Acidea.net Team
How to build this Live Edge Concrete Epoxy River Table
Today we are building this live-edge concrete epoxy, every buzzword you could possibly think of a table, and this is probably the last build I’m gonna be doing as far as furniture for a long time before I’m full-on rent.
Oh for the foreseeable future. That’s either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what kind of videos you like. I hope you like them both to be honest, but it is what it is so what’s dive into it for this design. I only want the inside of the slab to have a live edge, so I started by getting out my track saw and cutting the outside edge straight before we go any further. I got to take a second and thank this video sponsor raid shadow legends. I’ve been playing raid over the last couple weeks and it reminded me how much fun I had played those classic RPGs as a kid raid is a cross-device dark, fantasy role-playing game available on PC and mobile devices, and it’s free to download and play raid takes you To the epic world of salario, where you collect, equip train and upgrade your teams of Heroes, called champions and take them into battle against the undead hordes of Cirith, as you battle you’ll acquire different types of shards which allow you to unlock different champions here, I’m using A mystery shark and I got a pretty cool barbarian, but this guy is just a common champion.
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So just look for me if you log on, if you’re a new player you’ll get a hundred thousand silver and the badass hex Weaver champion for free and once you sign up you’ll find those rewards in your raid inbox right over here. So much love to raid. For supporting this channel and everything I’m doing here and now back to the build before we fly on this thing, we’re gonna fill all the voids with epoxy, so they’re stabilized and to prep for that. I used some tough tape taped off the back of the void, so the epoxy doesn’t spill out on the other side, all over the place, and yeah. Let’s pour that epoxy.
This little step right here goes out to all those hand, tool lovers out there, I’m showing you that you can flatten a slab with hand planes if you don’t have or just don’t want to use a planer, but I have a power planer and I want to use it so, I did sorry, not sorry moving on the right, nice and flat on that side. Next up is the main epoxy pour as I’ll explain in a second. This will be a bit different than your typical River table pour since one side of the epoxy form will be made from carved foam.
The idea here is that we want to get a layer of clear epoxy, that kind of mirrors the shape of the live edge and I’m just gonna trace the shape of the live edge on the top onto this pink foam. You are we’re gonna flip that foam over, so it creates a mirroring edge that we can then pour the epoxy into so it’ll kind of be like a river table. Pour it slipped on one side, they’ll be full, then we’ll take the foam out and can pour the concrete where the foam was. Hopefully that all worked.
Let’s, let’s see what happens I used my jigsaw to cut along the live edge line I drew on the phone. I then flip the foam over so the curved edge faced the live edge of the wood and used a cheap turkey cutting knife to cut a changing slope in the side of the foam so that approximately mirrored the shape of the live edge. Would I refine the curves of the foam further with the 120 grit sandpaper and then cover the side of the foam with duct tape, so the epoxy wouldn’t stick to it during the pour.
I also used silicone caulk to attach the foam to the melamine sheet, which will form the bottom of the epoxy form before securing the live edge slab inside the form I brushed the seal coat of total boat high-performance epoxy onto the live edge. This seal coat will prevent air in the wood from escaping and creating bubbles during the main epoxy pour after the seal coat cured. I stuffed it up with some sandpaper and mixed up some total boat Dixit epoxy for the main pour and I selected the thickset epoxy because the main pour is going to be one in 1/8 inches deep. I left to fix that epoxy cure for three days before Dean molding.
Now, while it might look like the epoxy stuck to the melamine here, it didn’t what you’re actually seeing is a vacuum that formed between the epoxy and melamine and once I broke the vacuum seal, the slab popped right off had a little epoxy spill under here. On this, the decide we flattened out so I’m gonna have to knock that down with the hand plane. So we can put this through the planer again to get both sides flat, and this Springs like shrapnel all over my face. If you can’t tell so definitely, safety glasses are a really good idea.
Not such a good idea was trying to plane the slab without clamping it down. So I remedied this by getting out my trusty t-track clamps and carried out. That was a lot of work, but uh yeah. It is nice and flat. So now we can run it through the planer. I’ve drawn a center line here so that I can check whether this edge here is parallel to the centerline of the epoxy and trim it if necessary so that the epoxy will basically be running right straight down in the center of the table. As I suspected, the straightedge wasn’t parallel with the centerline, but not a big deal. I just use my track saw to cut it. I then gave the slab a quick, sanding, and applied one coat of sealer. While it might seem odd to apply a sealer before cutting the table, legs from the slab I’ll explain the benefits of doing this. Preliminary finish in a moment after the finished dried, I used a carefully adjusted track saw to cut the 45 degrees.
I’m not gonna lie. Making these cuts with the track saw was nerve-racking and you really only got one shot if you want to get a continuous grain effect of wrapping around the mitered corners. I’d love to have one of those sliding tables saw thingamajigs in the new shop, so they saw stop. What do you say call me? Fortunately, the miter cuts went pretty smoothly, so I busted out the domino jointer to create some loose Tenon’s, which will add strength and help with alignment for gluing up the waterfall legs before starting the glue up. I masked off the edges surrounding this is really just insurance. Since the coat of finish, I applied earlier should prevent stains from glue squeeze-out now, this glue-up is a bit atypical since I used epoxy on the epoxy portion of the joints and wood glue on the wood portions.
This way the epoxy waterfall transition will be as clear as possible, but I’ll have maximum strength in the wood sections. Because of the wood glue in the loose tenants, I initially cut the legs a bit long, which allowed me to come back after the table was assembled and cut the legs to their final height of the table. Saw this approach ensures that the bottoms of the legs are perfectly parallel to the tabletop and also that both legs are exactly the same length I moved over to the table saw to cut the melamine pieces that will make up the concrete form. I also use the wood half of the table to adjust the fence to cut the sides of the form.
This ensures that the concrete half of the table will be the exact same thickness as the wood have, with all the melamine pieces cut. I could move on to assembly in the form of the concrete pour now. This is gonna, be a little tricky and different from your normal concrete. Pour because of the fact that we want to keep the epoxy and wood from getting covered in the concrete and we’re gonna be spraying the concrete of these vertical surfaces.
So what I’ve done here is just taped off all the edges and taken some garbage bags and tape, those on to basically cover all the wood with plastic, so it won’t get concrete on it. I’ve also come back with some construction screws here, tap them into the sides of the wood there, just to give it a little more bite and bond between the wood part and the concrete part, and now it’s time to start assembling the form.
After assembling the form with hot glue and fry wall, screws would get to everyone’s favorite segment of the show. That’s right! It’s time for a dog, I apply a Blair page box to the melding, lay down generous layer, 100 % silicone copra in the middle thunderbolt. Overall, the call clients, metal, fun ball. It pushes excess caulk to the sides, leaves a clean line over the seam and the layer. Paste marks make it easy to peel the excess caulk away once secured is leaving a perfect Koch line, and that’s it for this episode of Kult.
Oh, one other thing to note here, I used clamps to hold the wood in I’m, not using caulk on the edges. Against the epoxy, because I’ve sometimes seen where little pieces of the Blackhall could actually get trapped in there permanently, and I don’t want that and of course it came dust realtor edition to begin a concrete day by Dexter, finding the shop covering everything with plastic sheets. It’S go time for the concrete and these ones gonna be a little different because we’re putting that thin layer of epoxy over the cured epoxy which to tack up before we put the first layer of concrete in it, took about an hour for the epoxy.
To get to the gummy tacky state, where I was pretty confident that the epoxy would bond to the concrete as they both cured. At this point, I could mix up the first batch of concrete and since the form has two vertical surfaces wouldn’t be spraying on the first batch as a one-eighth inch base coat, the face coat, doesn’t have glass, fiber or any large aggregate in it. So it provides a very smooth surface when removed from the form I’m using a relatively inexpensive, modified hopper gun to spray the face coat. It has a 45-degree connector between the gun and the hopper, so you can spray both horizontal and vertical surfaces, links to the hopper gun, and all the concrete products I use are in the video description.
I waited about an hour for the face, coat to firm up and then mix up the first backer coat, which is the same GF RC mix as the face coat, except for the addition of alkali-resisting glass fibers. For this batch I used a bit less water to achieve a thicker Plato, light consistency, the thin layer won’t slump and hand packing. It allows me to really work the concrete in and ensure there are no air pockets between the face coat and back.
After the first backer coat had a couple of hours to firm up, I came back and added back forms on the legs. I used this melamine back forms since the backs of legs will be visible and I wanted to make sure they were flat and flush with the wood half of the table, it let the concrete cure 24 hours and then remove the plastic and tape. I was relieved to see that the wooden epoxy was in pretty good shape.
However, I was getting a bit ahead of myself and removing the plastic, since I still needed to do a bit of processing on the underside before demolding, so I decided just to throw caution to the wind and go for it. First, I use diamond sanding pads to get the concrete edges flush with the melamine, ensuring a nice straight bottom edge. There are also a couple of air pockets that left gaps in the backs of the legs, which I filled in by hand with more GFR C mix. It definitely would have been better to do all this before removing the plastic, but fortunately, there wasn’t any damage to the wood that a little sanding couldn’t fix after the patch is set up for a few hours.
It was time to D mold and see what I had concrete Christmas now that it’s out of the form and flipped over, I can see that the epoxy concrete bond is working. It feels like one solid piece and super happy about that. One downside is that the concrete looks like it did seep under the epoxy just a bit, so it’s not perfectly level, but that’s not really a big deal. I’m just gonna have to sand the concrete down. That’s gonna inevitably end up scuffing the epoxy up and maybe the wood too so we’ll have to repolish the epoxy Ricci on the wood. Basically, we’ve got a few hours, we’ll hopefully just a few hours of finishing work to do here and then this thing will be done, but I’m super excited about how I think it’s gonna look. So let’s get on into that.
I polished everything up to 400 grit and at this point, applied the concrete sealer. Now I had to stop here for the sealer because it won’t absorb into the concrete, if you polish it past 400 grit after letting the sealer cure overnight, I continued to wet sand. The epoxy up to 5000 grit, the last step to get the epoxy beautifully clear, is polishing it with total boats rubbing compound, followed by its finishing compound. I then applied the maker brand, simple finish to the wood.
So now some quick updates on the renovation for those of you that are following that, I’m gonna be moving into some temporary Airbnb housing in about a month and living there, while I’m finishing their innovation here. So after this video. Basically, it’s all Renault all the time until it’s done and ready for me to move in, you guys are digging this build. I’ve got a whole playlist of concrete and epoxy projects right up there. That I think you should check out too, and another big update for me personally is that I sold my old loft. I’m leasing it back from the new owner for a little bit. So I can move the workshop over slowly over the next month or so, and I’m thinking about actually doing a loft tour at the old place. So, if that’s something you’re interested in leaving a comment, let me know if you want to see a loft, your video before I move out.
