Mockernut Hickory

Resin “River” Table

This project is my pride and joy. After watching hundreds of hours of videos on YouTube of people using live-edge wood and resin to create beautiful works of art, I knew I had to make one of my own. As luck would have it was also in the market for a new dining room table! After my research I felt fairly certain on the process that a piece like this would require, so I went to a local Florida sawmill an bought two live-edge slabs of Mockernut Hickory to build the table around. I designed a simple six foot table design in AutoCAD to establish the dimensions I would need to fabricate and base my design around. I created a mold for the tabletop and after planing the wood to level and putting them into the correct positions in the mold, began to pour 1/8” layers of colored clear resin epoxy every 45 minutes for the next 48 hours. This was a meticulous process where I would quickly mix the accurate amounts of two part resin and slowly pour it on top of the previous layer before it hardened, and then would follow up with a gas torch to carefully pop the remaining bubbles before the solution dried. After the 20 layers of resin had cured I then proceeded to re-plane the surface level and then sanded and polished for around nine hours until the surface was a clear glass-like finish. The legs were made from the wood’s outer bark surface cut from the board during milling, and the finished table’s beauty is beyond description and is not truly shown by these pictures.