We recently found this piece of live edge cherry that looks like it needs to be used in a project right away. We don’t have a whole lot of ideas for what it will become just yet (waiting on some inspiration). Sometimes, when you see a piece of wood sitting in the shop, you just know you have to build something with it immediately. So what might we do here?

The piece is almost 8 feet long and has a split on both ends. My initial thoughts were to make some live edge serving trays with epoxy pours to fill the cracks. I could probably get four nicely sized trays built from the amount of wood in this one piece of cherry. Or…we could make one really long shelf? Or…maybe some sort of miniature bar top is in order. For a woodworker, this is like giving a young child a blank sheet of construction paper and telling them to do whatever their imagination comes up with. The possibilities are endless. Scroll down to see a video of the full piece of cherry. 

Our shop reno is coming along nicely and we’ve been sprinkling in projects for customers along the way just to help keep our sanity. We have a small amount of electrical work to do yet and then we’ll be working on building more ductwork for the dust collection system. What’s left on the list after that? Build the mobile sanding table, setup the Grizzly 17″ sander, pipe in the secondary dust collection, build the new router table, update the grounding system, coat the new workbench in poly, upgrade the lighting to LED, install drawers and shelving, update the lighting in the darkroom (yes we have a darkroom), build the downdraft sanding station, etc. So, just a small list haha.

Just for fun, I’m including some pics of random epoxy related work we have going on in the last two weeks or so. I feel like regardless of what we do with this cherry it’s going to end up with some epoxy in the cracks so my brain is walking down that road no matter what.