Woodturning – Coffee Beans Into A Tumbler With Lid

Beans
I’ll tell you, no project has ever smelled so good.

When I started woodturning the coffee bag full of beans and epoxy I had no idea what to expect. Would it even hold together? Would I find air pockets all over given all the small cracks and crevices between and inside the coffee beans? Which would make the piece too weak to cut into anything of use. This was more of a long shot experiment than a potentially successful project. I did not have high hopes for this to turn out well.

For starters I ran my PSI up to 80 instead of the usual 60 PSI in the pressure chamber given the circumstances. I have a strong feeling this helped because in certain spots the walls of tumbler were sanded down thinner than the width of a coffee bean. Impossible to do without the cup collapsing in on itself! So I thought.

Another thing you may notice is after doing the initial shaping and drilling on the mug, not a single blade touched the coffee bean/epoxy mixture for the rest of the project- only on the spalted oak base and lid were metal tools used again. All of the shaping was done with heavy grit sandpaper because it’s a lot less aggressive on the already thin cup. That’s how careful I wanted to be with the pice after an unexpectedly successful (but very slow) drilling process.

Enjoy!

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