The Saga of a Custom Coffee Table
- orindawoodworking
- Mar 22
- 3 min read
This is the saga of the creation of a custom olive wood cookie coffee table - and it has been a saga. Please let me know if you think I squandered my journey!
As background, I have a wood buying problem. There, I said it. Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards solving it. While others spend their internet time scouring news, politics, sports, and social media, I spend most of my leisure internet time searching for some piece of wood that I immediately picture as something that I want to make. The board and my brain sort of coalesce on what it needs to be, and I instantly need to make it. Inevitably, I buy that piece. This is how this table was conceived, and it took me on a journey not totally dissimilar to that of Odysseus (okay, I'm being slightly overdramatic).
The table started as a baker's baker's dozen (14) of olive wood cookies of various sizes. Wood cookies are horizontal slices of the tree, so the piece features end grain - one of my favorite parts because you see much more character. The large central cookie was low on the tree, where the roots shoot out in all directions creating the interesting starlike explosion. This also means there are tons of nooks and crannies that must be cleaned out by hand (or with a pressure washer if you want to then dry the piece again - which I did not want to do). These cookies were au naturel. By that, I mean they brought a lot of rock and dirt from their home with them to my shop.
These cookies came from desert trees that were about 70 years old, and you can tell from the photos that they have lots of cracks that are, as I understand it, caused by the drying process as the wood contracts. I love the texture that they add to the piece, and they look excellent when set in epoxy. The next step was trying numerous different arrangements and rounding out the outside pieces to fit the contours of the mold in preparation for the pour.
Above is the final layout after the boards were cleaned. The next step was to add 7 gallons of epoxy. I have been testing different recipes of epoxy and dye to give an effect that I call "fade to black," which means that up close you can see the depth of the wood, but from farther away it simply looks opaque.
For the pour, each cookie must be held down and in place, or else a flotilla will ruin the project! Here, with so many cookies, I ended up using six 2x4s that I clamped down with another two crosswise. Given the fact that Home Depot cannot find a straight 2x4 and the fact that not all of the olive wood cookies were the same width, I used folded-over paper towels and tongue depressors to fill in the gaps.
Knowing that this was going to bubble like crazy, I added a layer of epoxy directly to the wood prior to pouring, but even with that, I ended up with a bubbly mess and wondered whether the $1000+ of materials, not to mention my time, had gone to waste. Luckily, I had the foresight to add extra epoxy at the end so that the bubbles would be above the finished surface level of the table. It was very satisfying to peel back that extra layer of epoxy to see what was beneath!
After flattening the top and bottom, removing extra material on the outside of the circle, adding a chamfer to the bottom of the table, and sanding the you-know-what out of it, I was pretty sure that this table was going to be awesome.
It was now time for the table's dental exam.
A few layers of tabletop epoxy to fill in all those little holes, and it is almost complete. It awaits one final flattening sand and a full flood coat of resin to complete it. Let me know if you would like a satisfying video of that final pour!
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