This coffee table is made completely from oak I salvaged from shipping crates. It's good stuff with a lot of character. It's got knots and nail holes and saw marks and dings and cracks and all sorts of visually interesting points.
The legs came from crates constructed to hold farm implements in shipping. Plows, rotatory tillers, that sort of thing. None of this was finish cut, so its full thickness. The planks that make up the top are an inch thick.
The table measures 24" by 48", and 18" tall. Also, it weights a frick'en ton. I didn't think about how much this amount of oak would weigh once it was all screwed and glued together. You don't want to run into this thing on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Here you can see the rays in the white oak leg. You only get this sort of pattern if the wood is cut at the right angle. Cutting wood for shipping crates doesn't result in this on purpose. Here it's just a happy accident. Originally, of course, this was rough cut and the pattern wasn't obvious if you didn't know to look for it.
I ground down the unevenness and marks from the saw teeth with an angle grinder. You could run it through a power planer and make it perfectly flat if you wanted that. I don't want that. Dead flat surfaces and perfect angles don't keep your eye. I'll make tight joints for strength and durability, but I want a hand made item to look hand made.
There is no commercial stain on this table. All the color comes from the juice of green husks of Black Walnuts. I have the fingers to prove it. I really haven't found a commercial stain that compares to walnut juice for depth of color. It penetrates into the wood, and depending upon the species, brings up a gold to near black that just draws the eye.
Here's the table drying in the sun after the final finish coat. I'll usually put on three coats of finish. Allowing it to dry between coats and then sanding each one to get that glassy surface that still allows you to feel the wood grain. The oak, especially the white, however, is so hard that it doesn't pull in much finish. Because of this, I only used two coats on the table.
I'm not completely done with this one yet. I have to take a hair off two of the legs and then put low profile feet on all four of them. All the legs are exactly the same length, but because the top is not dead flat, but has high and low areas, I'll have to adjust for them.
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Great blog, inspirational projects! Really enjoying it.
ReplyDeleteHow do you make the stain out of the walnut husks? I've got an abundance of black walnut trees in my backyard, and the idea of making a stain out of some of the nuts is interesting.
What I'm doing now is more a matter of juicing than making stain. I'm just cutting the husk off in two pieces and directly rubbing the wood with them. It's messy and slow, but gives great color.
ReplyDeleteI picked up an old Blackhawk corn sheller, and I'm going to use it to husk a lot of walnuts at once. Then I'm going to press them like you would apples if you were making cider. I'm going to divide the juice and try it as a tint in a few different base carriers to see what works out for the best.