Resin inlaid chestnut shelves

Big old cracked, knotholed, spalted piece of chestnut we got cheap from the timber yard. Time to tidy it up and make it good to go on the wall.

Sealing the holes with aluminium tape.

Set it somewhere good and level otherwise the resin will be a mess.

Ready to mix

Bag of pigment. Traditionally resin inlay is colour-matched to the wood, but I'm going down a different path.

Resin mixed up and standing a little to let the bubbles bubble out. Told you this wasn't a traditional inlay.

Poured into the big crack.

Doing a bit of a Clever with this edge. It's going to take a while to set, I think I left it nearly a week in the end.

Awwww yeah. This is going to look amazing. Now only the long, long job of planing, carding and sanding this lot flat.

Getting there.

My favourite part, the first coat of oil. I love that moment where you wipe the oil over and the grain just leaps out at you. They got about eight thin coats of boiled linseed oil.

Chopped up and ready for the wall.

Brackets installed. The wall they're on is going to be painted that grey later on, so I pre-painted the brackets (they looked terrible in the gloss white they came from the shop in)

Some spare bits of walnut for the other brackets.

And here they are. In daylight.

Later in the day, as it's getting darker, the glow resin really starts to come into its own.

I think this is my favourite one. It's on the bottom of the top shelf, so it's visible in normal use.

Wall robot approves.

Another angle. Now we just need some jars of pickles and stuff to fill these up with.