$15,000 Wood Slab Kitchen Island — One-Man Woodworking Shop

Hi, I'm Cam with Blacktail Studio and this week I was commissioned for my first

kitchen

island

made from this giant

slab

of Oregon black walnut. Everything went pretty well until I received the scariest text message I've ever received from a client. Stay tuned. You're a regular on my channel, you might recognize that guy over there, which is Phil, yeah, and Phil doesn't just break tables, apparently he also sells lumber and he's the manager of Gobi Walnut and they were carrying this

slab

. that was too wide for my truck, I really need to start looking at trailers or something, maybe one of those enclosed car transporters because it was too wide to fit between my wheel wells, it was like 63 inches wide and this thing was a bear.

He told me I wasn't going to get it off the truck myself but there's always a way and this is the way it worked and apparently the way to do it is to break the rails on my little tonneau cover so that was it. Kind of a shame, but I took the slab out in one piece because that was definitely the most important part. Many times people want to know how old the tree the slab came from was and I didn't count the rings in this. but goby tells me that with a slab this size the tree is probably 100 to 120 years old which is pretty incredible and a lot of times people have trouble taking down a tree this size and one thing you may not know is here in In western Oregon it rains a lot, so our soft

wood

s, our hides, our red

wood

s, live forever, they do very well with all this rain, but the hardwoods don't live much longer than 100, 20, 150 years , it's simply too wet for them.

So in other parts of the country they might live a little longer, but around here they really don't live much longer and there's a disease that's killing tons of these walnut trees, so almost all of these big, old trees are coming down. dead and starting to rot and decompose, if you're wondering, what I'm doing here is just removing all the bark, all the little threads, any soft wood that might compromise the bond because we're going to fill this void with epoxy and it won't be a ton of resin like other types of river tables I've made, but this void will be filled with black resin, so I want to make sure I get a perfect joint and a couple of weeks ago.

I made a whole video on how to make a partial epoxy mold because it was a little complicated and I didn't want to have to build a mold to fit the entire table and waste so much epoxy. I just needed this little corner. filled with epoxy, so if you want to watch that video, I'll include a link in the description below, but here's a little time lapse of what I did to make this perfect leak-proof partial epoxy mold that many of you already they know That super clear epoxy is a long time supporter and sponsor of my channel and while I use them because I truly feel like it's the best epoxy I've ever used, you should always be skeptical of someone sponsored by a company when it comes to epoxy. to take his word for it, I don't expect you to just take my word blindly, but what you should do is check out Matt's

woodworking

because he did a completely unbiased, unsponsored review of the 13 best epoxies and did some clarity testing amazing in addition to the strength and hardness tests, I'll include a link to that in the video description below, but it got some really cool results and a spoiler with super clear epoxy that kicked my butt and that's why I use them, but it was nice to be validated by an unbiased source, I learned a lot of hard lessons making all these boards and one of the lessons I learned probably last year is when you add epoxy to an existing pore like I did there where I mixed a smaller bucket.

I need to blend them very, very well even though it was black on black. What happened to me before was that I mixed black with other black and you could see a swirly line when you saw it in the right light, so it looked really bad, so always. Blend your pores well. I don't really like to experiment with techniques on client pieces, especially when I have a slab as irreplaceable as this one, but every once in a while you really have to take a risk and hence the chance I'm taking here. Because this level was a little low, I decided to fill the rest with table epoxy instead of deep pore epoxy and the benefit is that table epoxy is actually a little more heat resistant and is actually harder than The drawback of deep pore epoxy.

Is it much worse with bubbles? Deep port epoxy is basically bubble free and this table top epoxy if you don't do it right can create tons of bubbles and there is also a risk of color mismatch so I'm using the pizza sauce method. That was actually taught to me by super clear epoxy and I don't know why it works, but it actually works very well to make a nice, even pour that levels out perfectly and you don't have to pop the bubbles with the blowtorch. In deep pore epoxy it is absolutely mandatory to manually pop the bubbles with this table top epoxy and I like the torch much better than a heat gun.

For some reason I see people using a heat gun. I never have much luck with her, so get yourself. a good propane torch and just cover those bubbles making sure to pop them all before it dries. I always try to emphasize the importance of using some type of release agent when you make these shapes and here's why it comes out super super easy, everything works great, this little piece, however, I forgot the release agent and I literally had to chisel it away, so always use your mold release, although this slab started out about 63 inches wide at the widest point, the finished

island

will only be about 45 inches, so what I'm doing here is just reducing it to the right size so it can go through the planer 50 inches at my favorite industrial

shop

in Northeast Portland, Creative Woodworking Northwest, so I scaled it down to about 48 inches wedged in my truck. and it's getting easier to transport at this point and here's that big

shop

in northeast Portland, they have two 50 inch planers with two white belts behind them, so every passing pass hits a spiral head planer and two wide oscillating straps each. every now and then I meet someone who acts very, very smart and tells me, hey, that's not a planer, that's a drum sander or, hey, that's not a planer, that's a wide belt sander, so believe me , is a spiral planer with two oscillating widths. belt sanders and those white belts that can go up to 180 I think on the belts that they have on hand, so it's an incredible tool and if you still don't believe me, I guess you're going to take my word for it because they've separated that panel.

I have seen the head spiral. I've seen the wide straps. It is not a drum sander. It is not just a wide belt sander. It is a planer with two wide belts. A really cool machine now that the slab is up. perfectly flat, it's cnc ready and I was lucky enough to have a client make some really nice plans, this perfect diagram, everything was measured exactly how he wanted it so all I had to do was hand it over to my cnc company , they were able to put that on their computer, it did its magic and they were smart enough to cut an mdf template first to make sure all the measurements were exactly what the client wanted.

I checked everything that wasn't there when they cut the slab, but they did. amazing job and I asked them if I could help share or spread the word of their company and they said they were changing the name of the company and moving so don't worry about that yet but I look forward to working with them. more in the future and they did an amazing job on my last video. I mentioned that I had just crossed the one year mark from the time I left my job to be a full-time content creator, carpenter YouTuber and first of all, when someone asked me what I do now.

I still can't say youtuber or content creator because it sounds ridiculous for an almost 40 year old to have that as your job, but it's actually so hard for me to say that's my job now. Most of my income now comes from YouTube and I'll tell you something else that's hard for me to say: I watch a lot of YouTube and I know how hurtful people can be when they ask you to subscribe when they haven't given it to you. anything, they're just trying to get something from you without really giving you anything in return, so if you feel like I've earned it, if you enjoy this channel, if you enjoyed this video, if you think you've learned something, I appreciate it.

Hit the subscribe button because that's how we get sponsors, that's how we make a living now. If you don't feel like I've earned it, don't push it, but if you did, I'd appreciate it and maybe even hit the like button. as a bonus, now that i got the black glue psa out of the way back to the one man wood shop and this is one of those ideas that is actually more harmful than it seems because here's the thing: it really worked and These are the bad ideas that keep you from coming back for more bad ideas.

If all the ideas that made the hairs on your neck stand up didn't work, you wouldn't do them anymore and that one actually had about 50% going to work and the problem is that it worked perfectly. , so that will keep me coming back for more bad ideas when the hairs on the back of my neck stand up at the beginning of my YouTube career. I made a video on how to embed these c. channels and there was nothing wrong with the video but it is a little dated and I have learned a little more and in the meantime I came up with a slightly better template and I keep promising you that I will make an updated video on not only how to embed them but when use them, why you use them, when you don't need them, when you need them and at the moment, I have no plans to make that video.

I just keep promising you that I will. I apologize for that, but maybe if you leave some comments or keep bothering me about it, I'll get around to making that updated video. If you have any questions about using those brass bushings, Matt Cremona made a really good video explaining how can I use them where to use them some really interesting uses for them because you can use them to embed things with perfect CNC precision. I'm being pretty basic with them and I'm hogging material with them. A video I made. Although it was about how to cut these bow ties and even how to embed them, and that was one of my previous videos as well, but I think I'm still pretty proud of that one, although maybe I should watch it again and see. how bad it is, I think it's pretty cool and I'll add a link in the video description below if you guys want to know how to cut those bow ties and how to get a perfect CNC fit with it.

Now some of you probably are. I wonder if this guy ever shut up. He's literally been talking the entire video. There's no music. There are no carpentry sounds. It's literally just him talking the entire time. I get a couple of comments a week that basically say the same thing and I actually have an advantage. The trick for you this week is if you look here, you actually have a mute button and then let me show you this. If you check this out, they actually have an extra tab that can open YouTube and as a bonus, they can play any music. you like it without listening to me, so it's all good there for anyone who's staring.

I like to let those bow ties sit for at least 24 hours before I surface them and in the meantime I'll add these threaded inserts and these. They are ramp, they come from a Canadian company and they are really good, if you don't want to deal with Canadian shipping I will include an Amazon link alternative that is not as good but will totally get the job done and if you do pop up These bow ties or any inlay with a belt sander, just be careful because if you twist them, if you miscenter them, you can leave a big indentation in your table and these bolts are also a little hard to find and I was able to find an Amazon. link for those, so I'll have links to everything in this video in the description below.

This next part really made me feel bad. The customer ordered a 3 8 inch round and I made one side and thought it looked good so I sent it to him. a photo and he responded with wait it's my countertop and I was like oh my gosh I messed up on this let me go back and look at the text what could I have done and he was like no it looks great and I was like oh My God, how could you respond like that? He was going to vomit, so customers should choose his words carefully. We, the creators, are very sensitive.

Anyway, he loved the round and so did I. I think he looked great, but that's how it was. He made me feel a little sick when I thought he might have messed it up. I was getting pretty cocky at this point in my flipping technique and once again it worked like a charm, so again this will fuel all those other bad ideas I have. but one thing you should know about this tabletop epoxy is that it is much more prone to forming bubbles, most of those bubblesThey like to stick to the edge of the wood, so here's a little trick if you're having trouble filling them: you can do it. carving them actually makes them a little bit bigger and the problem is those little dots basically hold the air in that pocket and don't allow the air to escape so they don't allow the hole to fill but if you can carve it a little bit bigger large, it will accept that new epoxy filler or Ca glue and another tip for you is to use clear, don't use black on these because no matter how hard you try, the black tint will probably come off.

Be more focused on this small volume than on your entire large table so that the clear is completely invisible, you will never know, just don't try to use black even if you think you have it. Pretty good combination and I mentioned using black dye, but actually that goes for any color, whether it's a metallic blue table or a white table or whatever color you're using, don't try to match colors, just use clear, it will be too much. It blends much better and here's another tip: when you're scraping that epoxy the next day, use the sander to heat it up because epoxy can be a little brittle and want to come off, whereas if you heat it up it'll scrape off a lot.

More gently, I know I've talked in the past about the importance of using a good photographic light to check sanding progress, but I don't always show why, so here's what we're looking for: If you look closely, you can see those linear lines of those wide belts that the belt sander ran through the machine and that's what we're getting here on this first pass, we're just getting a good look at any of those imperfections from the sanding so we can make sure they're completely removed before we go on next step, after filling in all those imperfections with the Ca glue and sanding it down to 120 grit, I now bring the router back to match the edge of the top with the edge of the bottom and this. it's for a very specific reason because if I start this router too early before sanding I would do all that sanding and then not have a perfect radius on the edge, but when I do it this way I can use that 150 and 180 grit to go down a little bit the edge level, you'll see it's sitting, I don't know, 30 seconds or 64 of an inch proud and that way, after I sand everything down, I can remove it. that and I will still have a perfect radius.

Many people use this pencil grid to track sanding progress and I use it all the time. I think it's a great technique and it's another good example of why we use these lights when we're sanding because here, if you look down like I would with that light over my shoulder, I can't see anything, but that's why the position Your light is important because if you look at it this way you can see. those lines are clearly there, that's why we need these photographic lights because we wouldn't have noticed them without this light and then maybe the sun is coming up.

My client sees these horrible lines scribbled on this table and it looks horrible, which is why we should use lights when we are sanding When this client first approached me about the possibility of working together on this project, he asked me what I thought about using a large slab wood as a

kitchen

island and I told him I don't know, it's probably not a very good idea. but we didn't choose wood because it's the most durable or the cheapest, we chose wood because it's what we want and then I left it up to him and after a couple of days he called me and said yes I want to move on. and I know a lot of you who watch my channel are carpenters and are trying to figure out how to get some of these high end clients and believe me I know the need to try to say anything to get the sale but this is a good example of why which isn't worth it because you really need to manage their expectations from the start because if you say it's going to be as durable as quartz and then the customer puts a hot frying pan on it and ruins it, "They're going to be furious and want their money back and I wouldn't blame them, but if you're honest with them, it'll really build that trust because you told them from the beginning, hey, this is going to happen." having to be pampered is not going to be like granite, they will like you more, you will be able to enjoy the process and they will be happier in the long run talking about talking to a client, you always want to know how much things cost and I never have a problem sharing that information always and when the client doesn't mind me sharing that information and this client had originally contacted me to do a smaller island and I had given him a quote for around twelve thousand dollars and then he'd given me my deposit, we were in the project, he had come to me and told me, hey, I got the new dimensions and they were much bigger and I tell my clients from the beginning that their cost will never increase from the moment I get a deposit from them if the price of my wood quadruples and the prices of my epoxy quadruples and everything goes up.

I will never add that cost to my client. The only thing that will change the cost of your table is if you change the size or style and He made his island about 25 bigger, so I said, hey, I have to add 25 to this, which I probably could have added more, but 25 It was the least I could do, so I said, hey, it'll be 25 more and he just says, "Okay." Well, my calculations come out to a little over 15,000 of the original offer and I said, well, that was easy and anyway, the final total cost to the client was 15,000, even if I rounded down a little , I usually build a custom box. and then ship them by freight to anywhere in the world and this one was going north of Washington and it was about four or five hours away, which was going to be my limit for personally delivering something and I normally don't like that. deliver things because you know there's a lot of time to do it so I have to deal with the rain and stuff like that but shipping is a nightmare and it's gotten really expensive these days, apparently these vaccines have sped everything up so I told him to the client.

Hey, I'll do this personally for the lowest freight rate we could find just because I thought it would be easier for both of us and I definitely didn't make my normal hourly buying rate, but I was glad of that in the end. I did, it's always great to see a client meet face to face or at least mask to mask and he had a really cool house and actually lived in a log cabin which made a lot of sense as to why he would want an island made of wood because he doesn't like to do things the easy way, no, don't get me wrong, I love the look of wood countertops.

I wish I could have wood countertops in my own home. I just know myself and unfortunately I'm too animalistic there. There's no way a wooden island can take my abuse so I can't have you guys say I love getting 15,000 it's one of my favorite things so I'd like to do more of these and that's where you guys come from some Of you know that I like to give a little credit to people who make it to the end of the video, so this week start your question or comment with wood or without wood, which means you would have wood countertops or you would not have wood countertops. wood and that way I will know that you made it to the end of the video and I promise that I will answer all your questions or comments first, as always, thank you very much for watching, please.

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