Wood Slab Bar
One of the projects I have wanted to do for a long time is to make a live edge wood slab into a breakfast bar. The first part of this was figuring out where to get a live edge wood slab. I did a lot of research online and found a place that looked promising in Berkeley. Only problem is that the slabs they had where ginormous -- like 1x4 meters ginormous, and the prices were equally ginormous. A guy there told be about a place around the corner which consisted of a very scruffy looking dude with an open barn like structure filled with lots and lots of gorgeous wood slabs! I found one made of black walnut that I loved, and off I went.
Once I had the slab at home, the first step was to sand it down, taking off the bark and shaping the wood, while at the same time letting the natural organic irregularities stay since that's what makes live edge slabs so beautiful. As you can see above, there were several splits and gaps in the wood, which I filled with epoxy resin. First step is to mask off the bottom cracks with painter's tape so the resin does not flow through to the other side and weld your slab to your work table. Then I mixed the resin together with a combination of rich brown saw dust I had collected from sanding, and charcoal that I ground up with a mortar and pestle.
You pour in the resin (being sure to wear protective gloves) and in a few hours it turns rock hard. The next step is to sand the resin down until it is flush with the wood. You can see the before/after process of this in the two images below.
Once I was done with all the sanding (and boy it was a lot of sanding), I rubbed the slab with linseed oil which brought out the rich colors of the black walnut.
Next step was the finish, which gives it a protective coating. Since we were planning on using this as a bar to eat breakfast on, I wanted a finish that was food safe, which is how I ended up with a product called "Emmet's Good Stuff" which is this goopy stuff that you rub on with a cloth rag.
After applying about five coats of this Good Stuff, I wanted to get it to shine. I didn't want to do anything toxic (which a lot of the methods for polishing wood seem to be) so I arrived at the technique of wet sanding with 1000 grit sandpaper on my orbital sander, using a simple solution of dishwasher soap and water to sand with. It worked great, giving it a glass like shine. I then buffed it with Daddy Van's Natural Bees Wax (seriously who comes up with the names for these things?) which is made by... bees. Take a look at how gorgeous the wood looks!
For the legs, we got iron pipes and fittings from the big box hardware store, where they will cut and threat the pipes for you. We screwed all the pipes and fittings together, and spray painted it all with Rustoleum metallic paint to give it a uniform look. The final step was mounting the whole thing in place for the big reveal. Drum roll please... Ta-Da!!
