12/27/2023 0 Comments Waterfall coffee table wood diyYou may want to put a piece of masking tape or something along the cut to help prevent the top side from chipping out. Set your saw to 45 degrees and cut slow, don't force it, but don't burn it. You will want to use a straightedge of some sort, don't dare freehand this because any slight wiggle will be noticeable when you join the two pieces together, this should hopefully be your finished joint cut. To make the cut I used a circular saw and a sharp fine blade. I'm not sure how to explain that any better, but the more curvy your grain is where you make your cut the further off the grain will be from matching the top and the side. Since you will be losing at least a sawblade width of wood when you cut it the straighter your grain is the better it will match when you join them back together. The first key point to making the waterfall edge look good is to pick a spot in your slab where the grain is relatively straight. You don't have to do a waterfall edge, you can just make a different type of leg, but then why are you even reading all of this? If you don't want to go chasing waterfalls please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to. You can use a planer, a sander, or a card scraper, anything that will get you back to flat because you will need to eventually sand all of this smooth.Īs you can see from the title picture this table has a "waterfall" edge, which is the grain of the wood continuing from the top down the leg. Once the epoxy cures you need to remove the excess to get it back to flat. If you're not familiar with using epoxy you need to look into that a bit more before using it, I'm not going to go into detail here. I'm also making two walnut end tables at the same time as the coffee table, and I experimented with adding black paint to the epoxy on one of the end tables and it turned out pretty neat, I might actually do this for splits and cracks from now on, but I will always use clear epoxy for knots since that's the best looking part. Use some tape (foil tape is the cat's pajamas) to dam up anything you're filling on the edges, and use some putty to make a dam if you want to minimize the runout you will need to sand later. Once you have everything planed sufficiently it's time to fill any knots, splits, and cracking with epoxy. You don't have to get everything perfectly flat or smooth at this point because you will probably plane or at least heavy sand again after the next step. You can also use a hand plane or a router sled jig, if you're not familiar with a router sled just google it, it's your best option using a pretty common tool. I used a power hand planer to get rid of any saw marks and flatten out a tiny bit of cupping that occurred during the drying process. Once you have your slab the next step is to flatten and smooth is out. So try not to let this situation consume your every thought for the rest of your life, let's just move on to the next step. But being so impatient I decided to risk it and build the table right now anyway, if it has any severe warping or separating I can just fix it at that point. I know, I just said a year per inch thickness, thanks Mom. I had the log for a couple years but only had it cut into a slab for about a year. But aside from being fat, ugly, balding, and impatient I'm also very impatient. Now the general rule of thumb for air drying is you need to wait one year per inch of thickness in the slab. The short story is you just stack the planks on top of each other with a spacer in between them, but if you're going to do this you need to research it more because there are a lot of details that go into this procedure. I don't mill enough lumber to have the first two options make sense, so I went with the air drying method. There are a few ways of doing this you can drop it off at a local lumber dryer and they put it in their dryer for a fee, you can build a homemade drying shack or simple tarp operation, or you can just stack the lumber and let it air dry. After cutting the wood into slabs it needs to be dried. I used a chainsaw mill to cut that giant mamajama into 2.5" slabs, knowing I wanted the finished table thickness to be roughly 2". So after cutting the tree down and hauling it to my house it was time to get slabbin'. One person's trash, am I right? You can basically use any type of tree/wood for this table, I just happen to have gotten walnut. I was fortunate enough to know a guy who told me about a big walnut tree that was going to be removed and chipped up as part of a stream rehabilitation project. But since I'm a card carrying hillbilly I have to make my own. I'm going to fly through this section because it's certainly much easier and faster to purchase a wood slab.
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