This is the second and final part of the construction of my maple coffee table. You can view part one of this project here.
Onwards...
When we left off, the table was waiting to finish drying before a few final passes with the router to finish the top. After reading some articles online, I found that likely the slab had been sufficiently dry for some time. Apparently endgrain slabs can dry 15 TIMES FASTER than their cross-grain counterparts.1 With no doubt in my mind, I was ready to flatten out the slab to it's final dimension.
With the same setup as before, my brother and I chipped away at the slab, and after a few hours had the top surface leveled off and looking pretty. As I had mentioned before, the whole slab had cupped slightly, so all outside edges were higher than the middle when we were flattening it. Two passes with the router and it was done! I'm so glad that the ugly gouge is gone!
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| Just about to get rid of the gouge... |
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| Finished! Woohoo! |
We flipped it over and decided (in order to preserve the thickness of the slab) to flatten the bottom only enough to accommodate the stand/legs that the table will sit on. If we had gone until the bottom gouge was removed, the resulting slab may have only been an inch or so thick!!! We took a belt sander to both sides of the slab to level out the router marks, and called it a day. Not bad looking for a few hours work!
At this point the long sanding process began. The slab has some lovely figuring that I wanted to showcase, and I knew that I would want to sand to at least 600 grit before applying any kind of finish. I started with 40 grit on the random orbit sander (ROS) to remove all the scratches left by the belt sander, which ended up taking the bulk of the total sanding time. Once I was satisfied at 40 grit, I gradually worked my way up the other grits until I was satisfied with the look of the figuring. I would periodically wipe on a thin layer of shellac (1# cut) to check how the figuring looked before moving on to the higher grits.
Once the PNW weather started turning toward the wet season, I decided to attach legs to the slab and put it into use. It may be a while before I actually before finish sanding the surface, especially since it's finding so much use as our living room table. Here's a picture of it's current state, and I'll update this post later on if and when I complete it!
Frankly, I'm really happy with how this came together, and the finishing touches will be completed whenever there's time. I'm not holding my breath.... 😁
Juju
1. Reeb, J. E. Drying Wood. (1992).
1. Reeb, J. E. Drying Wood. (1992).
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