A while back I was working on a guitar body. I was in the process of template routing the body to shape when suddenly, the router bit caught the edge of the piece and tore out a giant chunk of wood. This completely ruined my plans for this guitar. I was so frustrated that I took the body to the bandsaw and cut it in half right there on the spot. That will show it. Now, I really don’t want to waste this wood so I decided to use it for this project.
I started out by cleaning up the bandsaw cut on the jointer. After a couple passes the piece was nice and square. Over at the table saw, I set it up to cut some square strips. The second one started binding, so I stopped and recut it to avoid any sort of kickback. Now I took those strips, turned one of them 90 degrees and glued them together. After the glue dried, I squared up the ends and cut the piece on half. Now I can glue those together with one turned 180 degrees.
While the glue dried I sliced off a couple small chunks of Purpleheart, and resawed them on the bandsaw. After running them through the drum sander, I glued them onto the now dried block one piece at a time to wrap the entire piece in purpleheart. I glued them one at a time in order to avoid difficulties clamping all 4 sides at once. Once dried, I sanded all the sides nice and flush. Now back to the bandsaw.
I grabbed my crosscut jig I made for the bandsaw. This will hold the block square to the blade and allow me to use a stop block to keep each slice the same size. Now I just began making slices of this block until I couldn’t get any more cuts. These are almost done. Just some sanding to remove the saw marks, hand sanding to break the edges, and its time for the finish.
I kept it really simple for the finish. Just some spray on, satin clear. After allowing a couple coats to dry, I added some protective cork to the bottom and this project is done. I’m really happy with the way these wooden coasters came out. The different species of wood all look awesome together. You can check out the build video below.
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Irwin 12″ Bar Clamp – https://amzn.to/2vb6hlP
Gator 220 Grit Sanding Discs – https://amzn.to/2sP88Mk
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