The original table (top photo) is made of cherry and has
curly maple panels for the drawer front, flanking inserts plus side and back
panels. That’s a possibility here too
but I have also been looking at other woods including zebrawood and
leopardwood. I am leaning toward using
leopardwood cutoffs which are strips from a snare drum I made (bottom photo).
As the pieces of leopardwood are not wide enough to make
the panel a couple of them will need to be edge glued together to get the
required width. Also, as the strips vary
from 1/8” to 3/8” thick they are all short of the ¼” thickness needed. The solution is to take the thin edge glued
pieces and glue them to a base of something like alder so the total thickness is
¼” thick. Because the panels will only
be seen from one side, I need just one good face. All this starts by marking the center of the
3/8” pieces so they can be cut in half.
Below the top photo shows two of those pieces and my marking gauge. The bottom photo is a closeup of the
marked-up edge. The reason why there is
a set of parallel lines is that it’s easier to get close to half the distance
and mark from both sides versus taking the time to get an exact center
line. With two lines all I have to do is
cut between them to get equal pieces.
Next, it’s over to the bandsaw to rip the them in
half. That’s followed by running them
through the thickness sander to clean up the bandsawn surface and bring all the
pieces to the same thickness of just under 1/8”. Here is the bandsaw setup.
One advantage of splitting a piece of wood this way is
these pieces can be bookmatched when glued together so they form a mirror image
of each other. In this case since
leopardwood is not a linear grain most of the effect is lost but the color and
figure of the wood is virtually identical so the joints will all but
disappear. Here the pairs have been
pulled together to roughly show what I mean.
Once glued up it’s going to take a very close look to identify the joint
between the two pieces.
Because the pieces are so thin edge gluing them together
requires a little more work than just adding glue and clamping them
together. The glue-up starts with a flat
base in this case a scrap of shelving that has plastic laminate on it. On top of that a 6-mil piece of polyethene is
laid down. Since the glue does not
adhere to the polyethene this prevents the wood from being glued down to the
base. A thin bead of glue is applied to
the edge of one of the pieces and it is set down on the polyethene. The other piece is set next to it so they are
side by side then they are rubbed together spreading the glue along the
joint. The rubbing also causes the glue
to grab holding them together. A damp cloth
is used to wipe the squeezed-out glue at the ends then a small piece of the
polyethene is laid across the joints and two vertical clamps are added to hold
the pieces flat on the base. Three more
horizontal clamps get added to squeeze the two pieces together. These don’t require a lot of pressure. Last a damp cloth wipes up any additional
glue that gets squeezed out. In my
experience it takes overnight for the glue to cure as the polyethene acts like
a barrier slowing the curing process down.
After curing overnight, the clamps get removed and the
glue line checked. The top is fine but
the side that was down on the poly had a little glue squeezed out during the
clamping which spread out across the joint that needs to be removed. I could run it through the thickness sander
but would rather not. When using the
sander to remove glue some if it gets transferred to the sandpaper which
creates a gummy residue degrading the ability of the paper to cleanly sand off
the wood. That in turn causes the
residue on the paper to heat up and put a burn line on the wood. To minimize that problem a card scraper shown
at the top of the left photo is used.
It’s a thin piece of hardened steel with a little burr that removes
whisper thin wood shavings. The right
photo is me using it along with the lower part of the joint showing what I end
up with. When done there is just a tiny
bit of glue exposed to the sander. One
other thing, just above the scraper are the wood shavings it removes. The pile is a mix of shavings and dust. The dust tells me the edge is dull and I need
to redo the burr.
While the glue-up of the veneer is in progress it’s time
to select and prepare the base it will be applied to. Early on I had thought about using alder as a
base but while going through the available stock I came across some 5/8” by 5½“
wide cedar dog-eared fencing planks. I
keep a few of these on hand for jigs and other miscellaneous uses. They are inexpensive and if one carefully
sorts through the stack (1 in 30+ is good) you can find quarter sawn clear
ones. The one thing to keep in mind is
that they are not dried. Most of the
time the moisture content is well over 30%.
That is way too wet to use so they need to sit and dry for a while. Now that time will vary depending on where
you are. Here in the desert where the
humidity is often in the single digits things dry out in a hurry. These are well over a year old and test out
at around 5% moisture content which is great.
First step is to run them through the planer just like I did with the
oak at the beginning of this project.
The photo on the left is before surfacing and the photo on the right is
after.
Next Up – Veneer Panels Part 2 & Trimming Legs to Length
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