Coffee table from a rotting piece of wood circa WW2 that a friend got from another friend.

Posted byDIYAccountantPosted inwood workingTags:, , , , ,

This piece of wood was in pretty bad shape. I managed to stabilize it with PC Wood Hardener and epoxy. The rotting portion was very much a sponge. It sucked up about 3 bottles of wood hardener and lots of epoxy and varnish.

Here is an over exposed picture of the piece of wood.

I used a hand plane to plane the surface of the table flat. I then realized the right side of the wood was going to fall off due to the rot.

Close up of the rotting wood
After planing over several days

I don’t typically like the epoxy effects that some people do, so I strictly wanted the epoxy to be structural and not a feature. I mixed in some deep red dye so that it would not be entirely noticeable.

I sanded down the epoxy so it would only show up where it was needed and not on the rest of the table top itself.

I had to make legs for this thing. I noticed some cool joins that welders do, so I tried one myself.

Figuring out the measurements is relatively easy. It’s a quarter circle, so the distance of the cuts is 3.14 x the height (or width of the steel – let’s say it is about 2″ x 4″, then the diameter is 8″ because 4″ x 2) all of that divided by 4. So Pi x D / 4.

Because the bottom of the wood was not planed to the same thickness, I had to improvise on the legs. I made one of the legs adjustable for level.

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