Some Christmas Tables

The pine slab table that I built for my front porch got some interest from the family, so I ended up getting the rest of that stack of slabs that my mother-in-law till had hanging around the house. They were stacked up, so the one on the bottom was pretty rotten, but there were still 4 in total. One went to my porch, then I had full slabs for tables for my niece Kaileigh and my sister-in-law Martha. The rotten slab I was able to cut out a particularly interesting chunk out of it, and I made that into a smaller table for my SIL Summer. Really caught her by surprise too, she didn't know that was coming.

Ella is cleaning out the rotten slab

This is all I could save out of the 5' long slab

I still carved it down into a clean slab

The bottom had some really neat deformations from the rot and bugs

Starting the epoxy fill for those huge voids

I made this base, and still had to add another platform for it

Martha's table too

I got really slack about taking pictures this Christmas. The stress of meeting all of these sales & holiday deadlines really got to me.

For the small slab, I used a spokeshave and a bunch of sanders & planes to create a smooth-ish surface. Then used the TotalBoat 5:1 epoxy to fill in all of the bug holes and rotten places to create a smooth surface. And after 5 pours of the the epoxy I still didn't have a flat surface. I then sanded again and started with the polyurethane, 8 coats with 000 steel wool buffing in between. Then I made that stand for it with the X legs, and attached that to the bottom of the slab. It was still wobbly, so I added a piece of plywood to the bottom as well and it got a lot more stable. The base was spraypainted gloss black, and some people actually thought it was metal.

Martha was expecting her table, Summer's was a complete surprise. My brother Michael (Summer's husband) also caught her with another surprise, but that's another post. I'm really glad these turned out, and really happy that the family liked them so much! It's fun for me to build things, but building things that are appreciated by the ones you love makes it that much more special.