Table Update

Stunning progress to report on the oak slab table. It looks like it will possibly be finished in the next few days! It has been quite a while since I actually finished a project, so I am quite looking forward to it!

I completed the mortise and tenon joinery fairly quickly, the fit came together surprisingly well. The error I made in cutting the mortises a bit too long turned out to not be a big deal, a 1/4" dowel will fill the extra space without showing.

First photo shows the table test assembled, no glue, no finish, and the legs have not been relieved yet. Could not resist throwing it together to see how it looked and fitted!

Detail of one corner. A very acceptable fit. The slightly brown tone of the skirt clashes with the slightly red tone of the leg, but the difference is barely noticeable later on with the finish applied.

Four coats of the Enduro Var urthane finish applied. I was more diligent about sanding between coats and that really helped with the smoothness of the finish. 

There is a slight taper applied to the inside faces of the legs, it's not so obvious in the photo above but it does help to lighten the underside of the table up a bit. The slab is not very thick, just over one inch, so it is better that the legs and skirt be a bit lighter.

Benched!

Finally getting back to some work in the shop, although I have also been spending some time in the wood vault cleaning up some of my slabs and cutting the crappy sections out of others in an effort to free up storage space. Storage space for more slabs of course!

I have decided to focus on finishing up a bench made of oak that I started ages ago. I have a couple other projects that are also partially done, but this is one that I think I can complete  relatively quickly (for me!). I intend to use it to replace my chair while I am sitting at my desk, I want to be able to kneel on it while I am typing/surfing/etc. I am hoping it will improve my flexibility and alleviate some related symptoms.

The top is a slab that I finished with several coats of Enduro Var water based finish months and months ago. It was pretty easy to apply and also not stinky at all. It darkened the wood a bit which was not too serious, but the foam brush which was the recommended application method left small ridges. They are quite small, probably not noticeable by anyone but me, but will  have to be resolved before I apply it to the legs and skirt.

I had also cut out the material for the legs and the skirts ages ago. I took care to cut out the legs such that I have all four sides with vertical rift sawn grain. I think they turned out quite well.

For the skirts I wanted to use some oak that had a bolder grain pattern. Unfortunately one of the longer pieces warped quite badly when I cut it out of a larger blank. I really liked the grain so I was loath to discard it.

I sat on that problem for months, and finally decided to resaw the piece into a couple of veneers and glue them to a nice straight piece of mahogany. That actually seemed to work pretty well, although my gluing and clamping techniques could stand a bit of improvement!

Here is a rough idea of what the table will look like upside down.

Side note -The oak for the skirts was from a tree a couple miles from my house. It was on a boulevard in front of a 1950s-ish 3 story walk up apartment building which were once common here in Vancouver. The tree had been blown over in a storm and the city crew had left a nice piece of the trunk there after cutting up the branches for firewood. It was one of the rare logs that I milled on the street rather than at the log dump our in the sticks somewhere. It took me several hours and as I was almost done a guy in a tatty white Jaguar who looked like a pimp with a very suspect looking woman in the passenger seat stopped and proceeded to harangue me for chainsawing in front of his suite for more or less the whole morning. Despite his scruffy demeanor, I felt he was probably correct so I have avoided milling in front of houses/apartments since that time. I did get some beautiful slabs from that log, but unfortunately they cracked terribly as they dried and I was left with just a few bolts of usable material. That is another reason I was so keen to save the little bit of the material I did have. It's nice to mill your own wood, you get lots of stories to go along with it!

Next I mortised the four legs freehand on my horizontal mortiser. I am starting to think that a nice X-Y table might be a good addition to the shop. I find freehand milling just a bit too grabby and hence stressful for my liking.

Next will be to finish the tenons and then I may do a bit of shaping on the legs just so the thing doesn't look so darn 'blocky'.

In the setback department, in addition to the warped piece mentioned above, I have discovered that I cut all the mortises a bit long. As I have already roughed out the tenons, I will not be able to compensate by lengthening them, so I have decided to plug the tenons at one end. Fortunately the amount is fairly small and 1/4" dowels look like they will do the trick. Just pure carelessness on my part, dropped my concentration for a moment and BOOM!

Copenhagen?

Found myself with a free day in Copenhagen earlier in the week, so it seemed like a good idea to go check out the Design Museum which holds a bunch of mid century modern Danish furniture.

As I approached the museum it looked promising, there were a number of furniture and art/antique shops.

As I arrived at the museum I discovered that, being Europe, it was not open until 11 AM. So I had to go hang out in a nearby coffee shop for a while, not a particularly tough task!

At 11 into the museum it was, after battling my way past a large gaggle of elderly Danish ladies at the entrance who all had to pay individually using small denomination coins fished from the very very bottom of their purses.

Some stuff to see, not as much as I had hoped, and it was a bit chair heavy for me.

I really liked the display cases they were using to showcase some of their ceramics collection!

Puttering

Well the much anticipated bonanza of logs resulting from the late summer storm described in my last post has failed to materialize. In fact there is nothing but crap at the log dump right now.

Meanwhile I have been keeping myself busy with odds and ends, including running a few cherry slabs through my 24" planer.

This one still needs a few more passes to finish it. You can see that it developed quite a twist as it dried. Luckily it is quite thick so I can afford to take more off the top. It is glued onto a torsion box to provide a flat surface to ride on the planer table. Once this side is done I'll pop it off the box and run the other side through like normal.

The amount of shavings that get generated is quite large. I have only a standard metal garbage can under my cyclone, it can get full on a single pass from a slab like this! Really crimps the productivity to have to stop and empty the shavings after each pass!

Contemplating the End of Summer and Elm

Late Summer Storm

Well summer went out with a bang. Two months of scorching heat and water shortage, followed by one of the biggest storms in recent history (maybe the 2006 flattening of Stanley Park was bigger) which resulted in power lost to 525,000 customers of BC Hydro. Since the population of Metro Vancouver is around 2.5 million, and the number of households and businesses (ie customers) is less than that, it seems that power was out to a substantial percentage of town!

From a tree perspective, near where I live there was a huge oak tree down completely blocking a four lane street.

My woodturning buddy scored a bunch of ash (one of the few common trees in Vancouver that I have never milled), plus there was a walnut tree down nearby as well. In the news there were trees down all over town.

We will see how much of this 'windfall' shows up at the log dump over the next while. It could be a good season for milling!

I plan to get back to the shop in the next few weeks, so this will likely be the last wood contemplation.

Elm

When I first started woodworking I never expected to be able to work with elm. Similar to chestnut, I figured it had gone the way of the dodo, in this case thanks to Dutch elm disease.

It turns out however that elm is a rather common street tree around town. There are American elms, along with other varieties such as Chinese, Dutch, Siberian, etc. Several get quite impressively large. It is the American elm that is vulnerable to Dutch elm disease, but the virus does not seem to exist out here, permitting elms to grow unabated here.

Unfortunately by the time an elm log shows up at the log dump, the leaves and branches are long gone and I have no way to identify which variety of elm it is. Some of them sure smell bad though!

I have two favourite stories of elm milling. The first is a large elm log with a crotch at one end that was down at the log dump several years ago. It was too big for my usual 36" bar so I had to use my 60" bar on it. A friend and I peeled a few slabs off of it, but it was a ton of work and the slabs were super heavy, so we left it half-milled. A few days later another friend called and asked if I could take off another slab for a friend of his to use in her garden as a bench. So I trundled down to the beach one chilly winter's day with a dusting of snow, by myself this time, with the 60" mill I can barely lift on my own, never mind push on my own. Milling one more thick slab off that log almost killed me, so I call the wood that came from it 'death elm'. I didn't even bother trying to move it, I just called my friend and told him to come get it!

Another funny elm slab story concerns a really nice slab I had drying in my wood pile some years ago. My wood pile which is frequently home to rats. Apparently one of the rat traps I set out in the woodpile caught a rat, and it sat there for a while before I discovered it. The rat had decomposed and left quite a stain on one of the nice slabs of elm. Eventually another friend took that slab and made it into a wedding gift table for his friends. Apparently the stain is on the underside of the table, and the groom was told the story of where it came from, but not the bride!

Some of the nicest, straight grained clear hardwood slabs I have ever milled were elm. This was a big one on private property that a friend and I milled some years ago. It was too wide for my 36" bar, we had to trim it down to fit it through the mill.

This slab may have come from the above log. 8 feet long, beautiful straight grain, probably 2 1/2" thick. A gorgeous piece.

Here are some shorter boards, but impressively wide. This particular one I had to flatten with a router jig as it was too wide for my 24" planer. Nice clear grain on it.

Elm can also be spalted, although that is rarer. It definitely seems to take a lot of the darker tones out.

Close up of some spalted elm. Very lovely.

This was a piece of an elm crotch that I flattened with a router jig. An interesting piece but I struggled to find something to use it in. Still awaiting the perfect use to come along for it!

A couple of good sized slabs, just home from being milled up.

Contemplating Cherry

Cherry logs have started turning up at the log dump in droves over the past few years. Some are diseased, but others are in beautiful condition.

A piece of local cherry was actually the first wood that I 'rescued', probably 15 years ago now. My dad had some cherry in his firewood pile, they had come from a street tree near where I had grown up. I grabbed a few of the best ones and cleaned them up. I still have some of it. Here it is on the back of a cabinet I made for my sister a couple years ago. If you look closely you can see that there are black streaks between some of the growth rings. This is not uncommon in the local cherry and is definitely a bit of a downside. I don't know what causes it, but luckily not all trees have it.

The cherry street trees in Vancouver are not the well-known black cherry of eastern Canada and the US, or commercial cherries grown for fruit. Rather they are are almost entirely cultivars of Prunus serrulata, Japanese flowering cherries, grown for their outstanding blossoms.

According to the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival website: "By the time the Park Board completed its first comprehensive street tree inventory in 1990, nearly 36 percent of the 89,000 trees on city streets were represented by trees of the Prunus genus—the flowering plum and cherry trees. Of the 479 different classifications of trees identified in the inventory, the most common species was Prunus serrulata ‘Kwanzan’, the Kwanzan flowering cherry. (12.6 percent)" 479 different types of cherry/plum trees growing in town? Wow!

Here is a photo of a Kwanzan tree in full bloom not far from my house. Beautiful!

Another interesting fact about the local cherry trees is that they are all grafted. The flowering named cultivar is grafted onto a trunk of a more robust cherry variety. I have been unable to identify the name of the variety commonly used for the trunk, although my dad, who grew up in Vancouver in the 30's, told me that there was a tree near Stanley Park from which the branches were taken to make the trunks. Don't know if that's true or not but there you have it!

I do know that the trunk wood is quite consistent across the many cherry logs I have milled, so I can believe that there was a common source for them. It has a milder look to it than black cherry, I have heard that it is more like European cherry wood.

So the graft union between the flowering branches and the trunk often creates some interesting patterns. Here is a photo of one with particularly strong contrast between the two woods. The flowering wood is on top and is much more colourful than the trunk wood below.

This was a complete small tree that my son and I rescued after a homeowner cut it down. We put it in our van just as another person pulled up who wanted it for firewood! He was not happy but we got some interesting slabs out of it. The graft line is visible, but the contrast between the two types of wood is not much.  You will note that the majority of the cherry I have is made up of the unknown trunk wood variety rather than the flowering branch wood.

Some of these local trees get quite large. This one is 3 feet across. They grow fast as they get plenty of water and they are spaced far enough apart that they do not have to compete for sunlight. The growth rings can be a bit coarse though.

Here's one that is a bit more gnarly.

And in contrast here are some nice thick clear slabs without any graft line. Sorry about the edge view!

My friend who is a woodturner often comes out and mills with me. He loves using these wide thick cherry slabs for large platters. He says they make his shop smell like cherry pie when he is turning them!

This is how these logs look before milling up. They are sometimes only three feet long, a six footer would be a long one.

Fresh off the saw they often display an orange tint.

Drying-wise I find cherry a bit fussy. I will leave it outside under cover to dry for two years (or at least two summers which is when most of the drying gets done in this part of the world), then put it in my dehumidifying kiln to squeeze out the last couple percent of moisture. My rule of thumb for cherry is that if it is milled too thin the slabs will warp like crazy, and if they are milled too thick they will crack! Slabs flat cut from the outside of the log will warp much more than slabs cut rift or quarter.

Some of the quartersawn grain can be stunning.

Contemplating Arbutus

Arbutus is not common in the city, in fact I know of only a few trees in town. And I have never found it in the log dump. But it is native to nearby undeveloped areas that are a touch warmer/drier, such as the cliffs above West Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast, the Gulf Islands, and Vancouver Island. I have seen it along the Skeena River in northern BC, and I believe it grows as far south as Mexico. In the US it is called Madrone.

I received a couple small firewood sized pieces from a friend several years ago, but the main part of my supply comes from two trips I made a couple years apart to the property of a family friend on one of the smaller Gulf Islands. They had several trees which had come down in the winter due to accumulations of heavy wet snow. Due to the two ferries required to get there, it was an overnight trip to get there, although I was able to get back at the end of the day of cutting.

I cut from this same log on both visits, which were a couple years apart. The other trees which had come down were both hung up in other trees so I did not go anywhere near them! The slabs were about 16" wide and I cut them at 8' so they would fit in the truck.

Four years later when I went back to cut some more, the wood had started to stain quite a bit.

I air dried the slabs for two years before running them through my dehumidifier kiln. My experience is that Arbutus is the most badly behaved and frustrating wood to try and dry! The amount of waste is incredibly dismaying. It cracks freely at any excuse and it also warps tremendously.

These slabs are from my first expedition. The cracking is evident.

Here is a close up, the grain is very lovely.

From my second expedition, the wood has a much darker tone to it due to the staining from sitting on the ground for an additional 4 years.

And the grain is still lovely despite the staining.