutely correct so had to sand it all the way down and then completely refinish the whole table to get everything to match just perfectly again but we're here we are back to the support and this is just because the table was pretty thin in the end that I wanted to have more support I had threaded inserts and these furniture bolts that are gonna hold everything together I did account for wood movement so there's a little bit of breathing room in there and I headed a French cleat so it could either be wall mounted or I also added legs to it so it could be a desk or wall mounted because this is actually gonna be on display up at gobe walnut and didn't want people setting stuff on it so I decided to put it up on the wall over there if you are gonna attach anything it doesn't have to be just to apply wood base like this but he would base don't use like bolts like bolts are for decks don't use them and nice furniture use these threaded inserts you can see here I'm just marking my holes with a little Brad point bit so that way everything lines up exactly exactly right doing the same thing on the other side and that way I know everything's gonna fit and make sure you use the race has bit with these threaded inserts that's the biggest mistake people make is using a bit that is too small and then it causes chip out when you go to threaded in so make sure you use the appropriate size bit for your threaded inserts I'm adding a little bit of just again some that tight bond through wood glue it's not made for metal and wood but it is gonna give a little bit of lubrication and a little bit more security to make sure they stay in place I was really excited with the legs I found for this I didn't know what I wanted but they were exactly what I wanted in the end they are by flowy line designed by Alex Jew and they're kind of a minimalist style and he has some of the coolest most original designs I see endless amount of legs every day and he still surprised me with the designs he comes up with so in a world that everything is so repeatable he actually has some truly original designs so here are the finished shots of the bow tie mistake that I made but the rest of the table and overall I would love to hear what you guys think of these legs cuz I think they're awesome on this particular table I think they go well with that bevel that you really can't see any of the flaws from that flippin the edge I think the legs complement it I think the black works well with the black don't want to just take my opinion though I'd love to hear what you have to think on the topic as well doh so please please let me know in the comments and if you liked what you saw please subscribe for more videos just like this one thanks again

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 1,860,693

Keywords: epoxy table, how to video, diy epoxy table, epoxy resin table, river table, epoxy river table, blacktail studio, diy projects, diy epoxy art, woodworking, diy woodworking, woodworking hack, steel table legs, how to woodworking, diy desk, how to make desk

Id: Lezh7QxehcA

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020