My continued list of screw ups while learning woodworking.
When applying epoxy, when you need to pee, remember not to walk across your garage floor because the bottoms of your feet have been standing in wet epoxy. And most of all, do not go into your house and down the hall to the bathroom. You’ll realize your mistake when you are finished peeing and try to lift your feet from the floor to return to your garage project. You will need to spend an additional hour on your hands and knees wiping up your mess from the toilet to the project.
If you are applying epoxy to your redwood slab on sawhorses, try to use good quality sawhorses and avoid using flimsy plastic sawhorses that shift, bend and slide with every bump.
After throwing out your crappy plastic sawhorses and ponying up money for a pair of good solid sawhorses, be sure to set them far enough under your slab that epoxy does not drip off the ends all over your brand new sawhorses.
Unless your garage floor is made of dirt, be sure to put down protective covering so you do not drip epoxy on your concrete. And do not simply use a couple old newspapers.
If you do use old newspapers, be sure to use one hell of a lot of them. Also, pick them up as soon as you are finished, not the next day when they have stuck to the floor._
Do not wait until they are urgently needed to set out your acetone, denatured alcohol, mineral spirits and other cleaning products you might need to clean up. You cannot clean up as an afterthought when working with epoxy. It dries way too fast.
When applying epoxy remember that you must not only wear an ugly shirt and nasty blue jeans, but you should also remove your nice shoes because those drips do not wash out of fabric no way, no how. And they were $65.
If the instructions tell you to use two plastic mixing cups per application, and you intend to do three applications, make sure you have more than five plastic measure-marked cups or you will find yourself either eyeballing, or driving 13 miles round trip to Home Depot to buy a plastic cup for $1.29._
When sanding out bubbles, dust particles, gnats, and June bugs, do not be cheap with your sandpaper. Change it once in a while. You will be happier. While you are at Home Depot buying a plastic cup you could pick up a little more sandpaper.
You cannot apply only two coats if your table top is not completely level. The higher parts of the slab will be devoid of epoxy. Do not under any circumstances try to push liquid epoxy uphill. Don’t be Sisyphus. It is kind of like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water and expecting to see a hole.
When you select the day to pour epoxy, time it properly if you intend to apply a flood coat on the same day. A flood coat needs 10 hours to cure before reapplying another. If you don’t reapply within 10 hours, the coat will harden.  Then you will have to wait 72 hours and sand it.
For example, I applied my base coat at 2 PM, then I applied a flood coat at 6 p.m. That meant that I had to get up at 3 a.m. for a 4 a.m. pouring, or I would have to wait three extra days. Good advice is to grind your coffee before you go to bed and set the timer on the coffee pot for 3:15 a.m. _
If the day’s temperature isn’t quite up to 75 degrees and you only have the base coat on, do not set your slab in the sun for 20 minutes trying to warm it to 75 degrees to cheat the advisory. You will find that your entire slab has gone cloudy just like it would have done if you had applied epoxy below 75 degrees, from UV, and you’ll have to sand the whole thing down and start over._
Also do not put your epoxy bottles in a bucket of warm water to warm them up. The epoxy will be too runny and will spill over the sides too much and too fast._
When you are finished and your table top looks magnificent, do not be cavalier about picking flipping your slab over to inspect the bottom and accidentally have it slip out of your hands, scrape across the sharp corner of your sawhorses leaving a crease, and then crash to the concrete floor on the most delicate corner, crushing it and damaging your finish. You gotta fix that._
One place where I did not screw up on my first table which took me nearly a month to get right, was in selecting and attaching nice legs. I suggest you try using iron one-inch pipe sections, T’s, elbows, flanges and padding that can be picked up at Home Depot for a song, as long as you are there buying plastic cups and sandpaper and what not.
Author’s Addendum: I found out yesterday by moisture content measurement, the slab was green. That is the source of many of my problems. I have to let it dry for two years.

Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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