Hey guys,
It's not really great or fancy since it was intended to be assembled with my brother in law in one day... he came down to build a table and assumed we could find some wood locally (on a weekend... no lumber stores open). So, rather than call the project off, we just did what we could with scrap. I had some ipe lying around that we cut into 4 triangles to assemble into a 10.5"x10.5" surface, a 1/2" thick cut-off of bubinga that was about 8"x10" (we cut it down to square) that ended up being the lower shelf, some longer strips of ipe for legs, a trim piece of white oak around the ipe main surface for a little extra girth (to make it 12"x12"), and some wenge that we cut into an apron around the tops of the legs. And after all that, we decided we might as well make the whole project even weirder by using purpleheart plugs on the legs for the lower shelf. It's everything you'd imagine an overkill of random wood species would look like!
Finish was done on the white oak by slurry-sanding danish oil into the ipe and white oak... it pore filled it with dark slurry, however, which ended up looking fine. Same technique was used on the wenge. All surfaces with the exception of the main "top" piece were finished with about 5 thin coats of shellac and rubbed with 0000 steel wool to give more of a satin finish. The top was finished with a cheap minwax tung oil "finish" for 2 coats, then given 2 top coats with arm-r-seal.
Honestly, I like the top piece and the triangled-method of creating a surface the most out of this whole project. It was a fun learning experience that we don't always have to bookmatch or slipmatch wood to make a glue-up.
My least favorite part is the legs, but we were too lazy to make a template with a bandsaw. Given the space constraints of where it was going, it works, though it's so-so.
Enjoy!
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