Create Dual Tables from a Single Hackberry Slab

Thank you Sam. Look at this beautiful piece of wood. And if I cover this up for a second, bonus points if you can identify it. This is hackberry and it's an unusual specie to run across. I'm really happy to have found this slab, and I've got a pretty neat plan going on here. We're gonna get it cut so we end up with a large table and a small table. What I'm thinking is a coffee table and a side table. And as part of this whole process, we'll work through the cut, sanding, couple of different sanding operations going on, and ending up with some hairpin legs to make this really the final product, now cutting. If at this stage of the game what I wanted to do was simply cut this into a square-ended, square-ended slab, I would do that with the track saw. Or if we were doing a waterfall table, you've probably seen those out there, they're very popular. If we we're doing a waterfall table, we'd be cutting a miter on these pieces. Same deal, I would do that with the track saw. But we're gonna do something to give this a little bit more organic look. What I'm thinking is on the end of the small table here, I wanna have a curve. And from a design perspective what I'm after is that when this table is done and this table is done, you'll be able to see in a puzzle piece sort of way the way that they're actually one big slab originally so... This is a wonderful thing. These are called flexible curves. Rubber with steel inside so I can form it and it'll stay. And this is gonna let me mess with the shape I'm doing. And from a design perspective what I'm after is I want this center, this length point, to be about the same as the width of this piece. So I'm basically generating a square in that small one. I don't know, maybe I got it on the first try. What do you think? I kind of like that. All right. Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, right? So there's no wrong here. Yeah, now we're gonna do the work with a jigsaw, more specifically a Triton jigsaw. And let's talk jigsaws for a second. One of the things we wanna have is enough capacity to make our cut, so we've got the right blade in for that. The other thing is for the work that we're doing here, this is a pretty thick slab. And I'm gonna ask the saw to give me an aggressive cut so I can keep moving here. So that's all about the pendulum motion of the blade. So here's how this works. On this saw when that's on three and I'll run it in a sec so you can see, that's gonna give me a real aggressive pendulum action. And when I have it on zero, not so much. So three, aggressive pendulum, more aggressive cut. If I was cutting on a sheet of plywood, I wouldn't want that because I'd have a propensity to chip the veneer on top. So that's where I would dial that back down to zero. So let's have a look at this. I'm on the aggressive action now. Go to unaggressive. And of course the other thing I was messing with there was speed control, and that's a handy feature because if I wanna... If I'm having a hard time staying on the line, what I might do is use the aggressive cut but at a lower RPM so that if it wanders a little bit, it doesn't wander way off the line. It gives me a little bit better control. So messing with that variable speed to find the setting that's right for you is good. And then the other thing that's great here is just the grip options on the saw are good. Depending on what position your body's in, what position you're in, there are a variety of ways you can hold onto the saw so that it's comfortable for you and you can see what you're working on here. All right, enough chatter, let's choppa-choppa. This is fun, this is a cool table, cool project. Now the other thing about our setup here is you saw when Sam and I carried the slab in, we've got the two-by-sixes set up so that we're spanning the length of this. 'Cause of course at this stage of the game when I made that cut if we weren't supported, these would have collapsed. So so far, so good. Next step, we have to launch into the world of sanding. Next step for sanding, I wanna get the slab into the SuperJaws so that it gets a good bite them. And I'm not chasing the slab around. And first sanding we'll do is on the curve. This is such a great example of an occasion where taking the tool to the work instead of the work to the tool is bigger, better, faster, stronger. So huge slab, the idea of taking this thing to some kind of a sander to work on this curved edge would be really, really tough to do. However what I can do is bring the spindle sander to the cut and work my way through. Variable speed so that helps give me the control I need to make sure I don't burn and I cut at the right rate. Different sized drums are available for it. This is gonna do a great job on this edge. It's really smoothing out nice. And one of the things that's really fun is by cutting this end off, look at the spalting that was exposed right there. So it already looks neat. When we get finished on this, it's really gonna help accentuate those spalting lines. Now one of the things I like doing with these live edge slabs is not leaving the corners super sharp because when we look at the other edges, they're all organic. That's the original outside of the tree right there. So I wanna do something here and on the other end to give this a little bit more of a natural look. And I can do that with another sander. My next round of sanding I can do with a random-orbit sander, and we've got some cool stuff going on here. Two settings on the sander. When it's set here, that's my fine sanding. That's what I'm gonna use to get the top ready. Here it's more aggressive. Gets a little bit more toward the category of an angle grinder. And for what I'm about to do, I wanna be on that coarse setting. And I'm gonna use that to start wicking down this corner and giving it that more organic look I was talking about. I like how that's starting to look. I'll do a little more detailing there, but I'm kind of after this effect of that's kind of how it came off of a chainsaw or something, something that's a little rougher looking. On the top of this, now we can stay initially in that more aggressive mode because I got to get the marks off of it, there's quite a bit of sanding to do. And then transitioned back to the fine sanding mode as we're sneaking up on the point where we're getting more finish sanding going on. It's really coming along nice. I've got a fair bit of sanding to do. I'm only on 80 grit. I'm gonna march my way through the grits and then see if I can get some finish on this, and we'll come back and see what the finished tables are gonna look like. What do you think of this hackberry table? I like it a lot. This multilevel idea, making one big slab into two tables, and then the sort of puzzle shape of how they... You can see that they came from the same slab originally. Great work from the Triton tools to help make this happen between the curve cut, all the sanding that had to be done. So overall, I love the look of this live edge table. And hopefully you got some good information out of this that'll help you with your next big live edge project.