Thread: Carved Relief Beer Pong Table, yes I said Beer Pong Table

G'day guys, just thought I'd show you a project me and my mate have been working on for the last few weekends.

A few weeks back I asked about making a pewter inlay for a carved relief into a table, well I scrapped that idea because it was a bit to much of a learning curve for the time frame I had so we decided to go with leafing instead.

The table is for our friends as their wedding present (they are 21 and the table was the her idea). It's all made out of bog basic KD Flooring and mouldings from Mitre 10 and Bunnings. We were going great guns on it until we got to the stain which we mixed up from my mates dad's horde in the garage. We mixed up a combination of colours called 'Wenge' and 'Mahogany' which we thought we had enough of to cover the area required, we didn't and had to remix a batch that looked 'close'. You can notice an area on the table that is a little lighter than the rest but pretty much we were happy with it.

Now our mate Rob who the table is for is obsessed with LED's and I'm an electrician that just happens to work and install LED's often in homes so I know a bit about them. We ordered some multicoloured Strip off the eBays and mounted it on a 12mm Ally extrusion from Bunnings to dissipate the heat from the LED's. I wired it up to a 7.5A tranny from Jaycar and mounted it with some make-a-bracket from bunnings and let me just say at night it looks awesome.

Now to the carving, can I just say carving takes time multiplied by forever, even with our handy dandy Dremel, we plunge cut the rough outline of the desired shape, in this case a skull with a crown and a large banner with the recipients names on it, we then went on to clean the edges up with a finer carving bit, the names were carved with only the finer carving tool as the had much finer points on them which lead to me accidentally carving an 'n' instead of an 'r'.

Words were said that shall not be repeated.

To fix my monumental **** up we mixed our stain up to what we deemed to be very close to our end product and restained the area which I sanded back to even the colour out without noticing the extra leg on our 'r'. The end result was pretty close but it is noticeable after the gloss poly went on.

The leafing was a bit tricky but we got the resident artist (mate's girlfriend) to do it as we deemed she was the least likely to get the #### everywhere.

After that we coated it with two coats of Cabot's Flooring Poly and it looks great.

Now we're just knocking up just removable legs made out of laminated merbau post and should be ready tomorrow for the engagement party tomorrow.

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