A Coffee Table Made Out of Coffee Beans!

My roommates, my girlfriend, and I all started hanging out in my living room more often. Eating, drinking, doing puzzles. The need for a coffee table became quite apparent. I had never build any sort of furniture before, so I decided to take a whack at it. My coffee table, with embedded coffee beans!

I built the legs out of some scrap 4x4 I had laying around from a previous project. And the top is birch ply wood. I covered it in a thin layer of poly acrylic, because I was worried the epoxy would not enrich the wood enough. The poly acrylic does not amber the wood very much, but it was just enough to make the top look great.

I really wanted to do some inlay work on this table. Because I think inlays look great, and are a great exercise of skill. I had never done one before. And at this point in my wood working career had never bought any kind of wood that can't be bought at home depot. Learn from my mistakes. 

My first mistake, I used stained wood for the inlay. I should have known better. The final step of an inlay is to sand the whole thing smooth, so that the inlay lays flush with the thing it is inlaid into. But if you used stained wood, it will sand off all the stain. Oops. I figured it didn't look all that bad, so I kept it. 

The second mistake I made, is that inlaying into plywood doesn't seem to lend the best results. The top veneer will chip, leaving ugly edges. I suppose if your router bits are super sharp, this can be avoided. But I have no confidence that this can be pulled off at all. In the end, both of these mistakes did not prove fatal, but I would not do it this way again, especially if I plan to sell the work.

 I wanted the table top to be tough, durable, and water proof. Since it's a coffee table, it will see a lot of action, and will be very prone to have drinks spilled on it. The best finish for this use case turned out to be bar top epoxy. With epoxy, since it goes on so much thicker than normal wood finishes, one could conceivably embed objects into it. Which is exactly what I did. Most people use pennies, or pieces of paper. I thought it would be super cool to use coffee beans instead. As it being a coffee table and all. WARNING. epoxy is expensive. And coffee beans are relatively thick, when compared to pennies or paper. It will require substantially more epoxy to cover thicker things than thinner things. I only filled the coffee table about with about half as much epoxy as I should have, and it still cost me $50. So the table has a rougher texture where the coffee beans are. 

To pour epoxy, there needs to be some sort of dam to hold it in. Tape can work fine if you're careful, but I decided to put a frame around the edge of the table, to both cover the plywood edges, and provide a dam for the epoxy.

It's embarrassing how many times I recut the sides of the frame. I really didn't know what I was doing.

And that's my coffee table! Nearly a year later and it is still in perfect condition. Although the rough coffee beans  do make it rather hard to clean. Otherwise, it's perfect for the situation!