I Turned My Old Coffee Table In A Glow-In-The-Dark Epoxy Map Of The World

I had an old table that was donated to me.

It was a bit beat up and not really my style so I decided to give it a bit of a facelift.

More info: Instagram

First, here is a completed table

I started by grabbing a simple world map from Google and printing it off on A3 paper

Glueing it in place. Doesn’t matter that it ruins the surface of the wood as that’ll be going anyway

Outline is completed. I apologise if I ruined your country. I have a feeling I ruined a lot of countries

Using a sander I was able to remove more material much faster, but I couldn’t reach corners or coastlines so still needed the router for that

This is time consuming

Really time consuming…

Screw you Australasia with your multitude of beautiful islands

I built a simple jig to get straight(ish) lines around the sides

All routed out

Not a massive fan of the legs so replaced them with something a bit more modern

Another angle of that

I bought this glow in the dark powder from Amazon. Really wasn’t sure what to expect, to be honest

I painted a blue basecoat in the sea to give the clear epoxy resin some colour. The difference in shades is just the paint drying

I mixed the glow in the dark powder with the epoxy resin and poured it into the table

At this point I kind of panicked… All the imperfections of the table were immediately visible and I was really unhappy with how it looked. I thought I had just wasted time and money so I did what any reasonable man would; I chucked in all the blue food colouring I could find and tried my best to mix it in. I’m not sure why I did that.

This is it dry. It went cloudy in places and the blue food colouring showed up in other areas. I was pleasantly surprised

After the first pass of sanding I realised I might have something quite nice

Here is a close up after that first sand

All sanded down. I still didn’t know if the glow in the dark powder had worked

But it did!

Frame put back together

Time to varnish, and varnish. 5 coats, I think

So to attach the top of the table to the frame I built these little mechanisms

The mechanisms allow the table to be brought up and forward so that it sits over the knees (for laptops and such)

Attaching them to the top

Completed

Here it is folded out

And normal

I think this light level is the best. Dark enough for the glow to show but light enough for more details to be made out

Here’s a darker photo. It was impossible to get a photo in pitch black on my phone but it looks pretty good

And that’s it!

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