I'm not a huge slab Furniture guy but I do like the look of natural wood and I saw this in a local furniture store this was at a small chain it's not really a high-end place like medium priced furniture and I wasn't able to take a picture in the store but they had the same thing on their website now by the time you pay tax and shipping on this if you bought it online it would cost you around six hundred dollars now what kind of Live Edge slab table do you get for six hundred dollars well apparently a fake one this is not a natural slab at all it's several boards Edge glued together to look like it's a single slab and it's not even a Live Edge either they just cut wavy edges on the outer boards and roughed them up to fake the look of live edges according to the website the species is black brown wood they don't get any more specific than that basically it scraps from an Indonesian Furniture Factory and someone is making a killing selling these a simple slab table is the easiest piece of furniture you are ever going to build if you ever build one it's so easy that I built this one in about two hours that is it two hours of Labor time and it cost me half as much as the one I saw online and hundreds less than what the boutique shops are selling these for plus mine is an actual slab of exotic Canary wood and it's not a fake Live Edge it's real I didn't even need special tools to make it I just use a sander and a drill honestly I kind of feel like I cheated but I'm going to show you how I did it start to finish including applying the Finish which is what everyone seems to leave out of furniture making videos first you're going to have to find a slab now the best place is going to be a local Mill if you have access to it that's somewhere where a guy or girl has a portable bandsaw and they cut up trees and dry them themselves you're probably going to pay about half as much at a place like that but if you do buy a rough Sun slab you're going to have to flatten it and that is going to add to the tools and time required now there are lots of videos online about flattening slabs with a router and a homemade jig if you want to go that route but I promise to show you how to do this without those tools and all that extra time it's going to cost you a little bit more but you can buy pre-flattened slabs online I got this one from Rockler they are all first come first serve and their selection is going to change based on what they have on hand but I picked up a 17 inch wide 50 inch long slab of canary wood for about a hundred and thirty dollars again this is an exotic wood and it's pre-flattened so I am paying a premium for it but the time and the labor it saves me makes it well worth it I also picked up some steel legs these come in a wide variety of styles and start as low as about 25 bucks a set the ones I settled on are extra tall and pretty heavy duty so they came in around a hundred dollars for the pair the shipping on both that big heavy slab and the heavy steel legs was only around 30 bucks and that was a lot less than I was expecting and my slab arrived in relatively good shape it was pretty flat but it wasn't perfect there was a slight Twist from end to end now that's the downside of buying a pre-flattened slab it's already been planed down to just under an inch and a quarter thick so that doesn't give me much room to flatten it any further fortunately this isn't enough twist to worry about if the table doesn't sit flat I can add a shim where one of the legs Mount beneath the table top and that will correct it one thing that was nice was how they had already filled most of the imperfections with a wood matching putty if you've ever worked with slabs you know that filling knot holes in wormholes and other imperfections is usually just part of the process and I did spot two or three small ones that remained unfilled but I decided to just leave those as is and call them character as I said the real benefit of pre-flattened slabs is you can get straight to work on the sanding now the surface was pretty smooth already but under some raking light I did see some ripples on the surface that came from their planer and those had to go so I started with 120 grit and in just a few minutes the ripples were gone and I was ready to go up to 180 grit that's as high as I'm going to go because I'm going to apply a film finish the end grain did take a bit more work it was a little bit rougher so I started there with 80 grit I don't want any saw marks at all on the end grain they have to be just as smooth as the top now this is when I spotted the flaw you can see it from the underside but it doesn't go all the way through to the top surface I'm afraid that because of this crack the corner might break off someday so I've got to address it now normally I would pull it apart as much as I could and inject some glue or epoxy in there I might even reinforce it with a little bow tie or something but to tell you the truth I wasn't in love with how this end of the slab curved outward to a point so I decided to cut three inches off and kill two birds with one stone the crack was removed completely and I like the shape a bit better you're probably wondering how I clean up the live edges mine came with a little bark and that has to come off because there's just no good way to keep bark on permanently eventually it's going to fall off on its own and you don't want to do it later after the Finish is on so deal with it now I used a putty knife to scrape off anything that was loose then I gave the edge a good scrub with a brass brush brass is stiff enough to flake off anything that's not securely attached but it's not so aggressive that it will leave a bunch of ugly scratches and gouges behind that's important because you can't really sand a Live Edge like you do the surface of the slab the goal is to just clean it up while preserving as much of the natural appearance as possible now the last step of sanding was to ease all the sharp edges not just so it feels nice to the touch but to eliminate any splinters that may catch on something and cause problems down the road now it's time for finish I like General Finishes armor seal it's a oil poly blend that's thin enough for wiping so it is really easy to apply I just puddle it on and I wipe it around with a lint-free cotton cloth when the surface is covered I even it out with some nice straight parallel Strokes that go from end to end with the grain this is the bottom side it gets finished first so I can then flip it over onto some painters pyramids and any marks that are left by those points in the surface will be on the side that doesn't get seen the same process is applied to the Top If I get too much finish on initially I can just squeeze the extra finish out of the cloth and that'll dry it up enough that it can sop up the excess from on top of the slab in the end I'm going for relatively even coverage without any puddles anywhere and no rag marks left in the
