I am making a walnut coffee table. Two years ago in Decorah, Iowa, at a Seed Savers benefit concert, my old friend Gino pulled up in his pickup and said, “I bought you a gift in Illinois a few months ago, and brought it to Iowa all the way from Philadelphia.”
He flipped back a tarp in his Tundra truck to reveal a beautiful slab of walnut two feet by five and two inches thick. Light grain around the edges encircled a bulb of dark grain that stretched down the center. The striking contrasts stirred the imagination. Bark still clung to the fringes, plus a few cracks and knotholes added to the challenge. “Ha. I’m speechless.”
“Help me get it into your Highlander,” he said, and the two of us hefted it from truck to SUV. It weighed at least 100 pounds. I had to fold down two rows of seats to make it fit.
I patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks, man. What a unique gift.”
“Well, you said when you retired you wanted to build some crazy furniture. Here you go. Start with this. Make it into a coffee table or something.”
“I will,“ I promised. I brought it home, set it up on sawhorses in the garage and admired it for six months. Then Gino flew in for a visit.
“How are you coming with that walnut table?” he asked as he headed for the garage. I hurried along behind him down the stairs sharing all the ideas I had for designing it, assuring him that I’d put some deep thought into it. There his gift sat in the corner in its original condition on sawhorses. A few empty Amazon boxes sat on top of it.
“You haven’t started yet?” he asked, hands and eyes open wide. “Come on.”
“Well, I’m considering various options for dealing with this crack.” I pointed to it. “And that hole there,” I stuck my finger in it, “goes all the way through. I’ll need to plug it. I was about to plane it and sand it.”
He shook his head. “I’m looking forward to seeing it whenever you get it done,” he said graciously. “You’ll need legs.”
“Oh, yes. That’s a stumbler. Should I look for four logs? Buy prefabricated metal table legs? How about redwood slabs, two-by-twelves, coated in polyurethane?”
“It’s your project,” Gino shrugged. “Any one of those would work.”
It has been a year now, and Gino is coming to visit around Christmas time. I’ve become serious about finishing this coffee table. I started a week ago.
So far I have the wood planed and sanded. I’ve decided to coat the whole table in pour-on epoxy resin for that thick, hard, glossy coat. I looked at oil stains and varnishes, polyurethanes, urethanes, spars and waxes, but as I need to use epoxy resin to fill the knotholes, I may as well use it to cover the whole thing. Knowing nothing, I studied epoxy resin application online for a day. YouTube was most helpful.
To fill knotholes, Susan and I drove to Michaels and bought an assortment of cool crack fillers — a bag of pebbles, blue cracked shells, white mini-sequins, and blue glitter. At the paint store, I bought two-part epoxy resin. At home we stood over the walnut slab in the garage and each of us filled a knothole in our under-the-sea motif.
I mixed together a couple shots of resin and hardener in a cup and filled the knotholes only partway, coating the pebbles and shells. After 15 minutes, I popped the air bubbles that formed with a heat gun as instructed. I let that sit for two days. It looked fantastic. I mixed and poured another coat, filling the knotholes halfway, and chased out the bubbles. One more coat filled the holes and cracks level with the table top. They look under the sea to me. I like this stuff.
Up ahead, my next step is to pour the resin over the entire coffee table. That’s the big task, the main event. It needs to spill over the edges and be dabbed into the bark. It’s going to be a sticky mess, if I’m not careful.
For legs I am going steampunk. I am using ¾-inch iron plumbing pipe, screwed together with T-intersections and crossbeams. I used a few half-pieces with couplings to add to the visual clutter. Round flanges will attach the pipe to the underbelly of the table, and will act as feet on the floor once I adhere skid pads to them. I will spray all the pipe in glossy Rustoleum black.
I’m doing this at retired-guy speed. Today I plugged a few cracks where yesterday’s resin dripped through. Gotta dry for two more days. When I’m done writing, I’ll drive over to Home Depot to purchase one last pipe coupling, a tiny one-dollar threaded ring that will fit in the palm of my hand. Such a long drive. I might as well stop in for a matinee movie. I hear “Kubo and the Two Strings” scored a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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