There was a lovely large slab of Maple burl at a wood place that I saw and I decided to do something with it.
The problem however was that the board was too warped to be used as a single piece. It is a common problem with thick lumps of wood in that the shape changes as the wood dries out after being cut and what started out as a flat board just after having been sawn, becomes a warped monstrosity after a couple of months of drying.
And even then if you plane away the warp to make it flat again, it is very likely to re-warp again simply because you have removed some of the wood that was generating "internal stresses" that created the old warp... so now it will un-warp somewhat... which makes the nicely re flattened board that you just made, warp again!
So, there isn't really a lot you can do about it all.
I decided that rather than try and fight with the large warped board, I would cut it into smaller sections that would have less warp and would require less planning and flattening etc.
So, I cut it into three sections. Two were about 60cm x 45cm and one was 60cm x 30cm.
But since it was a slice of burl (which gave it very interesting grain and figure patterns) it had a few voids in it and especially near the edges of the two larger pieces. So I set about cleaning them out of debris, painting them gold, and then filling the voids with a clear epoxy (like I did with the previous smaller piece of burl that I used for the dresser table top.
Then I planed all three chunks flat again and I had three pieces that I planned to arrange into a coffee table top. I wanted the coffee table to be 150cm x 60cm (5'x2' in North American parlance) so I had to use some other timber to "fill in the gaps". I chose bloodwood which is a rich red in colour.
Note though that no-matter what the freshly cut colour of the beautiful exotic wood you choose, after exposure to UV and IR light for a couple of years they all turn to one or other shade of brown... Its a shame but all those beautiful bright reds and purples (Paduk, Bloodwood, Purpleheart etc) end up as more or less the same dark-brown!
Anyway, as I said, I decided to contrast the golden coloured Maple with the deep dark-brown of Bloodwood.
The next problem however was how to rejoin the three major pieces of the table in a way that was very strong, easy to do with minimal tooling, and would result in an attractive end product?
I decided to use very large dowels... 25mm diameter maple dowels that are 25cm long.
OK, that will be good and strong, but the trick is to get very good alignment between all the dowels in a joint and both adjoining slabs... If you get it wrong then the slabs will not slide together and/or they will end up with a bend at the joint.
It would be pretty easy to drill all the 25mm holes in straight and parallel if I had a big drill press, but all I have is a hand drill!
I solved the problem by building a wood jig that allowed me to drill the four holes into the edge of one of the slabs in a way that would ensure they were at least parallel.
Then I started by drilling the four holes into a "joiner" piece and continued into the edge of the slab. After that was done, I took the joiner piece off the edge of the slab I just drilled, and clamped its other edge to the other slab I wanted to join it to... and then I "back-drilled" into the edge of that slab using the four holes in the joiner piece as guide holes. Then, just to give myself some "wiggle room", I sanded down half of each of the four dowels into a slight cone so that once it was all assembled, there would be a little bit of up-down play in the alignment of the two slabs.
Then I repeated the procedure with another joiner piece for the other end of the table.
Then it was time to assemble the beast. I mixed up a batch of slow-set epoxy and slathered the four dowels with it as well as pouring it into the holes in each slab. Then I quickly slid the dowels into the holes of one slab, slipped the joiner piece over the dowels and upended the other slab onto the first one and slid it down over the dowel ends... That was all done rather hurriedly as you can imagine, and then the whole thing was laid flat on a good level surface for 24hr to set.
I used glad-wrap and masking tape to stop all the epoxy leaking out and sticking everything to everything else :)
Once that was done for one joint, I repeated the exercise for the other joint.
So, now I finally have a pretty flat slab of tabletop :)
So then there was another round of planning everything flat again and then sanding it smooth and slicing off the slightly uneven edges, and rounding off the corners... And then I was ready to coat it. I was going to use the epoxy coating again, so I brought the slab indoors and set it up on my existing coffee table in the living room (with suitable drip catching) and set about mixing up a large batch of epoxy which I spread over the whole tabletop.
Now I put it on in an even coat but since there were two different sorts of wood as well as various sized voids that had already been epoxy filled, the new layer of epoxy was absorbed very unevenly (I knew it would be this way). So, after I coated the bottom side of the table, I did the same to the top side of the table... with the same very uneven result.
Then I took the whole thing outside again and sanded/planed it all smooth again on both sides, but being careful to NOT sand through to the bare wood again... So now I had a smooth epoxy layer to work on. I took it back inside, mixed up more epoxy and recoated first the bottom side and then the tops side again.
And this time I got a nice smooth finish that reflects like glass :) Its not quite perfect but if I want I can sand it again with very fine grit and then polish it (with finer and finer grits) to get it like a mirror.
I'm pretty happy with the outcome. It took me a couple of months to slowly work through all the steps involved because the epoxy always takes at least a day to set up and I must have mixed up at least thirty odd batches for all the void filling, panel joining and surface coating.
But, now its done and I like how it looks (and I think it will get better with time as the bloodwood darkens)
... There is just one small problem though... There is nowhere left in my house where I can put it... I already have a coffee-table that I like!
Typical me... just doing something to keep busy, not because I "need it"... I'm clearly either very privileged or very lacking in foresight or in fact both! ...
Just like most of the people I know :)
