Every piece of furniture begins long before the first saw cut. It starts right from the start with the selection of the wood. To the untrained eye, a raw slab of Walnut or Cherry is just a dusty board. To me, it’s a roadmap for using the best qualities that the tree can offer.
Finding the ‘Feature’ in the ‘Fault’
I often look for what others might call ‘defects’— a unique knot, a swirl of grain, or a natural edge. My goal is to refine these elements without losing their character. By applying engineering discipline to the selection process, I can identify which slabs have the structural integrity to become a tabletop and which grain patterns will ‘pop’ once the hand-rubbed finish is applied. It’s a delicate balance between nature’s chaos and human design.
The process gets even more complicated when the size of a project requires two or more boards to be joined together. Not only do these mating boards need to be nested taking into account how their growth rings are oriented, in order to negate or dampen the composite piece from warping, but also so that the mating grain patterns match complimenting each other. To further complicate this process, board color and/or tonality differences between older heartwood and younger sapwood needs to be considered to maintain a pleasing composition. In most cases, and while there may be exceptions, it just doesn’t look right when a light colored piece of wood is joined to a dark piece. Additionally, grain patterns should work harmoniously together ideally providing a seamless appearance between adjoining boards. Taking all these things into consideration, I’ve spent countless hours swapping, rearranging, and flipping boards over and end-to-end to find just the best combinations that is both pleasing to the eye and structuarly sound. Sometimes, the best characteristics of one board may wind up being in the middle of a boards overall length – necessitating waste on one or both ends of a long board. Hopefully, I’m able to put that waste to use on another project.
While the majority of time in this process is expended on the most dominant or visible piece(s) of the project, it is also repeated for each of the particular parts – legs, stretchers, rails, moulding/trim, etc.. So before the first piece of wood receives its first cut or exposure to any tools at all, hours of planning, material selection and layout are neccessary to achieve the desired look of excellence and quality that have become the hallmark of my work.
I hope that you find this information usefull and informative, and as always I welcome any comments and/or questions that you may have.