We were approached by some clients who wanted a keepsake to remember their time spent working/living in Kansas. After several discussions on what they were looking for, as well as the type of wood they wanted to use, we settled on a maple dining table.
This particular maple tree was taken down in 2018 as part of an effort to provide more clearance to a runway at Gardner Airport. There were several trees taken down during this time and two of the giant maples ended up in our possession versus being hauled away to a landfill.
We hauled these behemoths to our old friend, Tom the Sawyer, where he proceeded to laugh at me for bringing what I thought was a 23″ tree that ended up being more like 33″ (or more if you count the multiple large branches). A little chainsawing and we were able to finally muscle this thing onto the mill. Thanks to Tom for taking this picture of me fixing my over-size tree problem and then turning it into an even cooler picture
After several trimming passes on the mill we were able to get to something that could actually be cut to produce boards. We were pleasantly surprised at the figure in the wood that emerged as we began to pull each board off. We harvested these two book-matched pieces that will be used on this table from the center of the tree. Book matching is when you pull successive boards off the mill and flip one over like the page of a book producing a mirror image of the board below it.
Finally, the boards were stacked to dry at our friend Roger’s house who was kind enough to lend us his drying rack while we were constructing one of our own. Once the boards were dry, we began to lay out the shape of the table with the client and finalize our approach.
As an aside… Here’s a picture of the spider that almost ate me whole as I was moving the wood into the shop.
As wood dries it shrinks. As wood shrinks it can twist and crack. Part of the journey of taking a tree and turning it into a table is turning the various imperfections in the wood into things that accent the final piece and make it unique. In the picture below, you can see that several cracks had developed in the wood post-milling. We set out to fix this by applying duct tape to the opposite side of the board and filling it with an epoxy resin that had been tinted black.
NOTE: This is the time when our clients usually say… “what have you done to my beautiful boards” because things typically look worse before they look better.
It took several coats of epoxy (each requiring 24 hours to cure) to get both sides of the board filled and stabilized. We did a rough sand to make sure that the epoxy had set and the cracks had been filled. The rest of the epoxy will be removed as we flatten the boards and all that will remain is the slight accent of the filled cracks.
We also needed to remove the last remaining pieces of bark from the tree. Removing bark is a glamours process involving a hammer, chisel, an old screwdriver and tons of dust/dirt. We also decided to remove a bit from the end of the boards. The boards are still longer then the table will be, but the advantage of trimming the boards a bit is that usually most of the movement in the wood is near the ends and often times a little bit of trimming allows us to maximize the final thickness of the table. In this case, we also wanted to get access to the end of the board as some epoxy was needed to fill some irregularities.
The legs that the clients selected were finished and taken off to be powder-coated. Given the organic nature of the wood and the black used to fill the cracks/knots we discussed using a textured flat black that would look visual interesting, but not detract from the beauty of the table top.
Sometimes you have to get creative when you are working with rough lumber from rescued trees. There was a cavity on the end of one of the boards that needed to be filled. Even though most of the space would be trimmed off later, we felt it prudent to fill the hole first. They say that necessity is the mother of invention… so with some clever clamping and a ladder it was off to work. We poured the 24 hour epoxy and checked on it several times to top it off and make sure that there wasn’t any leakage.
One of the largest challenges of working with rough lumber is flattening the boards so that they can used to build furniture. The level of challenge often goes up when you have a highly figured piece of wood as they tend to move in unpredictable ways. Flattening these two boards required the use of a hand planer, a planer, a large built sander and some ingenuity, but in the end we were triumphant. We had to modify the design a bit to optimize for board thickness which allowed us remove an awkward notch in one end of the table that remained from how the tree was chainsawed. You can see in the picture how the board had moved while drying. To help address this issue, we snapped a chalk line equidistant from the center on both boards and took a quick band-saw pass to remove the material. This enabled us to flatten the boards without having to remove as much material (leading to a thicker table).
The boards were then ready to be joined together. Luckily the client popped by to check on things and he was able to participate in the glue-up.
Once the glue had set, we trimmed the table to length and started what seemed like endless rounds of epoxy to fill minor cracks and crevices in the boards. Trimming the table is a two-part process involving a pass with a circular saw followed by a finish pass with a router to leave a perfect edge.
The table was then sanded for several hours with varying grits of sandpaper in preparation for finishing. We also treated the edges to ensure they were smooth, but still crisp. This particular table had two unique spots from where the crotch of the tree once was that required a little extra work. The trick with sanding these types of spots is to make sure that they are smooth enough to not snag people’s clothing, but rough enough that they still look organic. Fall has arrived so we wanted to make sure that the change in temperature and the occasional use of the furnace hadn’t dramatically effected the moisture content of the wood, and we remained right in the zone we needed to be in.
After a couple more hours of sanding it was time for our favorite part… the first coat of finish. We chose an oil-based stain in collaboration with the clients. The results were dramatic.
Before we applied the final coat of finish our friends/clients stopped by and wanted to help so we put them to work helping to install the mounting points for the legs. They wanted to be able to remove the legs from the table at will so we decided to go with threaded inserts that wouldn’t wear out from constant tightening and loosening. Top help the inserts go in smoothly we used an old wood working trick and coated the threads with beeswax.
With all the mounts installed, we proceeded to applying the final coat of finish, and just like that… another successful table build.
