Appreciate the walk through on the epoxy. Really cool and I knew you said it was time comsuming but it really helps put it in perspective more just how time consuming.

 

Nice work on both.
I've been tempted to go the permanent soffit light route. Light options for multiple holidays that way, and no tedious setting all the clips on the lights & tangled cords.

 

I forgot to mention that an absolutely key part of the process is to painter's tape over any cracks on one side of the slab and then flip it over to pour the epoxy from the other side. This will prevent a massive mess lol. The worst part is once you're done with one side, you get to flip it over and do the other haha.

Edit: Correction, I used Total Boat epoxy and slow hardener, not west systems. That's what I used before and didn't like it. TB is good stuff.

 

Absolutely. The biggest reason I've decided to do this is so I don't have to go up and down a ladder in the cold every year.

 

Cold, not sure what that is
Just tedious. Not nearly as bad now that we're in a single story. Definitely didn't like it on our former 2-story home.

 

Finally getting near to completion on this project! I got the bench and counter tops completed over the weekend and planning to install them this evening.

First up, we can't have a real project without a fuck up to fix. I had to extend the width of the slab a bit to fit the space needed so I added on a chunk of walnut to the back and used some dominos to align the top faces perfectly. In my desire to get this done, I wasn't keeping in mind where my cut lines would be for final shaping and cut right through a domino on the show side of this piece. Was too pissed off to take a picture but quickly decided that it's only a problem if I can't fix it so I routed out a 1/4" groove over the newly exposed domino, grabbed the off cut of the piece I just cut off, cut a 1/4" chunk out of that piece to match up as close as possible to this location, sanded the fit to be as good as possible, glued it in, and sanded it flush. You can hardly tell that anything went wrong.

This is the patch in place. I matched the joint location and grain pattern as close as possible.


And after sanding it flush. With the finish on, you can't tell anything is there.



Once I got all the final sanding done up to 220 grit, I wiped everything down with a wet cloth followed by a tack cloth before finishing. This is the first coat of hardwax oil which is my go to finish for just about everything. You can see the finished bench (bottom) and unfinished countertop (top).



And everything finished with two coats of hardwax oil.



And a closeup of the countertop piece which, IMO, is the showcase part of the slab.



Will get these installed tonight and the project will be basically complete. Just need to do a hook rail and a final trim piece to finish. I'll do the hook rail in a few weeks and will do the trim pieces when I go to paint the next set of cabinets as I'll be painting them the same color.

 

Wow, those look fantastic. Nice work.

 

And all installed. Just need to paint some trim panels and get the hook rail done.

 

That looks amazing! Nice work!

 

Just got my next cabinet built in project completed with these cabinets for next to my fireplace. This one was pretty easy and managed to knock out all of it in about a week with 3 of those days being painting lol.



I think that this was the one straight wall in my house that I didn't have to scribe to fit it in there nicely.



Next up will be to make the top for this, it's the same as the bench top I posted about before and actually a slab from the same tree. The good news is that one is already epoxy filled (did it at the same time as the last one) and rough sanded so all it needs is final sand and finish. I don't think I'll get as lucky on the scribing front for the top so that will have to get scribed to the back wall and cut to fit as well but I've gotten pretty good at that lately.

 

Those came out great. Although not a surprise really with the quality of your work. With all your cabinet making, you have inspired me to try my hand at some cabinet making for the wood shop area later this year.

 

Do it.

Pocket hole jig and track saw is what you need to make it easy and I believe you have both. Add in a table saw and you can crank these out fast as it's basically making a box haha.

I make the doors tongue and groove on the table saw which you can do without a dado stack but it can be a PITA that way. Make sure you have a flat grind blade for your saw if you don't have a dado stack.

 

I do have both the track saw and the pocket jig. What about a tongue and groove bit set for a router table? I bought one long ago and then realized my router for my router table wasn't variable speed so I did it manually with a regular bit when I built my TV cabinet. Have since bought a new router for my router table but never used the setup. Pretty sure it was even a good Diablo bit set I have been sitting on for like 8 years now lol.

I know I will likely build the base door cabinets. Still deciding between two 42in tool cabinets with a base frame for drawers vs building all of that.

 

You could do it with a T/G set and a router, I don't have that so can't speak to how easy that would be or what the outcome would be. It's super easy and fast with a table saw though so that's what I do. If you don't have a powerful router, you may not be able to cut in one pass so that's something to consider. Table saw doesn't have that issue.

 

Knocked out a quick in drawing knife block for a friend. This one is made of walnut and lined in leather with some maple splines.



Starting a new kind of stretch project with this. Going to take all of these white oak cookies and weave them together into a table top and fill the gaps with epoxy. Will be my first run at doing an actual epoxy table so makes me a bit nervous for that...



First step was to remove all the bark which produced a bunch of good stuff to burn lol.



As these were all cut with a chainsaw and are nowhere close to flat, the first step will be to flatten them so I made this jig out of some scrap plywood to flatten them all. Then I realized I didn't have a bit suitable for flattening things so had to order one of those and am now waiting for Bezos to deliver it to me.



After this we're going to make a YUUUUUGGEEE mess with flattening these. Guess I better empty the dust collector bin before I start lol.

 

That knife block looks great.

Interested to see how the table turns out.

 

This sounds like a super cool project. Can't wait to see next steps.

 

Me too...

 

Seeing this one late. I have a T/G set for my router table; I used it over 10 years ago to make some solid cherry cabinet faces/doors in our old house. The things you will want to do to make it easier are (1) build a sled for the cross-grain cuts and (2) buy the Delrin setup blocks to match the T/G profiles so that you get the bit height perfect.

Where you will want to make multiple passes is if you get a bit for shaping the field - those will generally require multiple passes. If you keep it simple (Shaker style) your fields will just be plywood.

Space Balls help keep everything from rattling BTW. Well worth getting.

 

Yep, everything you said is absolutely true (and I can even 3D print the set up blocks in a few hours lol) but I can pretty quickly knock all of this out on the table saw so it's not a huge deal to me.