A client brought three pieces of wood to me and asked me to make them into a countertop for a bar at his home. He has a business and one of the things he does in that business is clear land. Several years ago he had acquired some cedar and walnut in the course of his work and that was the source of the wood.
He had seen some previous work I had done with reclaimed beams and epoxy and wanted to know if I would be willing to work with him to bring his idea to fruition. He had already decided how he wanted the three pieces arranged. I told him I could help and got to work.
First, I had to create clean edges so that I could glue the three pieces into one slab. All three pieces were too wide to face joint on my jointer so I had to start on the edges. I was able to get good enough edges to be able to achieve a good glue-up. I added several dominos to help with the alignment. Because the pieces are large and awkward to work with, I did the glue-up in two steps.
Once I had a single large slab to work with, I moved it to my CNC, a 5’x10′ PRO60120 from Avid CNC. I started with the slab face down and used a Whiteside 6220, 2-inch surfacing bit to flatten the bottom. I didn’t bother getting the bottom completely surfaced and flattened. I only went far enough to have a good reference surface for working on the top. After flipping the slab over, I then used the same process to flatten and resurface the top completely.
Now I was ready to start cleaning up the live edges and clearing out the knot holes and other imperfections. I did this using a combination of wire wheels in a drill and flap sanding discs in an angle grinder.
During the process, the client would stop by occasionally to see how things were coming. At one visit, he asked if it would be possible to add a custom carving to the top that could be filled with colored epoxy. He wanted to commemorate a special date with an image of a mahi tuna. I acquired a vector art mahi image from VectorStock.com and used VCarve Pro to carve the date and image into the center walnut portion of the piece.
The piece was finally ready for the long process of finishing. I started on the bottom, using epoxy and caulk to fill and seal all of the voids and finally applying a seal coat of epoxy. This was done to remove the possibility of there being places where I could lose epoxy through the piece when working on the top.
Once that was cured, I flipped the piece over and began working on the top. I spent a couple of days getting all of the voids and imperfections sealed on the top and sides. The last part before working on the final coats was to fill the carving and all voids proud of the surface of the wood. The epoxy in the carving had green glitter flakes added to it. The epoxy in some of the large voids was tinted with Meyspring Silver Druzy Epoxy Pigment. The remaining voids were filled with clear epoxy. The client decided where to use the tinted and clear epoxy for filling the voids.
Before proceeding with the final seal and pour coats, I put the piece back on the CNC one more time. I again used a slab flattening bit to resurface the top. The main goal this time was to clean off the epoxy that had spilled out over the surface while filling the voids.
Now everything was finally ready for the last part of the epoxy process. The first step was a seal coat. The cedar was fairly porous and despite all of my previous efforts, there were still places that were difficult to seal. Once the piece was fully sealed and allowed to cure for about a day, I was ready for the final pour coat.
By the way, I mostly used TotalBoat Table Top Epoxy Resin for this project though I did use some leftover SystemThree Mirror Coat epoxy from a previous project when sealing and filling voids on the bottom of the piece.
The countertop is roughly 7′ by 2-½’ in size which meant I needed 1-½ gallons of epoxy for the final pour coat. I mixed, poured, and spread it across the surface and used a chip brush to coat the sides as it spilled over. After waiting several minutes, I used a torch to pop any bubbles that had come to the surface. Everything looked good and now it was time to let it all cure.
Unfortunately, this is where I ran into a little trouble. I’m still not exactly sure why this happened but it appeared that late in the curing process there were bubbles still popping on the surface. Because the epoxy was mostly set up, however, these late popping bubbles left small circular dimples over the surface. There were a lot in some places and none in others but they didn’t look good and I couldn’t be satisfied giving it to the client like that.
It took several hours of sanding with a 6-inch sander and 60-grit sandpaper to get through all of the dimples. The picture shows a close-up of some of the dimples during the sanding process. Once the dimples were gone, it took another day to sand and polish the surface back to a smooth, glossy finish.
In the end, the piece came out great and the client was more than satisfied with it. Below are links to several of the items used and mentioned throughout this article.