Build a Live Edge Table: Part 2

Let me walk you through some of my thought process here. One of the things I really like about this natural edge stuff, it's very organic. You don't have straight lines. It really opens the door for you to be much more experimental with your woodworking. And I think that's a pretty cool opportunity. Let's look at this particular piece and see how it started life. What do we got here? If I fold these two back together, and we go this way and I'm lining up the edges that are close to me, the old, what looks like a chainsaw cut. You can see here along our natural edge. That's where they used to be connected. So they were living kind of like this. And then they were cut apart with a saw and a little bit of cleanup work was done. So that's why they're not quite perfectly aligned right now. What that means, what that tells me is that then, when I take those two pieces and I open them, this is this whole bookmatch idea. We get grains that mirror. Now let's flip everything over and see what we got, if we got anything. So if I do this, I says to myself, "Do I like that? "Do I not like that? "Is that as dramatic?" Well, we don't have a bookmatch cooking here. So we don't have anywhere near the drama with the grain. Now this is still beautiful chunk of wood but we don't have the mirror image. So let's go back to where we were. The other thing to talk about are these, chunks that are showing in here and you might look at that and say, "Well, geez, it's got, "there's some bark in there, "some inclusion of something." And that is the beauty of this stuff. There's nature going on here. And you really have to embrace that. If you look at that and say, "Boy, "I don't like that at all. "I'm gonna cut around it." You're not gonna have much wood left when you're done. So part of the organic aspect of working with material like this is that we wanna accept that and not treat it as a defect, but treat it as an aspect of the wood's character that we want everybody to see. Same with this natural edge. We're not gonna run this through a saw and eliminate that, we're gonna keep it. Now, similarly here, what I'm thinking is I started looking at these pieces and first woodworker thing in my head says "I wanna put them together." So I've gotta establish a straight line in a straight line so I can do this. One part of that thought process was, "Well, if I do that, "my overall slab is gonna get pretty narrow. "'Cause I gotta take off a fair bit "of material to get that edge straight, "so I can join them together." What if alternatively, we maintain a space. What I like about that is, we've got our edge the bark on the outside. We've also got a natural edge which was produced admittedly by a machine, probably a chainsaw, but there's a lack of bookmatch here along the center that I also really like. I think that's pretty cool. So, I decided, I'm gonna keep this project with this space going down the middle, get the legs underneath it. We'll have our tabletop. Do we have a gap in the middle where I can't set the edge of a cup? Sure. But, I really like how that's gonna look. How are we gonna create that gap? Well here's what I decided to do. I made three steel rods, half inch in diameter, painted the center portion black, so that it would match our table legs. What we're gonna do is drill a hole, drill a hole, drill a hole. And epoxy those rods and leaving a space in the center. So when we're done we're still gonna be able to see the ruts. It's gonna become kind of a detail, an element of our furniture piece here. One of the things I've done is, I would like you, I'd encourage you to file or grind some hash marks in the steel rod and the epoxy in all honesty is probably gonna be great even without those. But what that relief, what that notch does, is it provides a little more opportunity for the epoxy to have some tooth to grab that chunk of steel and make sure that everything stays put. All right, now let's figure this out. What I'm doing here is I'm lining up, this cut right here. That's gonna become the registration point that I'm paying attention to. I'm getting those two shoulders aligned and then we'll measure our overall length and find the middle. Right there. We're gonna be drilling for our steel rod with a dowelling jig. So I need to index off of both pieces Just like that. Then I'm gonna come in from the end. I'm gonna do the same thing on the other end. And that's gonna get me ready for my drilling process. Now length of my steel rods, they're pretty darn long. And I realize that. So one of the things I wanna check is when I have my one inch of space in between, like that, am I gonna be okay with the length of the ride so that I don't come out the ends and I'm gonna cut this one for this end just a little bit shorter before we install that, but in the center and on that end, we're gonna be just fine. Here's what happens next. This goes in a vise. The dowelling jig itself has got an index line on it that indicates the center of the hole. So we have to do one more step. We've gotta grab a square 'cause I need to bring that face line across the edge so I can see it here. Now what I'm doing is I'm looking down through the dowelling jig at that index line, putting it on the pencil line I just created. The jig itself is self centering. So as I tighten, it's automatically putting the hole I'm about to drill, perfectly centered on the thickness of our material. What I already know is that in order for those steel rods as they are to sit and leave me about an inch of space, I've gotta get almost all of this drill bit in until the end of it is just about even with my drill index here. Now on this fire end, let's get our index line and then double check our work. Wouldn't it be a shame if we blew out our natural edge there. So I wanna make sure that when I'm on top of my jig, yep. We're gonna need to limit our depth of drill a little bit on this side. Masking tape is a great way to make sure that. Okay. Let me work on my masking tape flag a little. There we go. Check that one more time. It looks good. Index line on the pencil line. So I'm gonna wrap whole up. I'm gonna do the exact same thing to the other edge and then we'll have a look at getting the epoxy in there and getting everything put together. Well, here's what needed to happen here. I got my three rods in position. I drove my holes and then I started working with the three rods. And one of the things I had to do was come back and elongate the holes a little bit this way. And I'm pretty confident I know why that is, because this edge is not straight. This is one of the things we're gonna run into when I put my drill guide on there, it's sitting right on that edge. So as I drilled the hole, if the hole drill guide is leaning a little that way or a little that way, the hole is gonna lean in that direction. The rod is also gonna lean in that direction. So I then had to do some test fits. I shortened up my rod for the end, until I got to a point where I knew that this was going to slip on there and walk down to a point where I could get, my one inch gap all the way down. Now, of course, let me go back to that. I'm gonna hit one inch on this end and one inch over here. I'm not gonna worry about the center because that edge isn't straight. So it's quite possible. If you follow the procedure I used here, you're gonna have to do a similar thing to your table, you'll get the holes like that. And I don't worry about those holes being elongated because we tooth the metal and we're using epoxy to glue the metal in. Could we do this with wooden dowel rods instead of steel rods? Yeah, but I still would go with epoxy then instead of a wood glue to make sure we had gap filling capabilities between the oversized holes and the ruts. We'll mix up some epoxy, get this glued together and that'll take us through this step. Gonna paint the inside of that hole. And then, what I wanna do is paint the hole and insert the rod right away so that the epoxy isn't all running down to the bottom while I'm working on the next holes in line. Now in this case, we do have to do all three holes and I'm gonna quick cut this in two. So I have two of these spacers so I can rest one on each end. Alright, spacer, spacer. One inch, one inch. Now I'm gonna leave those in there. We'll get those spacers out after the epoxy is dry. Now, if the work I did with the drills has with the drill bit has this pulled a little bit out of plane. That's okay. 'Cause after the epoxy is dry we're gonna sand this whole surface as a unit through our surface sander to clean that up that'll clean it up and make it dead flat. We'll be ready for that step in no time.