College of The Redwoods Fine Furniture: Week 7

I'm back to my bench first thing Monday morning.  More and more people are cutting into the wood for their projects. Some four-letter words have been bouncing around in the machine room after one cut or another.  After looking at several boards of walnut and wearing my shoulder sore planing on them to see what was hidden beneath all the oxidization I’ve finally decided on a board. Behind all the other boards of walnut in the back corner of the wood room, there is one board that I’d overlooked, one mammoth piece of walnut, 3 inches thick and 7 feet tall. I could get my box, my bench top, and maybe my legs out of this one piece. I get David Welters blessing and am cutting it down with a bow saw minutes later. My next four months will be committed this piece of wood. Heck, that’s longer than most of my romances.

My Piece of Walnut.

After cutting it into a more manageable size.

Now that I’m committed to a piece of wood it’s time to really cut into it. After cutting it down with the bow saw it’s time to resaw it and see what the grain is doing in there. I’m going to cut the wood along its length horizontally and split the section of wood for my bench top from the section used for the box. I wonder what the wood is doing there, inches under its surface. What does it look like? There is neither a bandsaw nor a jointer in the shop big enough for my board at 16 inches wide. So it’s off to Brian Newells shop with Laura to use his massive 24-inch jointer and his 36-inch Oliver bandsaw. It takes an eternal 15 minutes to ever so slowly resaw it on the bandsaw. And then it’s there, the colors and grain that will make up my bench. It’s a different board than I thought. And it is beautiful too.

Wednesday. I woke up at 2 am thinking about the grain graphics of my wood. I have a feeling that this kind of thing is going to happen more and more. My board sits on my bench, split into 4 pieces. A bench top, box carcass, and legs. I don’t know what to do with it now. I do know, I just don’t know that I’m ready to start running it through all the blades. There’s no going back. I’m living in apprehension of my next cut.

There may be some legs in there somewhere...

Thursday and Welter stops by for some honey roasted peanuts at my bench. It’s my secret strategy to keep snacks out. I get more bench visits. While pouring out some peanuts Welter asks me how I think through tenons will work with my piece. Damn. I was pretty set on them, but I’ll think hard about them now. I cut a leg out too. Not going to work. Back to the wood room to get another board that's more riff sawn and straight grained.

Darrick looking into some wood.

Friday and I’m getting Welter’s blessing on another board and then into the machine room to cut it up with the jigsaw. My bench is looking a bit overwhelmed with all this walnut. And I’m doing loose tenons. Welter was right (no surprise there), the through tenons don’t seem like they work with my piece. And when it came down to it I wanted to do them for the sake of them, not for what they would add to my bench.

Hank getting a bath with V8 after meeting a skunk.

 The rest of the afternoon and Saturday I’m working up jigs for the mortises on my legs and bench. The overall concepts and purposes of joinery stay the same, but how it’s achieved is different for every piece. I’m going from moments of “oh shit” to “ah ha!” and “oh…okay.”