Work-in-Progress - Black Walnut coffee table top

'Finished' shot first. Polyurethane has been curing for several hours.

These are the products I'm using. The Famowood Glaze Coat is a low-viscosity slow-setting epoxy meant for coating tables and bar tops, it's not a great product but it is cheap and because I'm using opaque pigments, I don't care if the epoxy yellows over time. The Jacquard Pearl Ex pigments are fantastic. They come in a bunch of different colors. I'm using Super Bronze for this table. I think the blue sky pigment will look good with lighter-colored woods like maple or hickory. One of these 0.75oz jars has enough pigment to add to about a gallon of epoxy.

Started with these 8/4 black walnut boards. Lovely figure, but tons of voids and defects. The farthest board in this photo actually broke into two pieces. The closest two boards have a big saw kerf cut at one end.

I used duct tape (mistake) to seal the underside and edges before pouring epoxy.

One of the other boards had a huge bark inclusion. It was loose, so I popped the bark out.

Here's an initial pour of the epoxy to fill the voids. Epoxy can't be poured too thick or it will over-heat due to it being an exothermic curing reaction. I decided to keep the saw kerf cut and just fill it with epoxy.

Once all the boards were filled and the epoxy had cured, I faced one side on my jointer, then jointed one edge.

Next I planed all the boards to a consistent thickness. They ended up around 35mm thick (1-3/8") once this was done.

I glued up pairs of boards next. You can see there's still a couple voids and problems.

Glued the three pairs into one piece.

This is what the epoxy looks like after the board has been through the planer.

I'm doing a full coat here on the top side to fill all the grain and all the voids. I had to wait for this to cure, repeat to fill a couple spots I missed, wait for that to cure, then flip it over and do it again on the bottom side of the table.

I used a combination of a paint scraper, a chisel, and my 6" random orbit sander to knock all the excess epoxy off the surface. It's really a pain in the ass to sand because it gets hot quickly and then becomes gummy and soft. I started with 40-grit, and worked up through 80, 120, 180, 220, 320, 400, 600, and finally 800.

This is the final top before putting finish on. I chamfered all the edges with a 45-degree router bit, did a couple passes of hand-sanding around the edges to clean up machine marks, then wiped it all down with a rag dampened with mineral spirits.

I always finish the underside of things first. This photo is just after polyurethane finish has been brushed on. I'm using Minwax oil-based polyurethane, semi-gloss.

Lots of figure in these boards.

This was a happy accident. The grain matched almost perfectly in part of this glue-up.