From Tree to Desktop

 

Most of the wood I use on the furniture I build comes from some mill and is already smooth, straight, square and ready to use. Last January however I got some walnut slabs that some one had got from a tree they cut down. Basically after they cut down the tree they cut the trunk up into slabs of wood which is very raw and rough. Back in March I turned a couple of the slabs into a plant stand. After that project I still have four more slabs to use and decided to use a couple of them for a new desktop for my desk. 

It takes a lot of work to turn the raw wood into a finished desktop especially with the limited tools I have. This is what the raw wood looks like.

It has a lot of marks from the rough saw cuts used to cut it into slabs and the slabs themselves are not straight or flat. Most of them are a little warped so making them into a flat desktop is not easy. Ideally I would use a planner to slowly shave off the top and bottle surface of the wood until they were perfectly flat. However I don't have an industrial planner and sending the slabs out to wood shop, to plane, would be expensive. 

Most of the slabs were flat enough that some quality time with a belt sander removed most of the saw marks and got them flat enough. It was however very dusty work. Because I was going to use epoxy to cover the wood they didn't have to be perfectly flat since the epoxy would level the surface out. 

The slabs I had were around 12 inches wide so I needed two of them to make my 24 inch wide desk. The boards are not straight or square so there would be gaps between the boards. This is normal with live edge wood and the solution to fill in the gaps is to create what is called a river table where you fill in the gaps with colored epoxy. 

I chose a black metallic color and mixed in a little white to give it a swirled marble look. It worked really well with the dark walnut. 

You can see from the side view how the slabs are arranged and the gaps filled in with the epoxy. After filling in gaps I had to put a couple of coats of epoxy to level the top. Between fitting the slabs together and putting the trim it took a few weeks to get it ready for epoxy. Then a couple more weeks to pour the epoxy as I wanted to be careful. 

I'm happy with the way it turned out. I still have more to learn about using epoxy. Getting it perfectly smooth takes a lot of prep and even then you usually need to do some touch up and polishing to get it to look good.

Putting epoxy on the walnut really brought out the grain and all the beauty of the wood.

I just enjoy staring at the different patterns of the grain so plan to keep new desktop clear of  clutter. That way I can appreciate all the work it took to get it from a tree to a desktop.