"For $35,000 I'd Expect it to be Perfect"

a few months ago I had a designer reach out and say that they needed a really big table for a yacht that was going to be based in Europe and wanted to know if I was free for the commission and I told them maybe needed to know a little bit more and so I found out it was going to be a big table it was going to be 3.4 M by 1.4 M and for my American friends out there that is a little over 11 ft by about 55 in wide which would make it the

biggest table I've ever attempted but it wasn't prohibitively big I knew I could handle that he then said it needed to be done in the next 2 months and that part for me was a little crazy because normally my commissions take anywhere from 12 to 24 months sometimes even longer than that but I thought you know I think if I really get on it right away I could actually get this done so for the largest table I've ever attempted on the fastest timeline I've ever been given I wrote the largest quote I've ever sent anyone

at $35,000 and at least half of me was just hoping they'd say no and I could go back to making de tables or something but they came back pretty quick and said yep that'll be fine and I thought to myself godamn it but then I thought for a guy like me that is a ton of money let's do this so what you've seen so far is me just frantically scrambling around not just my state but the entire country essentially whether it's in person or online I even got desperate enough to look at Facebook Marketplace but

I really wasn't having any luck until finally GOI said they had something in storage surfaced it for me I showed it to the the clients and myself and everybody agreed would be the perfect pair of slabs however then we ran into one of the first of many problems this how this different from other twisty tables we' had the difference is with this book match basically when they cut this tree like the thinner the cut the more symmetrical they're going to be okay and so like every quarter inch you get away from that perfect split in

the tree they get less symmetrical okay and so before if we have a Twist it's not a big deal if it's thick enough cuz then it's just a it just goes down in the slab this one it'll make one or both of the slabs less symmetrical every little bit we have to surface off of it oh so like right here how this is like an inch difference um I have an old video that I did where I messed up a book mesh like this luckily it wasn't for a customer and they got really unsymmetrical from

the start to the Finish oh so we need to not do that okay so what I'm doing now is just ensuring that this speed bump isn't a total deal breaker and these slabs aren't going to be unusable because I played around with some shims and I figured that I should be able to retain the thickness retain that symmetry as long as I shim it up just right because I can still return these slabs to GOI get all my money back which if you're curious these cost $2,000 $800 that is unless I cut them once I

cut them I own them and the next speed bump was my own stupidity I didn't want to make several small passes so I tried to make one big pass with this big track saww and it completely bound up and if you're doing this the worst thing you can do is stop the blade from spinning because then it will be completely seized in there so I kept it spinning Scott went and found a screwdriver to wedge in there for me and then I could just barely inch this along and this was so dumb it takes me

barely any more time to do a few small passes even when it doesn't bind up and so barely made it through and generated just a little bit of heat through the process that was way easier than just making three small kiss it is Smokey in here look at get aot that I feel like the elephant in the room for a lot of people watching this video is going to be the price point that I'm charging this customer for the table because like I just said the total cost of these slabs was $2,800 and I'm charging

the customer $35,000 so some of you might be wondering how did I possibly come up with that math or how did I make that number up and it's something that I'm not particularly proud of but I'm also not necessarily ashamed of it and my pricing model comes down to this I charge as much as I possibly can where I won't be disappointed if the customer says no and the reason I say that I'm not proud of this pricing model again it's not not that I'm ashamed of it it's just that I don't think that this

is the best pricing model for really hardly any of you out there if you're trying to grow a cabinet shop I think this would be a terrible way to run your business your customers would hate you but for me it served me well and this is just how I do it personally but I don't want to encourage someone to copy what is probably a bad system for them when I had this project explained to me I understood there's about eight collaborators involved a very big table and a very tight timeline and from my own personal

experience I know that all these things add up to insomnia for Cam and bouts of nausea and that doesn't mean the requests they made were unreasonable everything they asked for was fine I just needed to find a price that was commensurate with pricing in my nausea and sleepless nights and making sure that I could actually make some money on top of all of it and so that is where I came to the number of $335,000 which I do think that they could have probably found someone cheaper but for whatever reason they decided that I was

going to be the best fit for them and for me that was going to be the price for me to get it done it's kind of like if someone comes to me and says hey how much for you to be my dog walker I would never say something like oh for no amount of money or I can't be bought because trust me I can be bought it just probably won't be the cheapest dog walker out there the downside to using a pricing model like the one I use is that it is going to be much

more difficult to build those long-term customer relationships that are so important in almost any small business think about it this way if you have a customer and you build them a $10,000 table and they absolutely love it so they send all their friends to you whether they admit it or not they have told their friends exactly what they paid for that table or at least very close to what they paid for that table so they know what to expect but maybe now you're really busy you're really backed up so you tell them that same table

is going to be $117,000 now not only is that new customer going to feel a little betrayed your previous customer is going to feel a little betrayed and be afraid to come back to you because now they don't know if your prices have doubled or not so in the end you may have been better off just telling that new customer hey I'm a little backed up right now my books are closed feel free to reach out next year or whenever you decide to reopen your books but for me I'm honestly I'm a woodworking YouTuber I'm

just here to make fun videos and for me there is not much that's more fun than $35,000 it's probably just some deep-seated guilt for price gouging Russian oligarchs on their custom Yachts but occasionally I do try to give back a little bit a couple videos ago I donated this giant timber frame picnic table I also gave away this custom desk to one of you guys a few months ago I even gave away a bunch of these denim tabletops but what I've done that has probably reached the most people is this free finishing Workshop that I

offer and it's exactly what it sounds like it's completely free there's no bait and switch it's not like put your credit card in and then you have to pay to get the last chapter or something I was initially going to charge for it just like my epoxy Workshop but then I thought maybe it just be a nice way to give back to some of you and so far over 50,000 people have signed up and as far as I know zero complaints it's absolutely every step that I do to get as close to a perfect finish

on your tables in your home shop or garage as possible so if you do want to sign up for that it is something I do like to give back a little bit to some of you guys and make me feel a little bit better so there's a link in the video description if you want to sign up for that Workshop or maybe I'll even put a QR code on screen [Music] [Music] anytime you're building an epoxy table that is over 48 in wide or 8 ft long the form building gets a little bit more interesting

because that is the standard size for a single sheet of melamine you can get oversized sheets that are about 5 ft x 10 ft but that still wouldn't have been big enough for this one this is about 12 ft x 5 ft so I ended up making the form out of three individual sheets and eventually we got there this here though is one of my favorite additions to the shop over the last year or so this is a custom leveling bench and you'll see here in a little bit though it's only as good as an

8ot level and since the table right now is about 12 ft long we had to relevel it after the pour which I'll show you again here in just a minute this designer and I had a number of conversations leading up to finalizing this deal to decide if I was the best person to take this project on and one of the things that concerned me since this table was going on a boat was the implication and I brought this up to him I'd mentioned the implication and he wasn't aware of what that was so I went

on to explain to him that this table's out in the middle of nowhere a bunch of guys that don't know anything about wood movement all around the table nothing but open ocean AKA high humidity and again not that anything is going to go wrong but the implication is that something could go wrong if one of these installers over tightens one of the bolts then there's nowhere for this wood to run so to speak and the implication of danger is there even though again nothing's going to happen but the implication is still there the designer seemed

a little concerned but mostly just on how many times I said the word implication and the inflection that I gave when I said that but eventually he assured me that this is going to be in a very climate controlled space and said that if there were any problems they would accept the risk of having this boat out in the middle of the ocean with that super high humidity and potential for any cracks in the wood I mentioned at the start of the video that one of the biggest challenges to working with a book match is

keeping it as symmetrical as possible and one way that you can do that is by overfilling the epoxy normally when I do an epoxy poure I'll just fill it up to the top and then if as it shrinks a little bit it's okay I just surface it off in the end this one however I overfilled I dumped in an extra three three gallons just to ensure I had more than enough epoxy in there however I noticed a lot of it running down to one end this was leveled but again only to my 8T level and

it's a 12T table at this point so luckily for me I have these levelers and I could just crank it up a little bit more and as I was looking at this I just wasn't as confident that I had enough epoxy in there and I didn't want to mix up a whole another bucket because that color probably wouldn't match perfectly so what I did is I took some 2x4s and just squished it down just to maximize how much of that epoxy I had and now I had to let this cure over the weekend and hopefully

wouldn't have any problems when I came back hopefully got a surprise for you what shoes are you wearing huh oh never never mind uh had an exciting pour this weekend oh did it leak well come see for yourself get your reaction I don't see anything we had a perfectly normal por that's a good surprise yeah uh we need a little drama though for the video so um yeah no everything went normal I mean it is surprising it was a little bit surprising all right oh that's good yeah all right I uh have a new way

that Blacktail is going more green yeah what would you think would it be the most efficient thing to heat an entire shop to cure it faster or to heat just a table but how would you do it oh welcome to the 21st century blankets that heat you or maybe the 1970s but either way we're bringing them back epoxy cure time is something that not a lot of people fully understand because it'll be pretty hard after like 3 days but if you were to finish your table right then there's a good chance that epoxy will continue

to cure for the next couple weeks and that epoxy will shrink and actually make kind of a wrinkly finish so normally when I have a shop that's 60° like this I'll just let it cure for 2 or 3 weeks sometimes even longer than that however with these heated blankets I can keep them at around 110 120° for basically 24 hours a day they're only good for 10 hours at a time but if I come back and turn them back on it heats up the entire table all the way to like 110 120° it is fantastic

so I think that brings my total cure time down to less than a week and it's going to save me a ton of time using those heated blankets to save a little time during the Cure process was nice but it was probably the last time that any time would be saved throughout the rest of this project because from here on out this build gets pretty freaking sporty and I'm embarrassed to say that when I took this commission even though it was the most expensive table I'd ever had I'd secretly just hoped that it would be

easy and that's probably just human nature but going forward it is not only not easy and I won't say that I earned every dollar that I charged but I earned more dollars than I was planning on earning now I mentioned earlier that the finished Dimensions when this table is all completed is going to be 3400x 1400 mm or about 135 by 55 in what I haven't mentioned is the finished thickness they requested which was 50 mm or about 1.97 in or just under 2 in and that is a very normal size standard size for a

table this size the slabs themselves started out at about 2 1/2 in and ideally to play it safe I would have preferred to be somewhere in the 3-in range but these slabs were exactly what everybody was looking for and we were on that time crunch and 2 and 1/2 is usually about right to end at 2 in and I wasn't too worried since they were still over 2 and 1/2 at this point however as we got surfacing I was monitoring all the corners and all the sides with my calipers and there was one Corner that

just kept getting thinner than the rest and it was making me extremely nervous and we got the entire top flattened because we had to we didn't really have a choice and I took my measurements and that was about right 2 and a qu still had to do the backside this one 1.8 in so this corner is already thinner than the entire table needs to finish and that is a major freaking problem I was having a bit of a panic attack but again we had to surface it there's no other option and all I could think

was just what am I going to do to fix that one corner but like I said I didn't have a choice we had to surface it and then figure out the solution later but for now I needed to get the backs side done and then just figure out what the heck I'm going to do you feeling better uh no I'm not you look like yeah I feel like that um how much did I fill you in on how things ended at NX uh not really a whole lot um uh long story longer one corner is

too thin and we need to make it thicker so we saved all that uh this offcuts which we always do this is this is why so um we're going to make a series of basically Patches from the exact same wood so it should be invisible but they'll just be like little less than a/4 in patches when it's all said and done but we need to make those from those rough chunks also the table's due in 5 days okay and it's Thanksgiving week so when wood done today and then at least be prepared for that patch

I always save the offcuts from my projects until that build is physically out the door and in the customer's house because I've just had too many issues in the past but I don't think I've ever been more glad that I saved the offcuts than I was here I got those big chunks trimmed down to a little bit more manageable of a size got a really nice clean section that should match the grain just right then I cut them into about 3/8 in chunks and I actually ended up cutting a few extras because well who knows

what can happen in this project I really need to thank Nick over at Maverick Sawmill for bearing with me through this whole debacle because not only did he offer to store it for me while I figure out how I was going to do this fix but then I got sick for 3 or 4 days and he's building a 20,000 ft shop but this shop he's in right now is not very big and he said it wasn't in the way but I am positive it was and anyway here is the problem Corner in question and here's

what we're going to hopefully do to fix it I got my patches laid out to see how far I wanted them to go surfacing it it looks like a CNC but this is actually all done manually so I used their blue chalk and I was just like yeah just don't go past the blue line and we should be good and this guy was great he really knows flattening we talked a lot about this we talked about what caused this and we believe it was when the epoxy was curing it tends to kind of curl up

sometimes and it just kind of pulled that one corner up and it's one of those things that just happens with big slabs especially these epoxy tables slabs but in the end I think this is going to work but I've done it on a smaller scale never this big but we will see little funky things we used something I didn't know is those big flatten bits that he uses are actually slightly dished so it's not a huge deal but I am going to need to go through and square up those corners and that big radius there

and I brought in some tools from my shop some pretty basic stuff just a router and some chisels and a couple straight edges and and what I'm going to do here is just line these up with a flush trim router bit hit it with the router and it should Square it up pretty nicely I have done a similar fix to this on a past project on my personal dining table that I made 3 or 4 years ago there was a number of low spots that I ended up filling with a series of patches to help

maintain the table thickness and I will say in the 3 4 years we've been eating at it nobody's ever pointed one of them out and I've never actually looked down and noticed one of them myself however I do feel the Stakes are a little bit higher here it's one thing building something for yourself and another building it for a client so I really really need this to work and I need it to be essentially invisible as I was getting everything cleaned up I was feeling pretty good for about 30 seconds or so till I ran

into the next small problem how do we do that [Applause] I think I had a slight miscommunication with the guy running the flattening machine where I didn't want him to go past the blue line and I think he thought I needed to go at least to the blue line so went back to the shop got a couple of those extra patches that I cut if you didn't catch that foreshadowing earlier and now I have six pieces instead of four but it'll be long enough this entire patch process definitely falls into a bit of the seeing

how the sausage is made and I think a lot of people aren't going to like seeing this they'd rather not see it at all and I think a lot of channels probably just wouldn't show this but I've always liked Channels with transparency and those that are able to show kind of how you do your best to overcome certain obstacles but I also understand that if I was building a $50 Barnwood table probably wouldn't get a lot of backlash but when I'm openly talking about a table that costs more than I made for much of my

adult life as an annual salary I expect to get a bit of backlash and I do get a lot of comments in the past where people would say something to the effect of for 35 I would expect it to be perfect and I understand that sentiment but unfortunately that's just not how it works with big slabs slabs do not deal in perfect if you really want perfect I recommend getting something like a laminate top and I'm not even being sarcastic laminate is a great surface that can be made essentially perfectly and sure it's not the

most exciting but the reason why a lot of people like these big Live Edge slabs is because of all the flaws because this crazy color and the grain variation and all the character that comes with them it's kind of like the girls that like a bad boy or at least they like a bad boy until he comes home with the tattoo of another girl's name on his neck but that's why you liked him in the first place you wanted a guy who was capable of coming home with your name tattooed on his neck and these

big slabs are kind of the bad boys of The Woodworking world we have to take all the good with the bad thank you again for the weird tape measure no problem and forgot about about this corner remember this one oh so if everything goes well we get a cut it off but it's just everything is nothing can be easy and I'm embarrassed to say I had a brief moment of feeling sorry for myself but I'm ready to move past it shouldn't be any more problems from here on out and now I'm going to cut it

to size and this is a little different than a normal table normally I would just start with one cut and then cut it to width on the other side since this one needs to be symmetrical what I did was I found the dead center part of the epoxy on both ends and then I measured my width out from that Center Line it's pretty simple but it will make a big difference to ensure that one side doesn't have an inch more wood than the other it's also really nice having enough of these straight edges are enough

of these big tracks to get everything lined up in place and that's what I'm doing here just making sure my width is perfect and [Music] symmetrical with all the excitement about those patches earlier I'd kind of forgot about the first problem which was this corner here and I made the table oversized enough that I'm hoping it's going to be really really close that I'm able to cut off all that epoxy but I don't know for sure yet and as you can tell I'm not afraid of patches but I don't want this to be a Frankenstein

table I don't want to put any more than I have to and I made the cut to size right there we just have a little bit of it left but I do have one more thing that I think should take care of it y [Music] I don't know if it's just me but I used to think that it was really weird when a chef would need a recipe book and keep in mind I can't cook so I'm not judging here but for some reason I thought that if they're such a good cook they should just

know how to make everything but I think I finally get it because I have laid linear miles of the c channel but for some reason I can never remember what width of a spacer goes with which bushing and which router bit and all of that so what I end up doing is I'll go reference an old video I made from like 2018 so I can then learn how to put these C channels in in 2024 so for my own reference and your reference I use a 2 and 1/8 in spacer that little small piece on

the sides a/4 in router bit and a 3/8 in bushing so now I have that reference in a more recent video that might be a little easier for me to find or for you to use I wish I would brought this part up earlier in the video because I really need help from at least one of you and no this is not the part of the video where I ask you to like And subscribe although while we're at it yes that would be great if you subscribed that's not what I'm after here what I really

need help with is I need at least one of you who can help me find a property to move my operation to and if you are that person I'm willing to bribe you for the last 3 years or so I've been looking for a property to move my operation and I feel like it's most likely going to be a farm type of property an egg land a can have a shop or not have a shop but I'm having a really hard time locating a property for sale that's close to me and then I started thinking

about it and I was like you know sometimes my videos get a fair amount of views and maybe somebody watching one of these videos knows somebody because I look at these aerial maps of all these property lines and there are properties everywhere and I just need one so what I did is I actually made a Blog that just kind of outlines everything I'm looking for and what I'm willing to do if one of you guys knows about one of these properties that's off Market because I know about everything it's for sale publicly but if you

know someone who has one of these properties I'm willing to build you any table you want it'll come with shipping but I would assume it will be local if you know a local property and honestly save your time if you want to recommend a property in North Carolina or in southern Oregon I'm I'm not going that far but if you do know somebody local check out that blog I am willing to bribe you a free table basically anything you want normally when I'm shopping a marking knife I'm not looking for one with an extremely sharp

blade to it because I don't do a lot of whittling or carving with it I do a lot of tracing like this however I was talking to my friend Drew wit over at witw works and he ended up buying one of these knives without even telling me and he did say he's like hey the Blade's kind of dull and I'd never really thought about it but I went to the manufacturer and I was like hey can we just get a really razor sharp blade to go along with this and they're like yeah no problem so

the latest model of these knives has a razor sharp blade but that does come with one downside I swear there's not an ad it guys it's all good I did get it really good is this worth an ad that knife must be super sharp that knife was almost too sharp I don't think I'm going to have to blur this out people are going to faint yeah if you're wondering why I'm not bandaging this up is cuz I do see this as a good add opportunity is it just graphic enough that isn't going to make the'll

turn away but you can still see that it was a real accident yeah is it too graphic do we need to get close it might be a little too graic all right have I uh stretch this out long enough yeah I think you can go bandage up here I think I had it like that and I came like pressed against this metal [Applause] man that was sharp blackt Studio LLC is not responsible for anyone who places their hand in front of a frighteningly Sharp Damascus blade and is then surprised when they cut themselves not only

that but I'm am wildly underinsured so you won't get so much as a Band-Aid let alone a settlement if you hurt yourself if you or anyone you know has a problem gambling we should totally hang out and hit up the casino sometime my wife was recently telling me about some sort of management exercise she did at a conference or a meeting or maybe it was online I don't know I wasn't necessarily paying attention but the gist of it was you had to choose which animal you would be and I was like all right I love

animals and I know everything about animals so let's see what animal would I be and I was like I like dogs would would I be a wolf and my wife looks at me she's like wolves live in packs and you hate working with people and I'm like I do hate working with people so yeah I guess it's safe to say that a wolf would be out which brings me back to this project because this is a very collaborative project which is not necessarily my strong suit this project in particular is a good example of why

I don't really like collaborating with people that I'm not in direct contact with and before this designer had ever reached out to me they already had the table based design picked out and the table based fabricator who I think is based over in Europe and they sent me that diagram which is that big print out that I had there to make sure everything lines up but what worries me is I don't think this table base fabricator has ever worked with big slabs before because they sent me pictures of how they were going to recess their

mounting plates and they were just absolutely snug fit in there not allowing any room for wood movement and then they screwed directly into it and I had to tell them I was like this will rip the table apart like this is not a maybe like this will destroy the table if you mount it this way and I showed them some old videos and they seemed responsive they seemed like they got it but I'm still slightly terrified that they're just going to screw this thing in rigidly and then if this thing rips itself apart of course

everybody's going to point fingers at everybody else but if I was in charge of the base and the top and everything myself then I could just guarantee it would work and if it doesn't then I'm responsible but now we have this whole collaboration and the designer has to answer to the fabricator who has to talk to me and I am hoping crossing my fingers that this will work and they will actually listen to me but I have no guarantee of that I feel like since this table's going to Europe and I've been using all these

metric measurements this one and only time I will use the British pronunciation of this bit just to keep everybody happy and tell you that I'm using a 22° shamer bit spelled CH shamer makes a lot of sense to me anyway this was something that I talked about with the designer and we went back and forth a little bit there was really only two options as far as I saw and that was just a simple 8 in roundover I don't know what the metric version of 8 in is but I did think that this shamer bit

would be a nice addition to it especially on a table this big and luckily for me I have this big oversized bit that I had custom built a couple years ago in the past I've used to tracks how to make this cut but it is much more accurate especially on a really long cut like this to have this big oversized rout a bit but it was starting to get a little dull so I had to make a ton of passes and I was really really careful to make sure I didn't have any Blowout at the

end which is why you see me go to the end then I kind of back it in a little bit which worked perfectly on all the other Corners except for this one what happened you chunked it where's the chunk I was going so careful if you have a little chip out like this the easiest thing is to find that chip and then just glue it back in because they generally fit perfectly so I spent a lot of time on my hands and knees crawling around eventually I thought it might have got sucked into the vacuum

bag so I even cut the vacuum bag apart looking for it eventually I gave up and decided that we needed to make an all new patch so back to the scrap heat I feel like there should be more is it that piece over there over by the Wall E we're smart for once we didn't cut it up that yeah see I'd say that's a pretty good match now I just got to find a way to put it in there the people who earlier in the video might have said thought or commented for $35,000 I expect

something to be perfect might actually be having an aneurysm right now and like I said before I get it I understand that sentiment but understanding it doesn't change the fact that I have to find a way to fix this now and at least give me to the end of the video or if you don't want to watch that long skip ahead to the end of the video to see what it looks like when it's all finished because I'm willing to bet even if you know where to look you cannot even see any of these fixes

and if you do think that you can see them if you do think that you are cheated a little bit if you watch all the way to the end of the video and you think that I didn't do a good enough enough job I will refund 100% of everything you paid to watch this video I am well aware that I am far from the greatest Craftsman in the world it's something I'm working at I'm trying harder every day and maybe someday I'll get there but I'm not there yet the one thing that is within my

control though is I'm not sure you'll find anybody that will try harder to deliver a better finish product to the best of my abilities anyway and I really feel like this is all that any of us can hope for I remember years ago listening to Adam CA on the radio and someone called in I think they were nervous about taking the bar exam and he goes oh well did you not study and they're like no no I studied a lot and he goes well could you have studied more they're like no I don't think so

I did it you know this many hours a night and I feel really well prepared and he's like well then that's all you can really hope for because if you prepared yourself even if you fail you didn't leave anything on the table and that's how I feel about these projects is I don't want to send anything out there where I could have done it a little bit better and maybe there's someone out there that could have done it better but I personally couldn't have done anything more and that's all I can really hope for on

this project speaking of making things a little better I am aware that that corner patch was darker than the rest of it but that should be a pretty simple fix here in a little bit also here are those patches that we did earlier and I am really pleased with how they turned out also I got a lot of Sanders and I'm well aware of that and it's not like my chisel collection I feel like I have a lot of chisels and Timber slicks because I just think they're cool I don't really have a use for

every every single one of them however all these Sanders I actually need and they make my life so much easier and this is probably the only project where I actually got to use all my Sanders on it because I have this small little corner one I have the small belt sander I have the big belt sander I have the Rotex sander I have the fine sander and this was the one project that I actually needed them all on yeah all right sticking with the theme of this project we got another problem can you hear the

difference between this oh yeah that's like louder and higher pitched and I show what's going on all right so these I think are called shakes it's kind of like another just form of cracks different technical term and it's normally fine but I think they go like filet it underneath so it's just like paper thin here on top and but there's not really a good way to like inject resin or something back you know this far cuz there's no cracks up here so ideally to keep it as clean as we can but then stabilize it and

I'm not sure the best way to do that small small interesting so what makes this particular defect so unique is normally I'll have like a regular check or a crack that just runs straight down and fill it with resin it looks pretty good and nobody's the wiser this one here is like a 10-in oval you can see I've kind of outlined the hollow point there with the chalk and it's basically like a millimeter thick through that whole perimeter but there's only one small access point here so what I need to do is find a way

to get resin impregnated underneath this but also still looking keeping it looking as natural as you can and right here there was no crack on it there was no access point but it was still paper thin so what I did is I had to take my knife and carefully kind of dissect it and give myself an access point and this might look a little aggressive but if you've ever seen those videos of plastic surgeons doing their thing before I saw these videos I thought they were all lasers and precision but then I saw them just

hammering on some woman's nose and it's like oh wow and so I do feel a little bit better about this cuz this is going to look good in the end I promise but it's looking pretty violent right now stop me if you've heard this already in this video but here's how we're going to fix this problem and what I've made here is a simple double boiler just a little bit of hot water to help heat up the epoxy and the warm epoxy is going to do a couple things one it's going to really reduce the

amount of bubbles in it because it's so thin and two it's going to help it flow down deep into that defect cuz I have the table tilted up on like a 5 or 10° incline gravity should suck all that epoxy down deep into the back of that void hopefully I've never actually done this before and I can't see how this won't work but you never really know till you get it sanded off I got the clamps pulled off the next day and sticking with the plastic surgery analogies I will say this probably looks about as

good as a nose job looks the day after but we're really hoping this is functional we're hoping we fixed that deviated septum under there and we're not going to know that till we get it sanded down and for this I broke out another sander that I have and the scraper this is one of my favorite tools for smoothing out epoxy and what is really going to matter is if we get that Hollow sound that's what we're really testing here because I can make this look good on the surface it's what's underneath that really counts so

I got it sanded down and was finally ready for that test okay and for any of you out there that are going to say that you can still hear the difference you can right off here's how it sounded before all right that last part was probably a little uncalled for I'm just a little sensitive at this stage of the project but moving on to something I have done before and I've done a lot of it sanding which is not the sexiest part of a project but ironically it might be the most important part to actually

making your piece look sexy and here is a quick tip for you on the lower grits and generally only the lower grits I like to do this pencil grid just to really track your progress you don't want to miss a section especially this first one cuz I'm right now I'm cleaning up all those CNC marks and you really don't want to miss anything here but I also mentioned earlier I have that free finishing workshop and again I promise it's completely free and in that Workshop we do a deep dive into all the boring stuff so

if you want to be a better woodworker if you want to be better at finishing I'll leave a link to that finishing Workshop in the description [Music] below I always discuss the type of finish I'm going to use with the customer and I obviously have my preference and try to lead them in the direction that I think they should go but in the end it's their decision and they get to choose the type of finish and this is a hard wax oil this is my preference this is the what I personally have on my own

dining table and what I put on probably about 90% of the tables that come out of my shop this is great because you basically wipe it on wipe it off and you get to still feel all the wood grain it's the most natural finish out there it's also very repairable also Comes In Colors so I had that one little corner that I fixed that is a little bit darker and this is a different color of that same hard wax oil and I mixed that with some of that natural and just kind of Blended it in

and you're definitely not going to get this out of a lacquer or a conversion varnish or something however you could use a traditional stain and then spray lacquer or conversion varnish over that so it's not like you couldn't fix that color problem if this customer did want something like conversion varnish which would be that thick plasticky layer that would provide a ton of protection but one of the main things I don't like about a varnish finish is that if anything happens to it if you get a big scratch in it or a chip in it

you need to take it back to a spray booth to finish it where this one is basically spot repairable and I'm going to be putting in3 Nano over the top of this and that is going to make it even more repairable so if you get any little micro scratches or little even drink Rings things like that you can just add another coat of the N3 Nano and that will fix a lot of those flaws okay the downside to a finish like this one is that it is very difficult to get a perfectly even Sheen across

the top especially on black epoxy which is what you see me doing here is this is a maroon pad and I'm just trying to even it out and make it look as consistent as possible and I do a deep dive into this into that finishing Workshop but this part can be really really frustrating because you want it to look even and unless you do a excellent job sanding it just won't but the nice thing is if you don't like the way it looks you can always come back and just do it again what you think

is it there yet I think we going do a little better think we got there now I like to get the sheen as even as possible before moving on to the N3 stage but the N3 will do a really good job at evening out any dry spots in the wood or any of those minor variations and it's hard to see when you're putting these coats on because I'm going to do two coats of the hard coat then two coats of the top coat and it's hard to see that transformation so I have this sample board

that I made like three years ago where I split it right down the middle just to show the difference and how much Clarity and how much depth is added by adding this N3 even on the epoxy from the very beginning this project was an absolute monster right now this top by itself weighs around 500 lb and from those old original rickety slabs to the gallons and gallons of epoxy and the endless number of problems that plagued this project and kept me up nights throughout this build here's where we ended up and all in all I

couldn't be happier with how it turned out either the design choices or the fixes that we made I think everything looks Fant fantastic we even found a bullet that had been lodged in this who knows how many years ago if you're curious there's how those patches look on the side those big patches the biggest problem of this whole project there's that little corner that broke off I can't even see it there even those shakes turned out great and they're completely solid now I might regret asking you guys this later but I would be genuinely curious

to know if you think that this table was offensively overpriced or just regular overpriced and not to influence your answer but as it turns out this 1000lb crate is actually getting on an airplane to go to Europe not a boat which I've never even heard of but let's face it you did not watch a 42-minute video on a yacht table build to see it inside a crate you want to know what would this table look like inside a yacht here you go