The Table Continues: Friday Update
I am finally feeling better which means it’s back to work.
I finished and delivered the Lazy Susan which means the video is coming soon!
Most of my time this week went into the table. After milling there are a few things I can start doing to the slab to prepare. My last activity was removing the bark, which is now all gone, so I turned my attention to the main surface where I hand planed all the milling lines out and flipped the slab over so I could start filling cracks and voids.
Filling Cracks
There were small little cracks all throughout the slab and a few bigger knots. The big voids will be filled with epoxy because I can pour more of it to sink down into the holes.
For all the small cracks I experimented on the underside. At first I went with my go to method, black super glue and activator. The super glue is thin, so it runs into the cracks and the activator sets the glue immediately. The problem was the cracks were too deep and the super glue was running deep which would have taken forever to fill, so I came up with an alternative. I stuffed some regular old wood glue into the cracks and sanded the area, pushing sanding dust down into the voids.
In doing so the cracks would fill, but the glue would shrink, pulling the filler slightly below the surface so I could come back and fill the small void with super glue. It worked really well and will save me tons of time vs pouring a bunch of epoxy on the surface and sanding it all off.
Filling cracks with glue.
After sanding the wet glue. It ruins the sand paper but successfully stuffs glue and dust down in the cracks.
The big voids receive some packing tape on the bottom to seal them up and a pour of black tinted epoxy to fill them in. The epoxy will take a couple of days to cure so while I wait on that I started work on the base.
Table Base
I didn’t have a ton of time this week so the base is in it’s beginning stages. All I did was mill, meaning I cut down long boards to rough length flattened them on one side using my planer sled. With one flat side the second side could be flattened and I could square up one edge with a hand plane.
In words that doesn’t sound like much, but it is quite a bit of physical work to flatten boards, even using with using power tools to do the heavy lifting.
Next week I plan to move on to base construction so I can plan for the connection of the base while the table is bottom up. There’s no good reason for this other than I want to limit the frequency of slab flips. At 200 pounds each flip feels like it could go wrong and something could break in the process.