How fortunate could I be, I have been asked to make something, anything from this wood, I paid a visit to the owners house and I suggested I could do a dining table.I managed to get the wood into my man cave 4 days before the whole country shut down due to Covid19 and all our travel was restricted, Its a mammoth task working out how to rescue the good wood from the rot so I have a lot to do during our isolation.
I had made a sample leg, an idea that I thought was appealing and it was approved, at the time I had thought I would put a similar stripe down the center of the table but the owners asked that I keep the table top simple, I didn't know at the time what the top had install for me, I made up a former and pressed up 4 legs out of ply wood before the wood arrived.
The wood on the floor is 2 pieces of kauri that must have been in a bog for years it is all very stained from what was in the earth some of it is very green, its grain is very close some of it shows less than 1mm of growth a year so I am playing with very old wood.As can be seen it is a challenge to get enough wood for a top 1.6m X 1m, at one end there is some very circular grain that is good wood then with having to cut around the rot I decided there were to be more wavy joints than straight joints in keeping with the legs.
I had to get the wood flat to begin with, my buzzer is only 150mm
so too small for this my thicknesser is 330mm wide so I decided each board had to be no more than 330 wide then I had to attach skids to the underside in order to get a flat top when I put it through the machine, I made 2 pieces of old packing case straight and attached them using "builders bog" this dries fast and hard so by the time I have had a cup of tea I can carry on and feed it through the thicknesser, it was a slow process and the uncertainty of not knowing just how it would all go together or if I even had enough wood or if I would have to include some with defects.I am now into my second week, I think I now have a plan to put these planks together for a top of the right size but it will be the rest of the week before it comes together.
I discovered early on that the big thick piece on the saw stools is not kauri but macrocarpa so there is half a plan to make 2 benches to go with the table.
The other long piece of 140mm X 50mm is kauri and will form the boarder around the top of the table.
