The Timber
Some timber arrives with a story. This one arrived with a ridiculous amount of time inside it.
The Kauri slab at the centre of this table was recovered from a Northland swamp, where it had been buried for approximately 50,000 years. Ancient Kauri is one of the rarest timbers on earth. Carbon dating puts these logs in the range of 30,000 to 50,000 years old, predating the last Ice Age.
You feel that when you work with it. Honestly, you have to. A slab like this does not give you many chances. Every cut, every pour, every sanding pass needs to be thought through before the tool touches the timber.
Preparing the Slab
The raw slab came in with all the things that make ancient Kauri worth stopping for: deep fissures, open voids, dramatic figure and that old golden tone you simply do not get from ordinary modern timber.
Before any epoxy work could begin, the slab needed months of quiet preparation. No rushing. With ancient Kauri, forcing the process is how you invite cracks, splitting and mistakes you cannot undo.
We dried and acclimatised the timber slowly in the workshop. The natural voids and live edges were cleaned and stabilised, but not erased. That part matters. The point was not to make the slab look new or perfect. It was to keep its story visible and make it strong enough to become a table.
The Epoxy Pour
The resin work on a piece this size happens slowly. Each pour needs to cure properly before the next layer goes in, and the room conditions need to stay steady while that happens.
For this table, we used a deep-black tinted epoxy to fill the natural voids and fissures. The contrast does a lot of the visual work: dark resin sitting against warm golden Kauri, with the timber grain pulling the eye back across the surface.
Look at it from one angle and the resin catches the light. Move a step and the timber seems to absorb it. That push and pull is what gives the finished table its depth.
Surfacing and Finishing
Once the epoxy had cured, the precise work began. The table was surfaced on the CNC router to create a dead-flat plane across the full 1,500mm diameter. Any wobble or unevenness would have shown up immediately under the final clear coat.
Then came the hand work. Sanding, checking, sanding again. The surface moved through multiple grits until the timber and epoxy sat together cleanly, with no harsh step between the two materials. This stage alone took the better part of a week.
The Finished Piece
Finished, the table has the kind of presence that makes people slow down. The 50,000-year-old Kauri grain is right there on show: golden, warm, full of movement. The dark epoxy fills sit like still pools in the timber, adding depth without trying to steal the whole scene.
Under the final high-gloss clear coat, the surface has a depth that is hard to photograph properly. It is glass-smooth to the touch, but the grain still feels alive underneath it, almost floating below the finish.
Specifications
| Detail | Specification |
|---|---|
| Shape | Round |
| Diameter | ~1,500mm |
| Timber | Ancient Kauri (swamp-recovered, ~50,000 years old) |
| Resin | Deep-black tinted epoxy with high-gloss clear coat |
| Thickness | 55mm |
| Finish | Multi-layer epoxy clear coat, hand-polished |
| Build Time | ~6 months (including timber preparation) |
Commission a Piece
Ancient Kauri is becoming increasingly scarce, and every recovered slab is different. We hold a limited stock of pieces suitable for feature tables, so the process starts with the timber itself: what shape it has, what voids it carries, and what kind of table it wants to become.
If you are interested in commissioning a piece from this extraordinary timber, get in touch and we will show you what we have available.