Spalted Maple Bedside Table

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.

Wet & moldy, but gorgeous!

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.

Thanks for reading,

Juju

Workshop Bookshelf

 Greetings friends,

This is a short post, as I completed this project in a bit of a hurry and didn't take as many photos as I usually do. The goal here was to build a small bookshelf for my repair manuals and reference books, so I can store them in my workshop instead of on my large bookshelf with other unrelated books.

I wanted the shelves to be 12" tall to snugly fit all my manuals, and decided on a 3-shelf design so the whole bookshelf would be around 3 feet tall. This allowed for 2 shelves for manuals and one half-shelf on top for whatever other books I want to have handy.

Sanded, pre-finish.

I sourced some ash lumber from my local hardwood store, and ripped the pieces to size and planed them to my final thickness (~3/4"). For two of the three shelves, I had to glue up board to make wider panels, but after planing, they look quite seamless. I cut rabbets into the side pieces, which the shelves then glued snugly into. I made a mistake cutting the first (bottom) rabbets, not accounting for my kerf thickness, but some shims made from the same wood hid that mistake well. I finished the shelf with my favorite oil-based wood finish, Arm-R-Seal semi-gloss.

Thanks for reading,

Juju

Maple Slab Coffee Table - Part 2

Greetings friends,

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!

Just about to get rid of the gouge...

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.

That's about as far as I got..

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.... 😁

Thanks for reading,

Juju



1. Reeb, J. E. Drying Wood. (1992).

Maple Slab Coffee Table - Part 1

Greetings friends,

This project has been a blast to work on, and hopefully the second part will follow somewhat quickly. In any case, this won't be a super drawn-out project; I anticipate it only being written in up in 2 parts.



September 2018

My parents had a large maple tree on their property which for years had shown signs of rot, with falling dead branches posing a hazard to their house. When they started talking about getting the tree cut down, I saw the potential to create a unique coffee table from a cross-section slab of the tree!

Astonishingly, a mushroom was growing in isolated darkness inside of the rotted tree!

Not surprisingly, the tree was revealed to be extremely rotted near the base. Luckily, this meant whatever usable portions of wood I could find were beautifully spalted! I rented myself a chainsaw, and went to town!!!

Pretty rough looking to start, my chainsaw skills are quite unrefined. Loads of fun though to have given it a shot! At this point there wasn't much else to do other to let the slab start drying. Because of the rot, the wood was soaking wet; pushing a finger into the wood resulted in water dripping out...

December 2018

The slab was able to dry for a few months, though the weather in my area was still consistently wet.. After being cut, the slab was close to 6 inches thick, which drove my decision to reduce the thickness at this point, rather than waiting 5+ years for it to dry completely (following the 1 year per inch rule). A thinner slab would then dry considerably faster. I decided to use my router with a 1.5" bit to hopefully make the work pretty simple.

Loads of sawdust resulted, but after many hours the job was done!

I constructed a simple rail system to flatten the slab, which then required two people to push the router back and forth to remove material. My brother helped me for a good 10 hours slowly shaving down the surfaces of the slab to a reasonable thickness before finally letting it sit to dry. We removed a total of about 3 inches of wood, roughly 1/8" at a time. I anticipated that the slab would still warp to some extent, so I did not take the it to the final thickness at this point, hence the still-visible chainsaw marks on both sides.

Interestingly, while routing we ran into two nails that had presumably been hammered in my our dad a number of years ago. Even looks like some rot reached the tips of the nails over the years!

For size reference, here are me and my brother 

with the slab, we're both 193-195cm tall.

July 2019

A warm summer was very welcome, and seemed to make quick work of drying the slab. It had lost a considerable amount of weight, and at least at the surface was quite dry. I was getting impatient and wanted to bring the slab to a somewhat-usable state.

I bought a random orbit sander and got to work. The routed surface of the slab was very rough, likely due to the fact that the wood was so wet when I did the routing. This added a little extra work when it came to sanding, but a few hours of effort brought me to a spot where I could feel happy looking at it every day. Two coats of linseed oil later, and the slab now sits comfortably in front of the couch! I was amazed at the level of figuring and spalting in this wood, it's really spectacular to look at.

Sanded down a bit, the real colors start to pop!

Here are a few views of the sanded slab in what will be it's final location. Two coats of linseed oil have really brought out the colors, and highlight some of the figuring. We'll be using this as a coffee table until I take the time to complete the project.

But.... there's a lot left to finish on the table... Like I suspected, the top surface has cupped, so a few final passes with the router will be needed to get that flat again, as well as to take out the chainsaw gouge. But since it's looking pretty nice at this point, I will be holding off on doing the finishing touches until the slab has for sure dried completely. I'm curious about drying rates of endgrain vs facegrain, since the slab seemed to dry very quickly... I'll dig into that topic and report when I post the next part of this project. If anyone has any insight on this topic, please post below!

Thanks for reading,

Juju