Description
Upcycled Twin trunks oak side tables (for sale to the right home)- comes as a set of 2 tables
Rescued Oak, metal legs; approx. 32″ long, 17″ wide, 16″ high each table
<tl:dr>
OK here’s the story on how these two tables were created. This originally was a single piece of wood destined for the junkyard [ or actually the chipper]. A friend of mine runs a landscaping company and he has a bin where he puts all of the cut wood from removal operations.
As soon as I saw this one I had a feeling that it could become not just a single very thick table but two.
When I pulled the piece out of the dumpster it also had this really interesting seam down the center where it looks like two branches had emerged from the trunk.
After dragging this piece home I set it up on my driveway and proceeded to section it in half with my electric chainsaw.
Now because the log had been recently cut, it was still too wet to work with so I stacked it and put two ratcheting straps around the outside to prevent the crack down the center from getting any bigger. Then I left them under my deck over the winter to season for about six months and promptly forgot about them.
Come the spring I crawled under the deck to take a look at how they did and surprisingly they were looking really good. And by good I mean that they hadn’t cracked all the way through and the moisture content was down to point where I could now work on them.
I have to say that I have a small confession to make. When I put these two pieces away in the fall, I thought that this would be a really quick project that I could do in a few weeks and they wouldn’t take much time. In the end I probably spent over 100 hours on these two because the more I work with them the more I realize that there were a few things that were pretty special about these two pieces.
Because they were cut from the same log they are actually what’s called “book matched”. That means that they are similar to when you open a book and so one side reflects what’s happening on the other side. So in a fact they are kind of like twins.
On the one end there is an interesting figure where it looks like there was a large limb that was cut off many years ago. This caused some interesting coloration that looks similar but is not exactly the same on both logs.
But the most challenging part was that the outer sides [or the bottom of each table when I sectioned them] was not cut flat, because whoever cut down the tree had no intention of actually using it for furniture.
So when I went to work on the tops and make them flat it was quite a challenge to set it up because the bottom is not only on an angle but also has numerous depressions and valleys where you can see the chainsaw cut into the wood and then was pulled out and started in a different place.
Instead of doing what other woodworkers do which is get one side reasonably flat and then use that to help flatten the finished side I left the bottom pretty much alone and used the router sled to make the top flat.
After that I used some eco-friendly epoxy to stabilize the cracks and then sanded down the surface so I could apply a finish coat of Osmo wood polish.
Then it was just a matter of figuring out what type of legs to use and I came upon this solution actually when I was looking at both of the pieces simultaneously. They looked to me like they were moving and I thought I would reflect that in the way I designed the legs.
So there you have it. There’s obviously more to the story but I’ll save you the details unless of course you want to know-then I’d be glad to talk at length. Thanks for reading this far
