Slab coffee table
I designed and built this coffee table while I was living in Brooklyn in 2017.
Glamor shots
The build process
As an apartment dweller I had no room for a home shop, but I rented space at a working woodshop in Industry City, where I got to keep my stuff and get access to a bunch of huge industrial scale machines. It was great.
Getting wood for projects is fun. I particularly like getting wood off of craigslist, even when I don't really need it.
This project started when I answered a craigslist post from a lumberyard that needed to clear out a bunch of inventory. This was an insane deal: $600 for everything in the foreground here (not the massive pile of slabs in the back or along the wall).
The guys at the warehouse were awesome - if you're in the NYC area check them out: Urban Specialty Woods
Once I decided I wanted to build a coffee table, I had to design it. I do all my designs in sketchup. I played with a bunch of options, some of which you can see here.
Preparing the slab
A surprising amount of work goes into getting a live edge slab ready for use.
For this one, I had to:
- flatten it
- remove a bunch of loose bark & hit other areas with wood hardener
- clean up the edges
- place butterflies on some cracks to add strength & prevent further cracking
- pour epoxy in all cracks
- clean up epoxy remnants and sand
I forgot to take pictures of making the butterfly keys, but basically the steps are:
- Cut out the keys and clean them up
- Figure out the placement and trace with a marking knife
- Route out most of the waste with a plunge router
- Clean up the edges with a chisel
- Glue and insert. In this case I just used the same black epoxy.
Here's what they looked like after the epoxy dried, mid-cleanup.
At this point the top is ready for finish. On to the base.
Building the base
As I mentioned above, building the base was really challenging. I had a very hard time figuring out the angles for these cuts even after dusting off my high school trigonometry. Ultimately I ended up using sketchup to draw a plane intersecting with the model and traced the intersection.
Assembly
Once all the base pieces were cut & sanded, it was time to assemble it.
I used this project as an excuse to buy a Festool Domino XL. I did not want to try doing traditional mortise and tenon with all these angles. Having it made my life a lot easier.
Finishing up
For most finishes, you want to put a coat on every 24 hours or so. My workshop space was about 30 mins away by subway, so I didn't want to go down there every day.
Instead, I called a cab and took the base and slab back to my apartment to finish.
