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Revenge of the Kerfs

Sawblade marks unwittingly made these sacrificial pieces purty. Epoxy resin makes them functional tabletops

By Rain Noe - May 8, 2015

in Furniture Design | Salone Milan

When you're cutting all the way through a material, whether you're using a track saw, a radial arm saw or a CNC mill, you need something sacrificial beneath it. Over time, these spoilboards become so scarred with kerf marks or bit channels that you toss them (or resurface them in the case of the CNC mill). Thus most of you with shops are used to seeing stuff like this:

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So it goes at marble processing facilities, where a gargantuan version of a radial arm saw slices through sheets of marble and into the sacrificial boards below. These boards can't be resurfaced—if you sent them through a planer, the stone dust lining the kerf would make short work of the cutting heads—and even if they could, they'd be too thin to offer the necessary support. So as soon as they're more kerf than surface, the boards go into the scrap pile.

Andrea Forti and Eleonara Dal Farra spotted these wasteboards and figured out a better use for them. Forti and Dal Farra are the duo behind Italy's Alcarol studio, and they're driven by "an impetus to generate a real ennoblement of the object and the material through a courageous and unconventional creative process, resulting in items that are both functional and charming." Their Marble Ways Dining Table—which debuted at Spazio Rossana Orlandi during Milan Design Week last month—fits the mission and the material here perfectly.

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The kerf marks already provide an attractive pattern, being perfectly straight, yet randomly spaced; all that's needed is for the duo to level the tops with epoxy resin, providing a durable and see-through flat surface that maintains the visual effect beneath. As a bonus, the resin also traps the stone dust in the kerf marks, providing some subtle marble bling.

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Here's a video of the process:

Marble Ways from alcarol on Vimeo.

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Mark Thomas

9 years ago

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It's a vicious scam -- fake post-industrial, up-cycled chic!

No way that table top is actual discard from stone cutting. The table top is much too perfectly "random", too thick, too flat, too lacking in any real-world blemish, etc. to be a real discard -- just look at their own video (0:47) to see what the real discards look like.

The boards themselves are nonetheless nicely executed. However, I think a lot is lost by the entombment in resin. I think the boards would be nice left unfinished mounted on a wall.

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- Toby B
  
  Mark Thomas
  
  9 years ago
  
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  Agreed, it's more like they were inspired by the texture of the wasteboards, so they manufactured their own.
  
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