John TenEyck
11-19-2015, 1:34 PM
Everyone but me seems to love live edge slabs, so I never made one. But then I had a friend who gives me logs ask if I could make a live edge slab for his ski house kitchen island from some walnut that he was taking down. OK, sure. So I milled the logs just over 2" thick. Let them dry outside for about a year, and then finished them in my kiln. I flattened them with a router sled and glued them up in the normal manner. Two hours with a hand plane brought the slab pretty flat and true on both sides, followed by plenty of sanding. It's not perfect like it would have been through a wide belt sander but it looks good. All that was the easy part.
The hard part was getting a reasonably high quality gloss finish on it with Arm-R-Seal. I chose Arm-R-Seal because it's the most durable finish I've used, but EnduroVar is nearly equal and I wish now that I had just sprayed it with that. I would have been done two weeks ago. I've used gallons of Arm-R-Seal on smaller surfaces, and even some fairly large ones. But I've never used gloss Arm-R-Seal on something this large and no matter what I tried I could not get a uniform surface. I'd either get streaks, swirls, or thin spots and ridges. I tried wiping in a straight line. I tried the busboy technique. I tried a combination of the two. None were good enough. So after sanding back to essentially bare wood more than once I finally tried diluting it about 25% with mineral spirits and applying it with a 3" foam brush. It was like night and day. It flowed right on and leveled out with no lap marks. I had a lot of bubbles to begin with but most were eliminated by gently tipping off after I had it coated and the rest popped after a few minutes.
So here it is after what I think is 3 wiped coats and 3 brushed ones.
325569
325570
325571
325572
My photos don't do the grain justice but hopefully you get a sense of how amazing some of it is. I'm very pleased with how Arm-R-Seal looks on it. It's very clear and has none of the plastic look some people complain about.
I will let it sit for a couple of weeks and then polish it with automotive polishing compound to remove the dust nibs and make it super smooth. And then, finally, I'll be done with it. From hence forth I'm spraying larger surfaces.
John
The hard part was getting a reasonably high quality gloss finish on it with Arm-R-Seal. I chose Arm-R-Seal because it's the most durable finish I've used, but EnduroVar is nearly equal and I wish now that I had just sprayed it with that. I would have been done two weeks ago. I've used gallons of Arm-R-Seal on smaller surfaces, and even some fairly large ones. But I've never used gloss Arm-R-Seal on something this large and no matter what I tried I could not get a uniform surface. I'd either get streaks, swirls, or thin spots and ridges. I tried wiping in a straight line. I tried the busboy technique. I tried a combination of the two. None were good enough. So after sanding back to essentially bare wood more than once I finally tried diluting it about 25% with mineral spirits and applying it with a 3" foam brush. It was like night and day. It flowed right on and leveled out with no lap marks. I had a lot of bubbles to begin with but most were eliminated by gently tipping off after I had it coated and the rest popped after a few minutes.
So here it is after what I think is 3 wiped coats and 3 brushed ones.
325569
325570
325571
325572
My photos don't do the grain justice but hopefully you get a sense of how amazing some of it is. I'm very pleased with how Arm-R-Seal looks on it. It's very clear and has none of the plastic look some people complain about.
I will let it sit for a couple of weeks and then polish it with automotive polishing compound to remove the dust nibs and make it super smooth. And then, finally, I'll be done with it. From hence forth I'm spraying larger surfaces.
John