The stand is a full 8 ft. long, in order to provide generous support tables on either side of the saw. They'll help you cut down long stock with ease. Resources for Colorado based woodworkers, woodworking businesses, suppliers or other resources for woodworking in the state of Colorado.
Timber Frame Tools. I got a nice section of a Swamp Laurel Oak log from a neighbor that was cutting one down a little over a year or so ago. I wrote up a post about slabbing an oak log by hand. The entire time I was sawing the slabs out of that log, I knew I wanted to make a coffee table out of it. The design elements rolled around in my head for over a year. I would sketch them on a whiteboard near my desk and eventually narrowed down the features I wanted. These sketches were how the design settled out. The design features that settled out: Asian inspired tapered slab legs. River wood ‘flowing” down the legs. A sub- shelf with tusk tenons wedged in place with river stones.
Legs mortised into the top slab. Butterfly keys, with curves, for crack stabilization. Black epoxy for cracks, with hints of emerald for a little color. I sketched a bunch of possibilities of what the ends of the tusk tenons on the shelf should look like.
It took me a while to decide on the shape of the tusk tenons that would hold the shelf in place and lock the entire table together. I eventually decided that simple tapers (first row, middle column) gave it the look that I wanted. This sketch is upside- down because I drew it how I was working on it. So the bottom shape is really the table top, bottom facing up. The green is the table leg, and the scraggly scribble is the panhead screw used to hold the leg into the mortise. I had planned to have the legs mortised into the underside of the table and glue them in, but then the table would not be able to be knocked down, so I decided to skip the glue make it so that a single screw run through the joint would hold each leg in place. Really all the screw has to do is keep the leg from dropping out of the mortise if someone tries to pick up the table top. Live Edge Slab Top. This gap actually had some bark inclusion, indicating that this crack already existed in the live tree.
This is the slab of oak for the table top, within days of cutting the slab. It was already drying and checking, so I decided to get some keys put in to minimize the cracks. I hand chiseled the mortise for this dutchman. These last two I mortised initially with forstner bit in my drill, then cleaned it up with a chisel. Mortising the walnut keys into place was a bit of fun. The hard part was recognizing that when the keys were in place, I would have to put the slab away for a year or more to dry. I had to be patient. The first three keys were just black walnut. The remaining 4 were done as cherry- black walnut curvy bowties. After they were in place, I put the slab on stickers under my car for 1. I am limited on lumber storage, so it stores under my car. Taking care not to put it in a spot where my car air conditioner was going to dribble all over it.
Eventually I grew impatient and brought the slab out to start flattening it with my router planing sled. What was a ~2. One small section had twisted so much that it is now only about 1/2″ thick. Unable To Update Office 2010 Sp1 there. The slab was flattened with my router in a planing sled.
After initial flattening I filled most of the cracks with Alumilite Amazing Clear Cast (epoxy resin) colored black (Gamblin mars black dry) and emerald green (Pearl- Ex emerald green) . Mistake #1: I used Nashua foil duct tape to block the cracks on the bottom to prevent the epoxy from spilling out. The tape did block the epoxy perfectly. The problem was that it was almost impossible to separate the tape adhesive from the wood. Even after softening the adhesive with a heat gun, then mineral spirits and a scraper, there was still a lot of tape residue on the wood. What remained, was there until the sanding stripped it away. Last pass with the router to remove the epoxy. At one end of the slab is an open crack that I decided to put a couple of polished pebbles into. I pushed the pebbles against the tape and then poured the epoxy. With the tape removed, the pebbles protrude nicely (you’ll see it in the finished photos further down). Normally I use a card scraper to remove the epoxy that sits on the top of the wood. If I catch it within the window of time between 2. Mistake #2: Getting the impulsive idea to use the router to remove a thin layer of wood and the epoxy on the top AND forgetting about the pebbles that lay just below the surface.
It turns out that a pebble can really damage the carbide cutters on the router bit. Replacement ordered 😉In some cases the router bit seemed to fracture the epxoy and flick out a few bits here and there, so there were some gaps in the epoxy now. Next time I will know not to use the router to remove the excess epoxy. I will go with the card scraper in the future. It is not really much slower, if at all, and the results are much better. Live edge I like, but I am not a fan of rough bark, especially if I smash my shin into it. So I removed the bark and softened the edge. The oak has a reddish layer of material between the wood and the bark. I used a card scraper to remove it from the edges of the slab and soften the edges a bit.
Tapered Slab Legs. The legs were coming from another slab from the same section from the tree. As you can see, this piece developed a huge twist. The twist is too big to resolve for the whole slab at once, but by cutting them roughly to length, it minimizes the amount of twist that has to be planed away.
The outer slab of the tree twisted a lot more than the other slab, which was more toward the center of the tree. After cutting the slab in half, it was time to do some flattening. I had originally planned to do this by hand, but the amount of twist would have been a bit of challenge to correct with a scrub plane. I changed my plans and went with my router planing sled. It took several passes just to get them close enough to flat, to make plans for the final shape. Removing the extra limb. It had great color, and some interesting grain and spalting, but just would not work for the leg. The extra limb stuck out too much to make the leg, so I used a flexible curve to map out what looked like a fair curve.
Since these pieces came from close to the outside of the tree, they are quite a bit narrower than the slab for the top. I wanted this table to be stable so I needed the base of the legs to be wider. For stability they needed to be roughly as wide as the table top. Testing out tapered river (top) and a fixed width river (bottom). I decided to add to the width and do a bit of a river path with the added wood. I did some experiments with two different colored papers to see if I preferred a bit of taper to the river or just a fixed width river. The tapered pattern (top) appealed to me. Not only would the river be tapered, bit it would cause the leg to have a bit of taper as well, and I liked that idea. The tapered wood to become the river, stuck with double sided tape to the leg. I wanted to use cherry for my river, but I didn’t have any on hand that was 2″ thick. So I went with a Douglass Fir 2″x. I had available. It is pinkish, and would add some interesting color. I cut the wedge shape with a hand saw, then jointed them with a jointer plane. To make the river, it is important that the two outer edges are straight because they will be glued to each other. In preparation for cutting the curve, I penciled in the curve using a flexible curve. Then I used double sided tape to stick the river piece to the top of the leg. The cut gets run through the band saw, cutting the curves on both pieces at the same time.
I used my bandsaw to cut the curve, and you can see that I completely missed my penciled in curve and just went with what the saw could naturally do in the 4″ stack of Oak and Douglas Fir. The tapered river flowing through the wood.
It will look good when glued up. Swapping the two curves and mating them up with the lower piece, gives you the look of the river running through the leg. Notice the live edge on the outside. That makes clamping the glue- up a little challenging.