Ive built a few pieces of furniture at various times, mostly of moderate quality but getting better each time I do it :)
Years ago, before I went off riding my motorbike, I came across a really nice big slab of exotic lumber at a wood retail store near wher I lived in Vancouver. It was a really really nice piece of "figured" Bubinga (I dont know, its exotic hardwood!)... It was about four meters long by one meter wide and 5cm thick... and it "weighed a ton"... Like I said, it was really nice and just perfect for a "feature" table top (though the dimensions were a bit hard to work with in order to keep it as a single piece) and in fact I didnt even own a house to put it in at that stage, let alone any woodworking tools... Anyway , it had a price tag of some $4000 which was a lot more than Id ever considered spending on a chunk of wood before!
... So, I didnt buy it but I looked at it each time I went to the wood shop to get some other item and I thought about it every time... Id love to work on a table project like that.
Many months passed... actually I think it was a year or two!, and then one day when I went in, it was gone!... I asked at the counter as to who had bought it and they told me that it was a group of local artists... sculptors, and apparently it was destined to be cut up into small pieces and carved into sculptures...
Now it was clearly going to make the sculptors happy, and no doubt they made some beatiful pieces with it, but to me, it was a bit of a tragedy!... A single piece of wood of that size and with that "figuring" is just begging to be made into a table... To me it seems like the size of the piece is half of the beauty and it seems like a waste to cut it up into smaller pieces...
But it was gone, and I hope it made the buyers happy.
However, it was only after hearing about what was to become of it that I felt regret ... Regret for not having pursued a dream even though it was only a small one... And ever since then, whenever Ive gone into that shop or whenever I see a nice "feature" table made from a slab of beatiful wood, I feel regret...
And again, years passed!
And then, a few months ago, after I got back from my "long ride", when I went in to the wood shop to get some mahogany veneer for my model boat,... And there it was again... the same slab of wood!
Well, actually it turns out that its not the exact same slab of wood but in fact another slab of wood from the same tree... Its pretty much the same dimensions as the original one, but this one is not as good as the first one because it is a slice more from the side of the tree trunk than from the center...But the price is somewhat lower too..
Hmmm
...But I have no place to work on a piece of wood that size!... I cant even move the thing without three other very strong people to help me!... I dont have any tools to be able to machine a pice of wood this big!... I have no clue about how I would work on it!... I dont even have my house back from the tenant yet!... And it still costs a rediculous amount of money!...
So I walked away again... but the urge was still there and is still strong...
But I was left feeling that same "regret" again...
Another couple of months pass and I go and have another couple of looks at the "lump of wood"... and my little "engineers mind" (emphasis on the little! :) ) is occasionally tinkering away with ideas of how I would go about solving the problems of working the wood.... you know, just in case... :)
And another couple of months pass and now its Christmas and the wood shop has things on sale ... And the lump of wood is a few hundred dollars cheaper... so I go have a chat with the staff about it...but Im still not making any commitments.
Its just a chat, but it keeps me thinking about it...
More time passes... and my thinking on the subject continues in its sporadic fashion...
But after a while I come to a a kind of closure on my thinking...
And know what? In the ballance of my emotions, it goes like this...
Yes, its a stupid thing to spend money on... Money that I dont really have and cant really afford.
Its just a lump of wood, that doesnt really matter or make a difefrence to anyone.
Sure its a project that I dont have the space, skills, or equipent to execute well.
And it'll just be a table that will likely only ever be seen or enjoyed by a handfull of people on a handfull of occasions.
Its just another project in a long line of projects that are really all just ways of me spending my time while I wonder what I should really be doing with my life...
But theres a bunch of little "sayings" that come into my head:
"Life is what happens while you are making other plans"
"We are not put into this world just to work... We are put into this world to live our dreams..."
"If you dont go when you want to go then by the time you do go you may find you've gone!"
" Id rather regret the things I have done than the things I havnt done"
... and in the end, I kinda feel that Im "done with" regretting that prior decission! Ive got another chance this time and Ive decided Im going to act on it... Damn the torepedoes!!as they say...
So, I may yet regret doing it, but I will no longer regret not doing it!
... and with that, I went down to that shop and paid them a very large sum of money for a very large chunk of wood ! :)))
Now for some more details about the "block of wood"
Well, like I said its about four meters long, one meter wide and 5cm thick... Its really dense wood and Im pretty sure it would sink (or barely float) in water so based on that, Id say it weighs about 200Kg!
Its from a Bubinga tree (also called African Rosewood) which I looked up on the internet, and they come from "Tropical West Africa". The "figure" I refered to is a carpentry term and does not refer to the shape of the block of wood, but rather the patterns and striations in the grain of the wood... I took a picture of it but the lighting was very bad and the picture is very washed out... The board is coverd with swirling grain patterns that look really nice, and should look amazing once it is planed and finished. The wood colour will be a rich orange brown once sealed :)
And Ive been thinking about what sort of table to make from it too... Ive done a few sketches and it at this stage there are two options.
The first is to cut the slab into a 2/3 and 1/3 length sections and then slice the 1/3 section longitudinaly. The two small pieces then get glued along the sides of the big piece so that an eliptical table top of about 1.2m x 2m size can be cut... but this wastes a fair bit of the wood.
The second option is to leave it much more "as it is" and make a long thin rectangular "banquet style" table... say 3m x 0.8m. Its a bit unusual as a dining table but it can work :)
The elipse seats six and the thin rectangle seats eight.... not that I have that many friends... or even really know how to cook for that matter, but there is always hope that I may eventually find someone else to share my life with who has some other friends and knows how to cook too! ;)
Anyway, at this stage Im leaning toward the "banquet table"... maybe just because I like the emotional and mental immagery evoked by the word banquet :)))
Ive also done some sketches and I think I like the simple "trestle" type legs I could make for the rectangular table... just a few curves in the profile of the legs to "spice it up" a little :)
... But, I wont know what Im really going to do with it till Ive got the wood home and had a good long look and measure of it all... You see, the slab of wood has a significant challenge ... other than its sheer size... Its got quite a bit of "crowning" at the narrow end of the slab. That means that the plank is "bowed" and the mid-line of the plank is higher than the edges (as if the edges have "sagged" down).
This "crowning" is too pronounced to simply machine off because at the worst point (at the narrow end) it looks like its about half the thicknes of the slab!
... Hence the idea for the eliptical table of cutting off the narrow end third and using it as sides... that way I cut it in half and the crowning effect is reduced by half...
... But perhaps a bit of an explanation of why its "crowned" wouldnt hurt...
The best wood for furniture making is taken from right across the centre line of the tree log. Its called "quarter cut" and it means that the grain of the wood is "ballanced" and runs through the wood at right angles to the width of the slab. Slabs cut from any other place in the tree trunk are inherently "unballanced" and you can see it if you look at the end section of the slab... you will see the curve of the tree rings in the wood grain.
And this "unballanced" issue is not at all just an asthetic issue, it is a very important quality that is critical for making furniture... You see, wood is not an inert stable material. It is pourous and organic and it responds to its environment and changes continually. What this means is that it is always expanding and contracting slightly as temperature and humidity change around it. Now these dimensional changes are usually very small and unnoticable. And solid wood furniture is usually constructed in a way that these changes do not effect things much... This is done by using smaller pieces of wood in combinations that counteract the dimension changes... A good example is ply wood which is a sandwich of several layers of wood with the grain running in different directions... Plywood stays pretty much flat and square regardless of its environment because the different pieces of wood all want to warp and streach and twist in different directions and it all kind of ballances out as internal stresses in teh pannel...
But, when you want to use a single very large piece of solid wood, its gonna warp and twist and stretch and bow and split as the season change... and this is a problem...
Everyone hates a table that wobbles because floor is uneaven, but a table that wobbles even though the floor is dead flat, just because its that time of the year is a real pain.
Back to this particular slab of wood...
Its VERY big which means the dimensional and allignment changes will be quite large. It also means that it will be impossible to physically stop the warping with other elements of the table design (since this piece is so large it will simply over-power any smaller braces etc).
And becase its not "quarter cut", it will develop a bow... and in fact it already has (it is after all, quite a few years old) and it has a substantial "crowning" at one end .
The good news however is that while its not "quarter cut", it is the full width of the log and the bowing is reasonably symetrical from one side to the other. But its significantly more pronounced at the narrow end than at the broad end (because the narrow end was less central in the tree trunk).
...work in progress...
