As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've been working with urban sourced wood. Specifically: wood that's come from individual lots and properties, and the owners want the wood turned back as useful finished goods.
Now that's an interesting proposition. The reason is because (by its very definition...) the wood is not graded. What is there is what is there. There is no going back for another board, there is no selection process to pick out the best, straightest and clearest boards. This is the client's own tree and what's there is there.
My current project is to transform a combination of silver maple and cherry into a clock. Per the client's spec's, I'm actually following a set of plans from Klockit.
Here is what the wood generally looked like:
Lots of bark, isn't there!
The sort of tall/square piece that you see standing upright on the left side of the bench was taken from the far left end of the barkey/waney board that's laying down at the front. I still have yet to clean up one face of that chunk prior to planing it to final thickness.
The boards are about... 5/4 in thickness. I only need to yield 3/4" finished thickness. I think what I'm going to do is to resaw most of the waste away in order to preserve it. No sense in making all the wood go up the DC hose from the thickness planer, now is there? I really like to conserve as much wood as possible, and it often becomes useful for something either in the same project or for future projects later.
This wood has checks, knots, it dried with curves and waves in it... in short, it can be pretty gnarly.
But this is the thing about urban wood. It's honest. It's not fancy. And it's kind of like Gump's box of chocolates: you really don't ever know what you're going to get.
Case in point, the two slabs that were flitch matches to this board that's standing up here to the right.
I selected three consecutive slices from the tree and then navigated around the checks, knots and bark in order to yield something useful. This third board has yet to be cut into.
I rough cut the pieces to a little under six inches wide and twenty eight inches long. Then I jointed one face. Lo and behold, there's some amazing figure down in there!
What I'm doing now is simply harvesting rough and oversized boards for all the component parts for the clock. I had to go through the bill of materials on the Klockit plans and then work out what the unit count and descriptions were so that I could harvest the right sizes, shapes and grain directions for all of the pieces.
This is very different work than standing in the lumber aisle and selecting either S2S or S4S wood. Here I am in complete control of how I take the boards from the flitches. I can make the call of how to follow the grain to yield harmonious patterns in the wood.
But the downside is that it's a precious resource. I can't just go back to the store to buy more wood. I have to preserve and conserve the wood the best I can.
In all I've got a solid day's worth of work left to harvest the appropriate pieces from this lumber and to get a flat face on the boards. There will be a few glueups, as the molding details on this particular clock will need to be quite thick. And the cherry will be milled, jointed and then face glued in order to yield turning blanks for decorative elements on the face of the clock.
It's challenging work. But it's just too cool to work with lumber like this, which has a story because it came from the client's own property. He grew up with these trees. He saw them every day of his young life. And now that they've come down they'll be transformed into items for his interior spaces.
