Wood. I really like wood. Even more, I like working with
wood.
Touching it, following its grain, and contemplating that it was
made mostly from thin air and water.
Normally, I just turn trees into handy pieces of firewood. While
that's already deeply satisfying in the sense that you actually get
to
see what you worked for, it's a mostly destructive
task. You kill a tree, you chop it up, only to turn it back into
(mostly) thin air.
As chance would have it, I needed a new table. After dragging
myself through way too many furniture stores, I realized that I
wouldn't be happy with what's on offer. So I struck a deal with a
local carpenter: I would buy from them, but only if I could help
building my own table; I would finally create something larger than
a carving from wood.
After some scouting, the carpenter found five planks of oak
which were 4+ meter long, about 40-60 cm wide, and 8+ cm thick:
If you think this wood looks old, worn, and broken: You should
have seen it up close; it was worse than on the potato-cam picture
;) But that's another great thing about working with wood: by
taking off a laughably thin layer of surface material, you can
renew the whole thing.
We cut off 10 cm from each side as that's what tends to split
and tossed that away. Afterwards, we cut off 80 cm from the wider
side for the legs. Again, the base tends to have more imperfections
and as you don't need to cut long pieces, you have more freedom in
deciding how to cut.
Cutting is an art in itself; tiny imperfections in the wood's
surface can hint at large fissures underneath. The fact that the
wood looks worn and spotty does not help in figuring this out.
After cutting to minimize waste, you end up with a pile like
this:
And a surprising amount of waste, i.e. firewood:
After a lot of planing, the wood becomes cleaner and
smoother:
Then, everything's fitted so that neighbouring planks have their
heartwood running into different directions, and so that the upper
surface gets (most of) the interesting features. This is another
surprisingly involved process and took about two hours.
And no, the potato-cam does not manage to capture the wood's
beauty.
After sanding the sides down to perfection to ensure the glue
can bond really tightly, the table feet are glued and put into a
hydraulic press:
while the tabletop itself shines in all its 287 cm x 107 cm x
6.3 cm glory:
Tomorrow, we will sand down the top and bottom of the tabletop
and prepare the feet. Grooves will be milled into the wood to glue
steel bars into it, as well as another plank that will be glued to
the bottom of the tabletop, running along the middle. Along with
the alternating heartwood, this helps ensure that this beast of a
table will not fold in on itself or otherwise succumb to internal
torsion or gravity.
The final steps will be to fit the feet, sand down the surface
again and then apply two layers of oil.
And while most people may not fancy taking a week off just to
rise
way too early and then do unpaid work, I love it.
As I said: I like wood.
