Greetings friends,
A while back, my next-door neighbor had an ailing Nordic Maple cut down, and I was lucky enough to be able to grab some small pieces of wood as well as a respectably-sized slab from it! It appeared to have some nice spalting, so I thought it would make a fantastic bedside table.
I brought the slab inside and allowed it to dry for a few months before trying to start processing it. Those of you who read my previous post about my endgrain slab coffee table may remember that slabs of wood dry considerably faster through the endgrain than the long grain, so cookie slabs dry upwards of 10x faster than normal slabs. After 3 months, I used a circle cutting jig with my router to cut the table round. The slab was thicker than I could cut with the router bit I had, so I had to use a jigsaw to cut through the thicker parts afterwards.
With so much more material having been removed, I decided to weigh the slab and track any further weight loss before moving on to the next steps. My plan was to fill the large crack and other negative space with epoxy, and I needed the wood to be really dry before I could pour the epoxy.
About 3 weeks of stable weight was satisfactory for me, so I was ready to move to the next steps. I wanted to make sure I had at least one flat surface to make the epoxy casting process as smooth as possible, so I brought the slab to my buddy Ben at Ply Ply Furniture, who used his CNC table to flatten both sides for me.
I constructed a mold for the slab using terrace board and melamine coated OBD. I used packaging tape to cover the melamine to prevent the epoxy from sticking and caulked the seams of the terrace board to seal it up. I tinted the epoxy using lampblack, which doesn't contain mica (shimmery effect) and gives a great flat black look. The pouring process was relatively simple, though after the initial pour I did have to nurse a few small leaks over the course of a few hours as the epoxy cured.
After a week I unmolded the slab and was really pleased with how it turned out, despite the mess and headache with the casting process. I saw it as a great learning experience in any case. Some sources say this slow-cure epoxy needs several weeks to reach peak hardness, so I let it sit around for a few more weeks before taking it back to Ben for one final flattening.
At this point the table just needed sanding to smooth out both faces and the sides, and the legs to be attached. A few hours with an orbital sander did the job, and my usual urethane oil varnish really made the grain look great. I had a few hairpin-style table legs left over from another project, so I decided they'd be great to use for this. I drilled holes for M10-1.5 threaded inserts, which I figured would allow me to easily swap out the hairpin legs for something else later on if I decide I wanted to.
I'm incredibly happy with how this turned out! I'm including several photos to show off the finish as well as the grain of the wood. I found that some very small bubbles are still present on the surface of the epoxy, but since this will be a practical piece of furniture, I'm content to leave them as they are. Removing all the bubbles would have been a tremendous effort that I think ultimately wouldn't have been worth it.
Juju