Build a Live Edge Table: Part 3

Here's our tabletop out of the vise. The epoxy is dried overnight. Now this is part three of our Build A Natural Edge Table series. If you haven't seen one and two, look for those and that'll help you get to this point. The epoxy is dry. So this is ready to go. Did a couple other things here. One of the things that I found was that our bark inclusions here were maybe just a little bit loose. Honestly, I don't think they were gonna fall out but I didn't wanna take the risk. So we used CA glue, cyanoacrylate, and just built a little bridge there between the bark and the solid wood. And did that on both sides where it was necessary just to make sure that was gonna stay in place. Now, next step, we wanna get this nice and flat. We wanna do some sanding on it and get it cleaned up. And even if I owned a planer that was this wide with conventional straight knives in this. You know you look at this and say, "Well what direction does the grain go?" Well, it goes in about 400 different directions and that's part of what makes this such a beautiful piece of wood. So we're gonna take advantage of a surface sander in order to make this happen. What's the dealio with a surface sander? Got a sander here. And when we call us a 25 inch sander, and I'm gonna be more specific about that in a second, to 25 inch sanding head. So instead of planer knives in here it's got a brace of paper. This is currently got 80 grit on it. We're gonna start at 80. We're gonna take this all the way up through a very fine grit. Now to be more specific, this is called a 25-50. Because if you look at the end out here, it's open. The end of the machine is cantilevered out. So what that means is if I had a 50 inch wide natural edge top, I could run that through this machine by making a pass leave it at a tight setting, turn it end for end and run it again because part of my material be cantilevered out here past the table. It's got a conveyor on it here. That conveyor is gonna feed our material under the sanding head. And of course we can control the rate of feed to make sure that we're optimizing our finish. So let me get this up to a point, where our material's gonna fit. And we'll fire up the dust collector and start sanding. Gonna sand the bottom through first. What I usually do with a sander like this, is I raise the head to a point where I know it's not gonna cut. And then I'll turn on the conveyor and I'll turn on the head and then I'll start slowly lowering the head until I hear it make contact. A really good way to find that first pass. We have to keep in mind that our one chunk of bark over here is standing up proud of the rest of the surface. So we have to accommodate that on our first pass. Well, we can tell I've got a ways to go here but that's okay. We're gonna get this nice and flat. We're gonna get this all cleaned up. What a beautiful chunk of wood. We're already starting to see how amazing this is gonna be. When I'm ready for a paper change on this, we'll stop and show you what that paper change is all about. But I'm gonna get back to work here and keep going with my 80 grit until I'm ready to change grits. Get a lot of sanding on our table top, and I'm ready for my last abrasive here on the surface sander. So I wanted to take a second to show you how this works with these drum sanders. A roll of abrasive wraps onto the drum and what I'm doing as I work it out here is I'm making sure that the sandpaper doesn't overlap the previous wrap. Having a little bit of a gap in there is okay. It's not okay for them to overlap each other. I'm loading a 240 grit paper here. So very light passes we'll take off just a little bit of wood to finish this up. Let me bring the top in here and show you what it looks like now, because it is beautiful. Look at the grain, the wood. I love the bark on here, and this is the backside. This'll be our front. Very cool and boy, once this is wet with finish, it's gonna be even more amazing. Enough talking, we'll get it sent through the sander here. We're pretty close to our finishing step. How about that huh? Beautiful. I gotta quit talking and wrap up my sanding, do some finishing, and then when we come back we'll look at our hardware choice and getting some legs on our natural edge table. Wrapping up the table, the finish is dry. I've got three legs already in place, marking out the fourth one. Now, one of the things to notice here is that the legs are not quite randomly placed but they're not evenly spaced either. And that's just because of the nature of the beast here. We've got a real organic shape here. You got to let the legs adapt. Now, speaking of the legs, remember that when it comes to these components that you might add to the project a lot of choices out there. We talked earlier about all the different types of components that you can get. So make sure that you shop that marketplace, and get something that's gonna work well with your project. I'm leaving the screw stand proud until I get all four in. Just in case I wanna wiggle that leg a tiny bit. Ready, big reveal. All right, there we go with our natural edge table. I really like how it looks. Again, I know I've used the word organic a bunch of times but the very natural shape to this, the natural look, the material itself is beautiful, sanded, nice and flat. I love how the legs look on it. Very happy with this project. Be sure you catch all three parts of this how to video and try some natural edge projects for you.