I know you have been having sleepless nights, breathless with expectation, and that every morning you have been hurrying to this blog to find out what has become of the dining room table. It would be heartless of me to ruin your Christmas by not filling you in on its progress. As if I would do such a thing.
We left the table (see previous post, if, for some inexplicable reason, you haven’t been following the story so far) as a pile of sawn planks, two thick ones and 4 thin ones, which were destined to be glued together. First job, and one of the most fun, is the planing. This strips away the marks where I had walked all over the sawn lengths and the top scuzzy layer. It requires multiple passes through the plane to get flat planks, as the lengths are inevitably like corkscrews. You start out with a thickness of about 5cms and you have to reduce this to about 4 to get them flat. As the lengths go through the plane, the grain of the wood is revealed – all very exciting. There was a particularly nice wavy effect in the grain on one of the planks that I wanted to keep, but the knot was too deep and papery in the middle, so it will in fact end up on the underside. See pic.
Once the planks have been planed, then two boards are made by gluing two thin planks either side of a thick one. But before you can glue them, there is the delicate operation of creating the zig-zag profile which is going to mesh together. You accomplish this by putting the planks through a cutter. This requires adjusting the cutter by a mere 1.5mm for some of the planks, otherwise the Toblerone peaks wouldn’t mesh but would abut each other. You must know the score if you have ever tried to print both sides of paper in a laser printer which can only manage one side at a time. The printer prints the first side, and then you have to work out how to adjust the paper so that the second page ends up on the back of the first and not upside down, or overprinting it. How often do you get that one wrong eh? Annoying as it is when you are printing, if you get it wrong, you can bin everything and start again, having lost a few sheets. With large amounts of expensive walnut, the problem is the same, but you can’t afford, literally, to make a mistake. So setting the cutter required a lot of head scratching. Needless to say, left to my own devices, it would have been a disaster.
Next the gluing – another delicate operation. The glue dries in ten minutes, so this is all the time you have to apply the glue, and align the lengths of wood and clamp them together in the right place. The joint has to be perfect. For smaller bits of wood, you could reckon on the joint being strong after 30 mins or so, but for such big lengths, we left them alone for 24 hours.
The boards are then unclamped and sawn to the correct length before sanding. There is inevitably a slight difference in level from one plank to the next, so the monster Makita is pressed into service with 80 weight sandpaper. This is one wicked sander. If you let it, it would tunnel through the board in no time, so there is technique required to carefully sand the board flat.
Then it gets even better – hand sanding the board with 180 weight paper, after which, the surface is as smooth as satin and delightfully tactile. After this process, you sand all the edges with 80, 120 and 180 paper, and chamfer off all the angles so that they feel smooth to the touch but do not look rounded. Getting this right is a lot harder than it sounds and requires once of those gestures that craftsmen perfect after years on the job.
Now the boards are finally ready to have their waxy oil applied, an organic compound which, I am assured by Jean David, you could apply to your toast, though I suspect you’d have to be desperately hungry and poor to want to try, even if it does contain orange peel. This is the best part. Suddenly, the grain of the wood and its knots are revealed in all their glory. A future visit will see more sanding of this, and further coats applied, although I don’t think that the appearance is going to change noticeably.
Now all I need are the wrought iron legs, but for that, I am going to have to get in touch with a forge. Next job on the list.
I pretty damned chuffed with my table top. It is beautiful in a way only a large quantity of expensive wood could be. It also weighs a ton and clearly won’t fit in a car, so even getting it home is going to be a challenge. Then I just need to invite lots of people to eat off it. Non-smokers, preferably. If they burn a hole in it, I will set them on fire.
By the way, the weird blotches on the photos above are caused by sawdust on the camera lens, not marks on the table. Fortunately.
Happy Christmas.
