Build a Live Edge Table: Part 1

Natural edge tables are really quite the rage, and we can go beyond tables, and we can talk about natural edge benches, mantles, other architectural elements, and what is it we mean, when we start talking about natural edge. The pieces I've got here are a great example. This is a maple burl, and what we're looking at here, is the outside of the tree. We're actually looking at the natural edge, it's very literal. What we're going to do here, over a three part video series, is, we're going to take you through, working with these slabs, and turning them into our very own natural edge tables, and give you some tips along the way. Now, what's the deal with this material? Like I said, what we've got here, are pieces of matched maple burl, but don't just stop at maple burl. There are many, many different species of wood, burls, slabs. There is a huge variety of materials like this, that you can get, provided you find the right supplier. One of the things that can happen, is that the pieces, as they're cut from the log, can be tracked, so that we get this kind of a book bash. In other words, we can get two pieces that, when we open them up, we get mirror images to our grain. Again, the right supplier can provide that kind of natural edge material for you. Now, what are some of our considerations, as we work with this? Well, what we'll be doing is taking our two halves here, and bringing them together, to make a single table top, and then I'm going to want to clean this up. They're not too bad, right now from the supplier, but I'm going to want to do some sanding, make sure everything is nice and flat. Sanding is a real key there, so we're going to be sending them through a surface sander. Now, for me, what I like about that, is that, sanding instead of planing, offers us some benefits. One is that, typically, you can get sanders wider than we can get planers, so in this case, with our 25 inch wide head, it's going to easily accept the material that we want to send through there. The other thing is that, when we get to curly material, like this birdseye, if we send it through a planer, and we don't have helical knives, and the knives we have are a little bit dull, and we can't control the feed right, it's possible that we could chip that material up. By doing abrasive planing, or sanding, we're going to really limit the opportunity for that chipping to happen. In fact, it almost can't happen, and we're going to gain the benefit then, of flattening our pieces, getting them smooth, not taking the risk of messing those pieces up as we go. That's going to evolve us to a point, where we've got a beautiful table top, now what do we do? How do we get it from being just a slab, to being a table top? A lot of different ways we can go, depending on the look that you're trying to achieve. When you look at something like this leg, you might look at that and say, "I love how that looks, but I don't own a lathe", or " I don't know how to turn", or "I'm not sure I could get four of those to be identical". Well, a cool thing to know about, is that there are companies that provide components like this in a variety of shapes and a variety of species, so that we can match this up to the project. So, we've got some examples here, there's a pine turned leg, let me pull another one up off the floor here. Look at that beautiful leg, of course, the guarantee with babies like this, is that every one of them is going to be exactly alike. In the case of our project, we'll see more when we get it put together, but I'm pretty sure we're going to go with the look, of these black hairpin legs, from that same supplier. So, starting out from a design perspective, find a supplier, look at their pictures online, to see what kind of slabs they have, how large they are, how much they cost, get them shipped into your shop, and you're going to be ready to start your work on your natural edge table, or mantle, or bench. Be sure to check out parts two and three of this video series, so that you can see how our table comes together.