![Finished Decorative Wood Piece](https://img.mikelduke.com/images/wood-slices/20171114_135100-sm.jpg)
Finished Decorative Wood Piece
For this project, I had some tree cookies from what might have been a Mesquite tree. I wanted to smooth them over and use one for a cake stand and maybe make a clock from another. I had 5 pieces originally in case some didn’t turn out, and one was used just for testing a tung oil finish.
![Unfinished Wood Cookies](https://img.mikelduke.com/images/wood-slices/IMG_20171004_220348_567-sm.jpg)
Unfinished Wood Cookies
The tree slices or cookies, were pretty rough to start with. They were covered in chainsaw marks and uneven. I tried sanding them smooth using a handheld random orbit sander and a belt sander with no luck. There was too much material to take off, and they were too big for the planer or any saw. I finally had good luck using an angle grinder with a 36grit sandflap attachment to take the chainsaw marks off.
![Epoxy Drying](https://img.mikelduke.com/images/wood-slices/20171111_142216-sm.jpg)
Epoxy Drying
After smoothing out the cookies, I wanted to use epoxy to the fill the cracks in. A couple of the pieces had holes that went all the way through and could look pretty neat after being filled. On two of the pieces, I just used plain clear epoxy and the other two I mixed in some gold colored powder hoping to add a neat effect. The plain epoxy never ended up curing correctly, but the gold was fine, though the bigger piece with gold didn’t look very good afterwards.
![Gold Filler](https://img.mikelduke.com/images/wood-slices/20171111_152052-sm.jpg)
Gold Filler
The tung oil finish looked pretty splotchy on the outter parts of the wood, so on the one I really liked, I just cut off the edges to leave a funky decorative piece instead.
![](https://img.mikelduke.com/images/wood-slices/20171111_142224.jpg)
![Unpolished](https://img.mikelduke.com/images/wood-slices/20171113_141119.jpg)
![Unpolished](https://img.mikelduke.com/images/wood-slices/20171114_115938.jpg)