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
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
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
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.
