- All right. So we have our board here.
We de-molded it.
So, we got to flatten this out.
If you look at a finished board
that's ready for sanding and coating,
it's nice and square.
It's nice and flat, looks really, really good.
Our current board that we just de-molded,
well, that's not quite square.
We've got a lot of stuff over here.
There's epoxy that's underneath.
This needs some love.
Needs a little TLC.
So that's what we're going to do.
We're actually going to take down
a good amount of material here.
Sixteenth's of an inch,
Thirty-second's of an inch until we have a nice,
smooth and flat surface.
Just like this one over here.
There's a couple of ways to do that.
You could put it on a flat surface,
like I've got here and just take a sander to it
with a heavy sanding disc on an orbital,
like a 40 or a 30,
and really spend your time making sure
you're being as even as possible.
That technically works
and you can get pretty good results with it,
but it's not perfect.
And being somebody who's a little bit of a perfectionist,
I'm going to use this right here,
which is called a slab jig.
Slab jig is a really simple tool
that takes a normal router
and actually allows you to go across your work piece
at a set depth with a spoil board bit.
A spoil board bit really is
just a large CNC bit for removing material.
So, using a slab jig like this with a simple setup
allows you to get a flat surface every time.
We're just going to go ahead, go a little bit down.
Go across our board, a little bit down.
Go across our board again until we've removed
enough material to where it's completely flat.
We'll turn it over.
It's a little bit of a process,
but let me tell you it's really, really worth it.
The board comes out looking phenomenal at the end.
Now, since this router
puts a lot of force on the material here,
we don't want this board sliding around.
So I'm going to actually put in some SPAC screws
on either side of each corner.
That's going to lock our board in place
and make sure there's no play.
Now that we're getting ready to slab,
we want to find the highest point on the board
and then set our router bit just to be a little bit,
little bit lower than that.
We're going to inch our way down on this.
Thirty-second's, sixteenth's of an inch.
That's the right move.
And that makes sure that we're not pushing
the router any further than it should be.
We end up, you know,
burning out a motor or breaking the bed.
All right, now I'm plugging this in.
I'm getting ready to go.
But before we get going here,
we do got to talk about personal protective equipment here.
Since this is resin and we are sanding and cutting it,
we are atomizing all that material.
Which means it's very dangerous.
That means respirator, safety glasses, and be smart.
(machine whirring)
And we didn't take much off that pass.
That's okay.
We're discovering where the material is height-wise.
Now, I'll just take my router shifted down a little bit
and do the same pass again.
This is a game of patience, folks.
Don't overdo it out the gate.
(machine whirring)
All right, we are done using the slab jig.
It worked perfectly. It's great.
This board is flat on both sides,
which is what we need to do our next step,
which is sanding things up.
But before we go there,
let's talk about some of this chip out
that we have on the board.
And that's something you might have to deal with too.
So when you see chip out like this on a board,
especially in a linear pattern like this,
it means that your process of using the slab jig,
there's something off there.
You could be going too fast,
or trying to take off too much material,
maybe would be another one.
Or the bit you're using itself.
In my case, it's kind of an old bit.
This has seen a few river tables
and a lot of cutting boards.
Now, am I worried about all this
chip out for our board here?
And the fact that I had an older bit?
Ah, not really.
You can see in this example here,
I had the same bit and I had the same chip out.
Well, what happens? What do we do from here?
We're actually going to go through the sanding process,
starting at 40 grit and work this thing down
so it's crystal smooth, something like this.
I've sanded this board up all the way to 320,
and you can see that the finish on it is phenomenal.
We're not going to go that high on this board down here,
cause we're going to do a top coat.
It gives us a beautiful finish.
So, let's take it through the steps of sanding,
one by one, and go from there.
Since we've got this flat and level,
we don't want to mess that up
by just randomly sanding this thing.
So what we're going to do is take a pencil
and we're going to draw lines actually on top of our board.
In doing this, gives us a sense of the material
that we're removing as we're sanding.
Once these pencil marks disappear,
it means that section has been sanded,
and we don't need to go back to it.
We're going to work our way up through the grits,
and we're going to start with 40.
So we're going to go 40 grit,
60 grit,
80 grit,
120,
180,
220,
and 320.
That gives us a beautiful, smooth finish
while we're slowly getting rid of all
the scratches that we put in there from the last sanding.
That's it for leveling and sanding.
In the next video,
we'll finish this board with the skim coat
followed by a top coat.
Stay tuned though.
In a later video,
I'll show you how to repair
and refinish your project after
it's seen a lot of wear and tear. Until next time!
(closing theme music)