EPIC Live Edge & Epoxy Reception Desk Build

So a while ago my friend Casey asked me if I could help him with a

reception

desk

for his new business, which is a sensory deprivation floatation studio. Casey is an expert on weightlifting, health and wellness and all kinds of things, so of course I said yes. He would help him, but I told him I wanted to have full creative control when he said no, I went ahead and did it anyway and I think you guys are really going to like how this turned out and then we'll see what you think. when we hand him over at the end, he has no idea, so let's get into this

build

.

The first thing we want to do in this project is prepare the

epoxy

mold so we can pour the

epoxy

and do all the fancy steps for that, because that takes the most time, so the first thing we need to do is make a mold for the epoxy and then we can get it ready to pour, take the time, so now we have the sides attached to the square since we're Converting it to a circle, we're going to go ahead and add these little corners just to use less material. There's no point in wasting the extra couple of liters that would probably turn into filling these corners just to throw it away so you can.

Look, I outlined this circle, figured out exactly how long they should last and we'll do four, three more of those and we'll seal this up real quick, since this project is focused on a type of business that promotes health and wellness. I wanted to take a minute to tell you how I'm recently taking control of my health with the help of Ritual Essentials for Men, the obsessively researched multivitamin that's formulated to help fill the nutritional gaps in men's diets, so most We think that exercise is the gateway to a healthy life and that's it, so all you have to do is exercise and then you will be very healthy, in reality it is just part of the equation, most of us who are in the store or we are as active as we, the manufacturers.

You know, running around

build

ing things, thinking we're doing fine when it comes to our health, when in reality the truth is that most of us are failing, we're not getting enough nutrients, especially vitamin E and vitamin D, just think about it. for a second if you're in the store all day or in your office you're not outside getting sunlight and that's where the vitamin D comes from and well that's just one part of the equation so I personally started taking the ritual a few months ago. ago and I have had some amazing results as I am constantly trying to improve my life like a whole ritual it has been super easy they have a subscription model that shows up at my door I take two pills in the morning it is phenomenal it actually tastes pretty good too with a fresh mint flavor instead of the normal kind of vitamins, you know, it tastes like something I'm not a fan of after playing football for most of my life, I also realized that it's not that easy to take care of myself considering it's not my full time job anymore so doing little things like taking a multivitamin every day is very important and that's why I wanted to talk to you about it because I know a lot of you are probably in the same situation that I. where you put your job and your family before your own health, which is just not a good equation, we want to

live

forever or at least close to it, and we want to be able to build for decades, so we have to take care of ourselves. do it, ritual is so amazing as it gives you and me an amazing opportunity to save 10 in your first three months by using the link below which is ritual.com slash john milecki you can sign up and get some vitamins incredible.

I love you, I know you will love it too and let's get back to taking care of ourselves so we can continue to build for a long, long time once again visit ritual.com forward slash john malecki save 10 on your first three months and let's crush your health and well being now let's get back to crushing this project so we're going to pour some resin and we need to be in a temperature controlled environment because we've learned wrong that things explode and explode. We've given some new epoxy a try, this is from River Table Epoxy dot com.

It has a two inch deep pour. The four gallon kit we have is just under what we need for this. I'm not a big pourer, but I still want to use a little deep. pour stuff, uh, so we gotta start mixing with tintin, porn and sit down, we're going good and now we pour, I hope whatever Jack Wagons did, this doesn't leak, it's just that I'm gold, what the hell are you? I'm a media elf. So now that we poured the epoxy that can dry for a few days and sit aside, the kids started the countertop pieces for the secondary counter.

Now we need to join those planes, smooth them, lightly stroke them and glue them. on top of a table and those are like the two big glues for this project and they will be out of the way the first day, come on, since we are literally waiting for the things that need to dry to dry, let's go cut out all the octagons that are going to be left , they are octagons, yes they are hexagons, we are going to cut all the hexagons that go in the front and we are going to use miss piggy to do it, now that it is No clamps, we are going to go ahead and cut the track on both sides to cut this suction cup to the right size and then we'll save you the pain of watching us sand this for three hours, peak time, okay, so that the countertop before you get it. all sanding we noticed that there is a little bit, it's a check, I think where the shake is, the wood is no longer connected as you can see in this region, so what we're going to do is use this quick setting glue and I Here I'm going to show you a little tip on how to fill a crack with glue, so we're going to go ahead and grab a clamp, a bottle of glue and a vacuum cleaner, we're going to put a bunch of glue in there and then we'll continue.

To take our shop vac, you turn it on and you put it at the bottom of the crack and pull the glue into the crack so the suction draws the glue in and we can go ahead and do it a couple of times, even for real. make sure the glue gets in there, then go ahead and grab your clamp, we'll hold it from the bottom so we can work on this while it dries on the other end, bam, oh she's dripping and there you go. A great way to get glue into a crack to make sure you get full coverage that way, stronger, sturdier than just applying a little on top.

You can also do it with epoxy or any other type of adhesive you want. What we're going to use, so the guys are eager to get the top of the interior cabinet of this

reception

desk

ready and that means the next thing we need to do is build the cabinet that I was putting off on that part because we're dictating it by how much. material we had there, we're close, so now let's break down some of this good old plywood, so now that we have all the pieces cut out, what we're going to do is start assembling this box, it's essentially just a big box that it will sit on top of a smaller box and then we will put those boxes together and then that box will be a box that will be used to pack things, but we want it to look neat.

See you breaking out our fancy spacer here. one, oh, that's a fancy throwback right now, I can lock this and use it again, so to grade this because we're classy in trying to reduce cursing, we're going to put some hardwood

edge

banding on all the parts before place. together and we're going to use this new titebond fast setting glue to make sure it doesn't take us all day so just run a drop over here oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah come on yeah I didn't even miss and then we'll come back with some tape for the clamps and we'll clean it all up with a palm router once it's dry, except we have everything with the

edge

s taped and it looks pretty crispy, the reason we did it before, I found.

It is much easier to attach the trim before assembling the cabinet. I'm all for the wooden edging and I think a lot of people would agree, so now we're going to assemble a casing, so now we're going to move on to the raised platform for this reception desk. it's about 10 12 inches taller than the base cabinet, so you could order the convenience spur boom which has nothing to do with this build, let's screw in some things that will do, we're going to attach this instead of screwing. It's because it would be faster, so I'm going to run a bill.

No, no, no, I want you to film me doing this, do you know what time it is? Don't miss the hit mode, no more hits, but John, I don't like that cold. brew coffee I think I like the taste of beer the first time I drink it yes no on the third day we have the cabinet shell assembled, we dry installed it last night before we went home next thing Jordan and I are going to do What What we need to work on is getting these drawers we ripped those strips off yesterday with John and now we're going to go ahead and break them down into all the different little pieces, there's a bunch of short ones, a bunch of long ones and some pocket holes and we'll screw all of that together and I think At the end of the day we will have four doors.

I think we have reached maximum efficiency here. I've got Jordan back there working on the edgebands. John is running the CNC for the small hexagon. parts I'm gluing the faces of the drawers, I don't know if you can hear any of this, there's a lot going on, but we're making moves. Jordan went ahead and screwed them all together now that we have them in one piece. We can go ahead and cut the bottom panels for them. We want to make sure they are together so we know what size to make them. So let's go ahead and cut some quarter inch plywood on the table saw.

Place the funds. these and then assemble these suckers well so that the guys completely crush the construction of the cabinet. I've been doing some CNC work and what I've done is the rest of our hexagons are all cut out and we're going to pre-finish them. the edges that way I don't worry about getting in between them while I'm putting them on the cabinet and it doesn't drip paint because I'm using this, it's ridiculously awesome, uh, airless sprayer, that's what it's called, right? a paint sprayer specifically for paint, it's the graco ultra 395 pc that you've seen me spray around my house with it, trim and such.

They just released this new mini extension for it and we are touching the edges beautifully and I am loving this little gun and the control we can have to paint my house with this sweet thing. These are specifically for paint a little different than a hvlp. It's not actually putting air into the uh what you're spraying like a hvlp pushing the air out. and I think it atomizes, there's a different science behind the two, but this one just sucks it out of the can, it might be perfect, let's do it, so after sitting here for three days, my very expensive slab that I bought for this project He decided to cup her. the opposite direction of anything you can continue to use, so now we're going to have to get pretty nervous to make this work.

I don't know what we're going to do. I'll have to think about it. this for a minute or two or an hour this is uh this is my potato chip I think this is this this might be the squirreliest thing we've ever done what we're going to do is I'm going to break a couple of cuts in this part of back on the back of this here and hopefully let me open this thing up, then we'll build a mini torque box and attach it to the torque box, after that we'll put the cnc on it to flatten that side, then we're going to cut our pieces in semi-dimensions and then re-evaluate and see if it is flatter or more usable.

Our biggest problem here is that I wanted to cascade it like this so that this part hangs down. To make To make a good miter, you have to have perfectly flat wood, this sure isn't perfectly flat, so now I just have to start diving in, yeah, diving into this ridiculously expensive slab and praying for the best, that's nothing either. except get it right, sam, let's get it, let's finish it, move it, get your hand out of that area, please, thank you, that was just get rid of all my restless ass ideas, okay, we're back to square one, like we like to do.

Here, before we got too nervous, we tried something else and ended up clamping it to the table and it's a little more manageable, so we're going to try doing this on the CNC and start flattening it out and then go from there. I'm getting restless, we're getting square, oh, I'm terrified that someone else is scared. A slight twist, we probably take an inch and an inch and an eighth at least from both sides of the slab to get it closer to being flat and, uh, it's sad, but sometimes that's what happens, so instead of doing a mitered waterfall, we are going to make a kind of waterfall with recesses.

I think I'm going to take this part here, lower it at the back here. I'll leave a shelf on this. piece of wood, what that will do is I will still have a continuous flow vertically and because this is a piece of woodheavily tooled, the top doesn't really look like end grain or edge grain, so it should still look pretty sharp. It's just going to have a half-quarter inch rabbet and then what we're going to be able to do is we're going to be able to put these two together to give us a square surface to put the miter on, unless you screw this thing into a box like we're getting we're getting really really really really getting it.

We're making it too hard on ourselves and we're going to take a look here no one will notice except Sam and I and every time we see it we'll be mad at each other because we couldn't figure it out but sometimes you just have to make lemonade and we'll all love it. love lemonade sometimes with spikes so let's get to it now that we have a concept of how I want to place this sucker we're going to fill these gaps with all your favorite black epoxy so we're going to prep both pieces before we put them together and next thing we're going to clean.

For these edges, a little plane, a sander, a little drill with a wire wheel, kind of backing off, but I definitely want to mask up and make sure I'm taking care of my very sensitive baby lungs, so with that we're going to dust ourselves off. , so while the other. the epoxy dries, it's time to cut this epoxy so we can put more epoxy on it. I just want to say I'm terrified, I'm about to cut a piece of epoxy that I basically can't replace unless we re-pour it. and do it again and then there will be a week delay so let's make it so the logo is pretty much where we want it so let's go ahead and fill it with resin we poured it pretty thick so hope is if I screwed it up .

The always plausible thing, never forget, is that I can surface this thing and try again, so we'll see, let this epoxy sit overnight. Hopefully the cure is pretty good because it's only an eighth of an inch layer with no bubbles. I'll be ready to move on to another one. pivot geometry all day I want this, this top, you know, sometimes you have to take a hit, they hit you in the face but you hit back, so I want to be able to put a domino here that I was going to go with. the shoulder, but there's no way to reinforce that joint because I can't put a screw in the front because it doesn't look as good, so to have a domino I have to keep it at full thickness and I can still get it. a 15 millimeter dip to use a 50 millimeter domino or a 30 millimeter domino or whatever, so we'll line them up, cut this, and glue this thing.

It should also help it square up because it's pulling it to the reference in itself and us. We're getting a lot closer, basically just make a bunch of marks. It's where I was talking about the squirrels. It will be easier to align them. At this table, next to the agenda, the CNC jumped on us and took all this out. the table because my clamping set isn't too strong yet so to finish it we'll cut it with the band saw and then I cut a round template to shape it and then we'll sand this thing and I'll get ready for some lacquer so make a circle down so let's make the gardeners garden nice and we're wrapping the side that this thing goes against the wall, so we're going to wrap this side.

I'm only cutting 45 degree angles. over these things and then glue them once they're set they'll be nice and strong so we basically hit them with a little bit of glue this is quick and thick and then we set them with some spacers and then I'm going to go crazy with a little design touch here because I feel like I'm feeling wild 23 gauge nail if you were curious because I'm going to get that question so now we just have to make a million of them, leave it. spray says this is the debut welcome welcome to be an influencer a micro influencer oh I love that that's perfect now come look at the front friend who is sick do you like how that logo turned out yes that's amazing so casey was doubting my vision when he I showed him a very rudimentary sketch potentially while we were consuming some adult beverages I was under the influence of multiple things he was like what the hell is this?

No, just what I didn't see was the rear blackout as all it seemed. almost like it's a thing, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think when you see that the hexes don't make sense until you get in the tank, but that's what we want regulars, so that fits, I think it goes well with the flow that is going to be a summary of this I really hope you like this project, we don't do a lot of things like this, but when we do we try to hit a home run, if you think we hit a home run, leave a comment below if you want check out another project that we think we hit a home run on, we have it lined up for you right here and if you want to support the channel get some merch, we have that link below, see you in the next one