All in the Name of Liberty: Kitchen Bench

The old energy guzzling cafe fridge in the Junkyard Studio kitchen gave me a shock when I stuck my hand inside one day so we replaced it with a regular domestic upright unit. Its now in a shipping container with all the stuff collected by our mate Albert to send back to sell in his home country of Ghana

But the old stainless steel beast doubled as a cutting bench so we were stuck using a couple of cafe tables, not ideal. After a lot of procrastinating I made a heavy bench top on a base with a shelf underneath.

The top is 3 slabs of different Australian hardwoods, all extremely dense and hard. The centre piece is a stringer from a staircase, with slots where thestairs fitted, so it needed to be filled so I decided to use some epoxy resin I'd bought litres for a project last year and never used.

With the dam wall of ducttape and slats half removed. I'd screwed it on all around to containthe epoxy resin

Lit by a combination of my 390nm headlamp and the last fading rays of daylight. The resin has bits of the 6 dry UV pigments langridge sell mixed in. (blue, yellow, green, pink, orange and a deep magenta, from them you can ctreate a whole palette odf colours)

An approximation of the golden mean in wobbly hand poured epoxy.. The next morning a currawong tried to eat a bit - to our mutual dismay

This is the bit the currawong tried to eat I think, and also brushed with its wing. The foil is a piece of silver leaf(genuine, not fake aluminium stuff) that I'd draped into a pool of epoxy resin some hours before and dripped some more colour ont.

The delicate silver has been shredded at one side, with some of it deposited 20cm away, and there's a currawong footprint beside it, about where I found it hopping and fluttering as I came out to check out the commotion

The bird comes into the studio from time to time, once at least to pinch a rawhide workglove for winter insulation. For non-Australians, the currawong is the magpie's slightly chunkier rainforest cousin, opportunistic and very clever birds with a tiny hook at the end of the beak.

I was cranky and grabbed a piece of metal like a spanner and almost threw it directly at it where it flew off to a few metres away on top of the fork lift. I just pulled the throw and it clanked into the metal 20cm below the bird which then flew off.

It's attempted feed must have come as a shock because it had chucked up the contents of its crop and so I frantically attempted to remove it with tweezers. I couldn't get it all but it was much less disgusting than mammal spew.

So what's the currawong's breakfast? Whole pearl barley kernels, starting to swell with moisture, and sweet smelling necary fragments of a red flower, bottlebrush?I should have left it at that but mixed the last yiny bit of the 2 part resin up that I had, but buggered up the ratio, and and I'm not sure it will set completely

Fluoro tabletop.

Below is exactly the same shot (which I used to set focus, as the AF struggles in the dark), except with a glary LED floodlight doing the illuminating

Ick, I've discovered a little patch of unhardened epoxy that I somehow created as I was learning about this stuff. I'll have to (properly) mix a bit more and see if I can successfully harden and cover it. Luckily its a small area where the resin is quite thin.

Ideally I'd like to pour a layer of uncoloured resin over the whole surface to create a limpid pool, but I don't have much left at the moment. And the kitchen is crying out for its new bench and then a makeover, but this stuff takes 3 days to touch dry, and longer to harden and cure. So its a bit frustrating to have to prop and level it - its now sitting on a slope, mix and apply epoxy and then have to wait another week

Another view of the fluoro top

Here are the finished (as I thought) top and frame while I wait for the last varnish retouches/pick-ups to dry )on the underside of the top and on the frame). The top is balanced on the frame back to front and skewed, to make the brushwork a bit easier

Top filled and glowing under the ultraviolet lamp. I've got a stopframe movie of part of the filling process which I'll link to here once I've uploaded it to my youtube channel

and daylight

Rustic! the table assembled. A shelf will be going on top of the lower horizontal struts between the legs. The top and frame are separate to make it a bit easier to move around. The top weighs a ton, slabs of Australian hardwoods. and with the base attached it would be really awkward to move

Three great slabs of hardwood for the top. The cntre piece is a stringer(?) from a staircase. I've got a heap of clear moulding epoxy so I'll pour it over the surface to make it flat, with a little bit of stuff suspended for effet, a bit of silver and aluminium leaf, maybe some pigment here or there