1. Workshop

Redwood Coffee Table

My longest and most elaborate project to date.
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The saga began in the fall of 2017 on the California coast, driving south on a road trip that brought us some 7,500 miles through ten states and then up the Al-Can. While passing through the redwoods we stopped off at a roadside shop and snagged this piece of wood for something like $45. It's a cross section of redwood roots milled roughly with a chainsaw and with a little rot in a couple places. Perfect for slapping together some rough furniture on the cheap. Or so I thought!
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The saga began in the fall of 2017 on the California coast, driving south on a road trip that brought us some 7,500 miles through ten states and then up the Al-Can. While passing through the redwoods we stopped off at a roadside shop and snagged this piece of wood for something like $45. It's a cross section of redwood roots milled roughly with a chainsaw and with a little rot in a couple places. Perfect for slapping together some rough furniture on the cheap. Or so I thought!

  • The saga began in the fall of 2017 on the California coast, driving south on a road trip that brought us some 7,500 miles through ten states and then up the Al-Can. While passing through the redwoods we stopped off at a roadside shop and snagged this piece of wood for something like $45. It's a cross section of redwood roots milled roughly with a chainsaw and with a little rot in a couple places. Perfect for slapping together some rough furniture on the cheap. Or so I thought!
  • The first use of this table was in a camp just outside Bishop, CA. Propped up with a couple rocks it made a fair to middling editing table for processing photos while seated on a crashpad, but still left a few things to be desired.
  • After getting this thing home the process got rolling with some flattening using hand planes. The grain on this piece is all over the place which meant I got a lot of tear-out, so I only used a plane to get the rough shaping done before eventually moving over to a belt sander and doing work that would eventually be redundant, but this was an ever evolving project that became a purpose all to itself, so I don't mind.
  • With the rough flattening done I filled all the cracks and knots with epoxy resin with black pigment. This process took a couple weeks as each filling had to harden for a day or so and several of the cracks were rather deep and wide. Some pieces of the wood really needed held together too since there was a bit of dry rot, which is what the rubber bands and clamps are helping out with while the epoxy sets.
  • A couple rotten spots had to be filled from the side, so I taped over the top of those parts and clamped the table sideways to pour those holes.
  • I used a drill and a sanding wheel to knock off all the bark and loose wood around the live edges and to smooth out the chunks of epoxy. I worked through a couple grits on this, but didn't try to get it perfect.
  • I liked the size of this piece of wood for a coffee table, but trying to do anything more than resting a coffee cup was hard because of the odd shapes and holes, so I knew I wanted to pour a flat top using resin. I also wanted to keep the live edge exposed, though, as I find regular old rectangular "river tables" sort of boring in their simple shapes and lack of wood available for the touch. Here I've outlined rough edges for what I would like my eventual resin top to look like, and then I just had to figure out how I could make this happen.
  • To protect the roughly shaped wood during the building process I coated it all in a single coat of Tung oil. I knew it was gonna take me a while to finish this thing, and while I didn't know exactly what I wanted for the final surface this stuff seemed pretty nice.
  • At first I had no idea how to make a live edge sticking out of a resin edge. The internet is full of people doing rectangular tables with straight edges, but this was going to be a lot trickier. Eventually, leaning on experience building climbing holds for a climbing gym I came up with my plan and set out to see if it would even work at all. I started out with a solid piece of 3/4in plywood salvaged from the floor of a C-130 freight transport plane, and then built a frame around that using 2x6 and caulking all the edges.
  • With the frame built, I got ahold of some silicone rubber and poured the entire bottom of my mold. The goal here was to end up with a perfectly smooth surface, but I wound up not moxing this stuff well enough so I had some goopy spots that I tried taping over with packaging tape, which just came off when I poured the resin. Ultimately through my mistakes this step became unnecessary, but it cost a lot of money so there's that. That's somewhere over a hundred bucks worth of silicone there.
  • With the bottom prepped I then dropped my table into the frame and supported it using pieces of wood to clamp it in place around the edges that I knew I wanted exposed, so the whole area I wanted resin was free and clear and there's no screw holes in the wood. It was also important for my plan that the wood be solidly held in place when held in any orientation.
  • The next step was to pour silicone around all four edges of the whole table, but since silicone is stupid expensive in those quantities I bought a bunch of floral foam and cut a whole bunch of jigsaw shapes out to roughly fill the gaps and save me some money. Since floral foam floats really well in silicone I tried to keep it all contained with tape and screws and stuff.
  • One end of the table had a much larger gap to fill, so I made an effort at taping it off with plastic, planning to do several smaller silicone pours to gradually fill all the gaps until it stopped leaking. This plan worked out fabulously, albeit with a number of puddles of silicone leaking out onto the kitchen floor. The nice thing about that sort of mess is you just let it set and it peels right off like a pancake. A dream mess!
  • I included this photo of the partially framed tabletop because it includes Luna for reference. When I bought the wood she was still incubating inside her mother, and here she is crawling around and bothering Jams before I've finished building this thing into my resin mold. Skip to the end if you want to see where she's at when I finish!
  • The table spent a few weeks in this shape while I poured both ends, with a bunch of trips to the rubber store and after buying out all of Alaska's supply of this type of silicone.
  • I didn't enjoy working with floral foam much, so I tried out sand as well. This stuff came from Lowes and contained quite a bit of moisture I wasn't sure about, so I actually baked it all on cookie sheets in the oven until it was dry, and put it into the mold one cookie sheet at a time.
  • Here's the last of the hundreds of dollars worth of silicone I poured into this mold.
  • After using up every bit of my silicone I was still about a centimeter shy on my last pour. Thinking quickly I gathered up all the metal tools in my inventory and dumped them into the mold too. This and a couple chunks of wood thrown in and pinned down raised the silicone level to where I wanted it to be just in time for it to set. That's what that dowel is doing there. I knew when I demolded I'd get them back, although I also knew that I didn't have a clue when that was going to be!
  • The resin pour was always going to be the most expensive part of this project, so it took me a few months to psych up for it. I studied up on resins and selected one that didn't need vacuum degassing since I didn't like the sounds of that much extra work and equipment. I purchased $500 worth of the good stuff from the only guy I found in Alaska who had it, set up with some room in a friend's garage for the pour, and mixed up the whole batch. Well as it turns out, if this stuff gets cold while on the shelf it crystallizes, and that makes it all milky. You can fix that by heating it up before you mix it, but you see me mixing it up here a few minutes prior to learning about that. If you ever needed a visualization of what it looks like when you take five Ben Franklins and just light them on fire, here it is. I wasn't about to pour milky resin onto my wood, so this whole batch became a bucket sized plug of resin and I took my stuff and went home and put it all on the shelf to wait for a day when I had another $500 to burn.
  • Here we are almost a year later. Luna's older, we've moved to another town, our cats are all gone, and we still don't have an extra $500 lying around, but sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet. I borrowed the money from my wonderful credit card guys and set out to finally finish this thing. This time I made sure my resin wasn't milky.
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