Lacebark Elm + Laminated Ash coffee table

First, a quick background on my wonderful clients for this build, Kim and Aaron Novod.  We met back around 2008, when they hired me to photograph their wedding.  We managed to stay in touch over the years, as we all started families.    Kim and Aaron sadly had a traumatic event with their first son, Saul, which ended in his death after a prolonged stay in the NICU.   Channeling their grief into purpose, they started a non-profit organization, Saul’s Light, which supports mothers and families in the NICU community and beyond.  In short, they’re good people.

+Photo of Aaron and Kim

The slab.

I was really just beginning my woodworking journey about the time that Hurricane Ida came through New Orleans.  For the first time, I finally had a permanent shop for my tools, and was beginning to get more and more obsessed and excited about the prospect of building out a shop and learning more about something that I had been interested in for years.    We evacuated for the storm, and when I returned, brand new chainsaw in hand, I noticed a badly leaning tree on the corner of our block, which had clearly taken out some of the power wires

Lacebark Elm

Downed as a result of Hurricane Ida

.  At some point over the next day or two, contractors came and cut the tree into pieces, and while passing by, I noticed it had a beautiful color to the freshly sawn ends.   Curiosity struck, and I managed to figure out that the tree was a Lacebark Elm, commonly planted as an ornamental in the city, and definitely a candidate for making lumber out of.  I must have, at some point, seen videos online of people cutting slabs with a chainsaw.  While I didn’t have an Alaskan Mill, at that point it  seemed inevitable that I would end up with one, so I went ahead and brought home some of the bigger chunks of the tree, enlisting my buddy Cesar to help drag the biggest part of the main trunk home with my truck. 

At that point, I was stumped (see what I did there), and it was a good long while before I ended up with a chainsaw and bar big enough to cut the widest part with the Alaskan Mill I inevitably purchased. Eventually, having secured a Stihl MS881 with a 41” bar, I sliced the main trunk, and set it aside to dry, first air drying it, then passing it through my homemade dehumidifier kiln, which temporarily occupied our guest bedroom.  I have since grudgingly given that bedroom back, apparently people needing places to sleep is more important than my lumber dreams…. 

The first slab I used from the flitch went to my buddy Robert Bostick.  As I had done with quite a few other projects, I burned and burnished the edges, filled any defects, and finished the top, in this case with Arm-R-Seal.  I enlisted another friend of mine, Arlyn Jimenez to fabricate a custom base for it, and he did an amazing job of that.  You can see a photo of that first table below. Check out Arlyn’s work here

When Aaron and Kim asked me about making a coffee table, I was happy to have found an ideal scenario in which to use another one of the slabs from that log.  The amount of blood, sweat and tears that went into that process of sawing and drying the lumber means that it is, for all intents and purposes, invaluable.  What better fit than using it for some old friends, and making it a real passion project.    As with most slab projects, I started out the process by flattening the piece with a router sled, taking out whatever twisting and cupping had been introduced in the drying process.   

Insert video of slab flattening

After flattening it, burned the sides with a propane torch, and burnished them.  This is a fairly involved process that I have gotten pretty decent at over the years, to the point that it is sort of an element of my style with live edge stuff at this point.  You really have to do quite a few passes of burning and burnishing to get something that is going to stand up to any kind of use/abuse.   If you try to get away with one pass, I find that it is incredibly easy to scratch off the char, resulting in an odd look as well as getting ash all over.   Each pass with the torch is followed by a brushing off of the char, and burnishing. Depending on the species of wood, the degree to which it’s been burnt, and the final effect you want, using a hand brushing with plastic brushes combined with a drill mounted plastic brush can usually get the end result you want. I typically also go ahead and apply one coat of whatever finish I’m going to use just to the edges, so that as I move the piece around and finish the top, the char doesn’t cross contaminate the top.

 This particular slab had a good amount of punky, almost spalted wood in it, and after I had completed the burning/burnishing, I moved on to stabilizing that portion.  I didn’t want the epoxy I would be using to run down into the bigger cracks in the slab, which I had also burned - there would be no way to sand or remove the epoxy.   To keep that from happening, I used a bit of caulk to create dams around the cracks, to keep the epoxy out.  I then mixed up some epoxy, thinned it slightly with denatured alcohol, and warmed it a bit, to make it as thin as possible, letting it penetrate into the punky portions of the wood.  I’d love to tell you all that it took one pour, but as is typical wit woodworking, it took vastly longer than I had planned or hoped for, requiring multiple pours to get to the point where it stopped soaking up the epoxy.  When that process was at long last finished, I once again whipped out the router sled, and did a small final flattening, to remove the leftover epoxy. 

With the slab flat, punky portions stabilized, and the edges prepared, I was finally ready to throw in some inlays to stabilize the couple of bigger cracks.  I don’t actually think this slab will move much more than it has, but the added inlays give some visual interest and some peace of mind.  I used some fairly light colored maple I had around, felt like the contrast was good.

After final sanding, I finished the top with Osmo, buffed it well, and… There it sat.  For months….  I had to finish up a couple of other projects, and also had a fairly busy schedule at the mill shop where I’m working.