Using Rocks to make a Bench

today we are cutting rocks like literally chopping them in two so that we can use them as the base for a bench that's carved out of a reclaimed wood beam the goal is to make a high-end piece of furniture out of inexpensive materials only using a few basic power tools let's start with the stones these are white lapis which I bought for about eight dollars each I want to put a flat side on each one and I want them to be the same height so I've built some little nests around them to hold them up in the vertical position just using scrap wood after checking to make sure my table was level I then ran a laser across them now I can just trace a line over the laser and just rotate them around so they have a level Mark around the entire circumference the majority of this project is fabricated with a single angle grinder I put on a diamond blade and just cut right along the line now the angle grinder only Cuts in about an inch and a quarter or so before the housing starts to bump into the stone now the question becomes how to separate operate the two pieces since I can't cut all the way through with a four and a half inch blade the crude and wasteful way is just to obliterate the smaller half that you don't want now that I had a clean score line all the way around I could just make cuts on the throwaway end and then use a hammer to chip the pieces off this took about two hours of Total labor time but I had to go slower because the blade on the angle grinder kept getting really hot this blade was about 32 dollars and obliterating this one part of the stone used up about half of its life the closer I got to the cut line the slower I had to go just to make sure I was creating a nice flat surface that would sit firmly on the floor for the second Rock I decided to risk it all and to try to crack it along the score line so I just shoved in a piece of 1 8 inch thick steel and then pounded it in and split it into two pieces [Music] now with this rock I did deepen the score line by running it across my tabletop tile saw the break was pretty clean and I tried out this aluminum carving disc that's meant for stone and this was a much more effective tool for smoothing out the cut surface Link in the description I want the curved piece of wood to look like it's just balancing on top of the stone so to secure the pieces together I'm going to use a steel pin I'm using my Ryobi hammer drill to drill a hole in the end and I oversized the hole the pin is going to be 5 8 of an inch in diameter but I worked my way up to a three-quarter inch diameter drill bit more on that later the difference between a hammer drill and just a normal drill with a masonry bit is pretty incredible that being said I still think it's a little bit easier to gradually work your way up in terms of the bits diameter the construction of my new house is almost done and there was a leftover piece of a 6 by 12 Bean it had been sitting in the dirt and they had used it as sort of a sawhorse so it was pretty nicked up it has a lot of split ends but still is a really substantial beefy piece of wood so I started sketching out my design right onto the wood itself I used a Sharpie for this just so I can see the marks clearly through all the dust and I just start with a very rough outline I made a couple of circles where I think the rocks are going to meet the wood and that just tells me to leave as much material as possible here and then I just drew some angled lines along the sides of the beam now I do love some angle grinder carving but it does make a lot of dust so what I like to do here is to make a bunch of cuts with my Japanese pole saw and then get one of the machetes out of my collection and start hacking away to really hog out the rough shape this is really fun dare I say therapeutic and you can remove a lot of material real fast now I'm not trying to proceed vision card with the machete so I kept my hacking within about an inch of where I want the finished profile to be I have a rough idea for the design in my head so I nibble away at first then I look at it and then I go oh gotta remove a lot more material here and so I might so sometimes I step up to a faster way of making a cut and just use the circular saw foreign I really like these spiny carving discs that go onto an angle grinder they've removed material really fast and they don't chip out the wood too much so now I can just blend away all the top marks and start to see the smooth Contours of the piece everything was looking a little bit too chunky so I drew some more aggressive lines so I could really start to taper those outer edges and get them to be nice and thin I really want this piece to look like the wood is wide at the top and then flows down to a curve that just gently touches the curve of the stone so the bench is currently upside down and you can see these two islands forming on either ends where the Stone's going to touch originally I want to keep as much of the length as possible but after doing a lot of the carving I saw that the splits were going pretty far down so I did have to sacrifice about two inches on either end and when you see how easily these end pieces break I think you'll understand why I had to do this foreign I drilled three quarter inch diameter holes on the center of each of the wood islands and I drilled these three and a half inches deep now this wood has some cracks in it is a little bit splintery so I do want to leave a healthy amount of wood around where the steel pin is going to go into the wood but I don't want to look too chunky in the profile so I just gently rounded over the islands into a nice gradual Hill this involved a lot of sanding with the orbital sander and 60 grit pads I went through about five or six of them steel into stone is fine but I feel a steel rod right into a wood hole would get wobbly over time so I cut some steel tube that's three and a quarters inch in diameter that slides right over this Solid 5 8 inch Rod I picked up these steel pieces from Home Depot which is kind of an expensive place to buy steel but they had what I needed I can now use two-part epoxy to glue these steel sleeves into the three-quarter inch diameter holes I want this thing to come apart easily so I was careful not to get any epoxy on the inside of the steel tube now one of them I cut a little too long so I just used a flap disc to grind it down flush I'm continually amazed at how versatile an angle grinder is just in this project I cut stone carved wood and cut and ground steel now remember when I said I over drilled the holes in the Rocks that's how I could put epoxy into them and the 5 8 inch rods would have a little room to wiggle now I did this because I assumed I wouldn't be able to drill the holes perfectly straight and this epoxy is super strong and will fill in the gaps between the steel and the rock this way I can put on the wood top and let the epoxy cure in the ideal locations for each of the steel pins once the epoxy had fully cured I could really start to see how the bent was going to look and I just carve from the top down in a way that really emphasizes the location of the stones and yes this did involve a lot of orbital sanding I put some plastic bags on my rocks wiped the dust off of the wood and then applied a coat of Minwax polycrylic now you can see there's still some cracks in the wood and I'll show you later how I filled those in with epoxy but first I want to do a fit check the wood top comes off and on relatively easily yet there's almost no wiggle in the top even when I'm standing on it it's really solid aesthetically I do think I achieved that kind of balancing look you don't really see the steel you just see a curved piece of wood hit a curved piece of stone now about those cracks the wood seems pretty stable but I don't want them to get worse so I taped up the bottoms with some painters tape and then mixed up some total Boat table top epoxy this is a real thick epoxy that cures relatively fast and was planning on using these big syringes to inject it into the cracks but it was too thick to suck up so I had to pour it in I was able to squeeze it out of the syringe but the viscosity was so great that it really wasn't flowing deep into the cracks it was kind of just creating bubbles along the surface which I could kind of heat gun out but just didn't really feel like it was penetrating all the way in so I switched to Total boat thick set fathom epoxy this is a much thinner liquid but it does take longer to cure with this thinner mixture I had no problem getting deep into the cracks but I did have to wait about three to four days to let it fully cure before sanding down the top again and applying another coat of Minwax poly acrylic I will be ordering more of these syringes though I think these are going to come in handy since I often work with cracked wood this is one of my favorite pieces that I've made this year I feel like I got real good usage out of my favorite tool the angle grinder structurally it's way more solid than I expected and I just think it looks good having a way to cut rocks and turned them into Furniture components or building materials relatively easily feels super empowering to me creatively I think a strategic use of rocks can reduce the material cost for our project versus using a hardwood and at the same type differentiate it as a Furniture piece if you plan on selling Unique Designs and if you're a Furniture maker lowering your material costs and increasing your sale price are really good things now there's some very obvious puns that you could use to describe this project and hit me with them in the comment section below just to let me know that you made it to the end thanks everybody bye

Channel: HomeMadeModern

Views: 728,746

Keywords: DIY, do it yourself, diy furniture, ben uyeda, Modern furniture, how to make furniture, modern design, modern builds, homemade, modern, stone furniture, rock furniture, cutting stones, cutting rocks, stone cutting, stone furniture diy, diy stone, diy bench, stone and wood furniture, organic furniture, cut stone furniture, power carving, angle grinder

Id: fl6kzQS8EUU

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2023