Couple of Tables

Made a couple of really cool tables recently, since I worked on them at the same time I figured I would blog about them at the same time.

I made a live edge slab table for my front porch that turned out great. So great in fact, other people wanted some. When we got that slab, there were 3 others in the stack so they all made their way back to my shop eventually. Then, we had some trees taken down in the front yard, and I got my little electric chainsaw out and cut a cookie off of one of the stumps. That turned out to be pretty interesting by itself!

before the power planer? hard to tell here

The cookie

because you haven't seen my face for a while - still in tank tops in October

that's a lot of polyurethane, y'all

 Yeah, that last picture has the floating shelves for my youngest, the next pine slab, and the cookie all getting polyurethane at the same time.Pretty interesting

To prep these live edge slabs, you have to (stay with me here) work the wood. I start with a power planer to get level faces, and a spokeshave to debark the sides. Once you can get all of the parts relatively level, it's time to start smoothing. For the flat faces, I start with 80 grit on the belt sander, then 120 grit. The live edge parts still have to be smoothed over, but you don't want to make them flat. Leave the interesting parts and some color. Next I hit 180 grit paper on the random orbit sander on all sides, then 220 grit.

Then you start in with the polyurethane. Put about 5 coats of the wipe-on stuff on the bottom, sometimes hitting the sides too. Then put at least 8 coats on the top, 10 would be best, again hitting the sides. So the live edge sides get doubled up some.

I didn't get any finished pictures of the big slab, but I put some of the same hairpin legs on it as the first table I did. the cookie got pipe legs, I think it turned out pretty good!

Installing the legs

These turned out great! It's a nice addition to the porch, the pipe legs let me get the table exactly level, and the hairpin legs look great too. These were both really fun builds.