I’m in the Pacific Northwest building a table for my aunt and uncle and mom and dad. It will have a top made of twin slabs of western big leaf maple with lots of curl and a live edge. I’ll post photographs of the build in progress sometime soon.
When I’m making a piece of furniture I give my whole self to it. I can see it finished before I start. It’s like the answer is there before the question is asked.
In this case I knew the space the table would occupy. I’ve been to their house many times and sat at their current table for many good meals. The big posts and beams and the copper/green/grey/umber feel of the place informed.
From Kansas City I telephoned suppliers in Bellingham, looking for slabs big enough. I was thinking four feet by nine feet by three inches thick. The second guy I talked to had a pair of slabs he’d been sitting on for a good long time, waiting for the right job. My aunt and mom went down the next day and bought them.
I flew out a week later and the next morning took a saw to them, ripping away a big twisty split and trimming them to 105 inches. It took two passes with a skilsaw and one with a handsaw to get through it. The twisty split kerwanged when I was half way through, rending itself three feet at a jump. Happily, it rended away from the blade and not into it. That stress in the slab had to go–it would have continued its potato-chipping for years to come.
Next I flattened one side of each of the slabs. They had wind of about a half inch over the nine feet, which meant a quarter inch would have to be removed from each catercorner. With slabs up to a foot wide I would have built a sled and sent them through the thickness planer. You can also solve this problem by building a flat frame around the slab and riding a router on a board over that frame until the slab is flat. It probably would have been worth the time to do that. In an antidiluvian mood, I went about it with the jointer plane I’d packed in my luggage. That would be a vittle-powered jointer plane.
An hour in, with blisters and a darkened mien appearing on the horizon, my thought was, “Electricity is your friend.”
I don’t own an electric hand plane, but Home Depot will sell you one, and my other Bellingham uncle had one to lend, even better.
Safety glasses…check. Earplugs…check. New disdain for style points…yup. Let the chips fly.
I still needed the quiet plane for smoothing over the indignities done by the WMD. With a couple of winding sticks and a very long scrap of left over formica countertop, I got the first slab flat (within a sixteenth) in seven hours.
It was 4 PM. By 5:30 I had the second one done. I was warming up to my new tailed friend, the Tasmanian devil.
The next day I talked to a shop in Bellingham with an abrasive thickness planer that could handle up to 36″ in width. Yes, they would be pleased to make the second side of each slab parallel to the first. But not until after the weekend…approximately.
I trucked the planks over, admired the shop space–light from the clerestories filtering through sawdust floating etc–considered asking for a job, went over the two slabs in anthropological detail with the foreman, and was on my way. Now what? Well, we’re going to need some wood for the base. Bellingham didn’t have any. South to my oldest and best friend in lumberyards, Crosscut Hardwoods, Seattle, by the train tracks.
I plan on three hours for any visit to Crosscut. I’d crawl there, pausing for prayer, if necessary.
On this visit, there was no 12/4 cherry in the rack marked “12/4 cherry FAS full rough.” “12/4” is the number of quarter inches the board is thick off the sawblade–twelve quarters is three. “Cherry” is American black cherry. “FAS” is “firsts and seconds” in a lumber grading system that goes FAS, #1 common, #2 common, #3A common, #3B common. “Full rough” is no thickness planing, you have to do that yourself.
“No 12/4 cherry” is no cherry at all.
That design that sprang fully realized into my head before I got on the airplane? Subject to alteration. What happens is that the answer is there before the question is asked, but once the question is asked, a different answer presents. Leading to the next question. And the next different answer. It’s completely delightful. It’s why I draw the first design on whatever card falls out of the magazine I’m reading. And do the next design while looking at the planks themselves.
What to do with no 12/4 planks to look at? Well, 12/4 is a luxury, and one I didn’t expect to have. You can make 12/4 by face gluing 8/4 and 4/4. But that seam will always be there. You can switch species to whatever there is 12/4 of. You can redesign down to 8/4. Or you can go looking for the missing 12/4. There is that sign right there that says “12/4 cherry.” What could it mean?
Guys who work at Crosscut are comically helpful, having been freed from their high-paying jobs as engineers at Boeing to stop and smell the rosewood. The guy I got was an exception. He looked for 12/4 cherry by peering into a computer screen. “Yes, we have lots of it,” he said. “By lots…?” I said. “140 board feet,” he said, “did you look where we keep it?” “Yes, that was my first stop,” I said. “Then maybe we have it but it’s just not here,” he said. I was thinking PhD Philosophy. I wanted to ask where the furloughed Boeing engineers were this morning. He arose from his screen. We were going to go look at the empty bin together. My theory was that was the only place we didn’t need to look, but Crosscut is a magical place.
The “12/4 cherry” bin remained devoid of any material substance whatever, when we looked upon it, the space-time continuum still being what it is. However, we would walk together toward the cherry…any direction from none being necessarily toward more.
rpdpod 