Fine wood or Fire wood?

[Derek Cohen]

I have a request for a kist (blanket chest) for our family room to double as storage and a place to rest a coffee cup. I have an interesting design in mind, something a little different ... but that is for another time.


I had three rough sawn boards about 14" x 10' by 1 1/4" thick in Curly Marri ..





They all had significant cup and twist, and to retain the maximum thickness the boards were sawn into shorter and narrower lengths, jointed on one side, and then resawn and thicknessed to 3/4" (what is saved from this process runs from 1/4" - 1/2" and will be used for the lower shelf and, possibly, drawers).





This all sounds quite standard, and indeed it was done on machinery, however it was not so straight forward. Curly Marri is very hard and the grain is extensively interlocked. My 8" jointer struggled, and stalled at times. The lunchbox thicknesser left noticeable tearout. And I began to ask myself whether I should just burn the boards instead of building with them.


Marri is not as hard as Jarrah, and it is not as abrasive. However the colour can vary quite a bit, and there are pockets of resin that dry and fall out leaving voids. This is Curly Marri. It is harder to match boards. Not only does one need to match for colour, but for figure and for curl direction.


The sawing and jointing took one weekend. This past weekend I glued up panels on Saturday, and then began planing then to final thickness on Sunday. Here are a few photos ...


Traversing ..





Checking for twist ...





My secret weapon - flattening with a 36" heavy Jarrah jointer with a 3" wide Berg blade ...





Smoothing ... aaahhh, that's what all the fuss was about ...





The grain switches back-and-forth. Some tearout is inevitable. Out come the cabinet scrapers ..





A finished board with a little alcohol to show the grain ..





I'm undecided whether this will become the rear or the front panel.


Question for all - in your personal experience, what is your equivalent of this terrible timber?


Regards from Perth


Derek

[David Weaver]

Looks like the most curly oak I've ever seen. Based on the coloration.

Google janka hardness says 1600, or slightly harder than hard maple, and I'm sure the curl makes it plane even harder.

[Adam Cruea]

In my limited experience, hickory.

You can plane it and have half a board go one way, then when you hit the middle, the grain changes. God forbid you get the area from around a knot.

I didn't use a BU smoother or jack on my hickory bench, but it's on the wish list for next time. I ended up going across the grain then sanding.

BTW. . .awesome jointer! :-D

[David Weaver]

Yeah, you're right. Looks a lot like hickory, except it's softer than Hickory (we rarely get to tell Derek about how one of our comparable woods is harder than his).

[Chris Griggs]

Yeah hickory sucks. Its all stringy and hard and at least the stuff I have has weird little super hard swirls of grain everywhere. I can work it with thin shavings, but any serious material removal by hand is a bear.

Man, Derek I got tired just reading that. I'm lazy so, the worst stuff I generally work is hard figured maple...its what I've been working lately and let me tell you I'm looking forward to getting back to some walnut.

Though that is cool looking stuff, and I must admit...seeing this does make me want to find some curly oak...

[Tom Vanzant]

ALMOND. I resawed a 2"x4"x6" piece to produce a 3/8" blank. When I tried to plane it smooth I got big-time tear-out. The interlocked grain looked like a braided rope. By the next morning the blank had warped and twisted just short of a bowknot.

[Charlie Stanford]

The usual problem with narrow but heavily figured stock like yours, doesn't matter the species, is that they all show the individual board glue ups so prominently. This ruins it for me for whatever it's worth. It's a personal thing, but I just cannot stand being able to count the boards that went into a tabletop, carcase side, or other panel. Not saying I haven't done it, but I never liked it.

[Derek Cohen]

Charles, I agree with you. I had no choice - it was either that or a wide board 1/2" thick. That side goes at the rear. It is the only one with four sections. There was so much colour variation and pitch holes that I was forced to use narrower boards on one side. I plan to even out some of the colouring differences with a tint or stain. Care to offer a suggestion in this regard?

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Jim Koepke]

Question for all - in your personal experience, what is your equivalent of this terrible timber?

Rippled iron ship siding.

jtk

[Charlie Stanford]

Charles, I agree with you. I had no choice - it was either that or a wide board 1/2" thick. That side goes at the rear. It is the only one with four sections. There was so much colour variation and pitch holes that I was forced to use narrower boards on one side. I plan to even out some of the colouring differences with a tint or stain. Care to offer a suggestion in this regard?

Regards from Perth

Derek

Outright veneering/marquetry/parquetry/inlay/lots of carving, or stain + tinted lacquer. It's hard to hide. The cure can be worse than the disease.

At this point, and with your track record of successful projects, you have an aesthetic to protect. Passing altogether would be a viable course of action. Indeed the title to your post leaves that as a possibility, one I would strongly consider even with the work put in to date. There is a level of staining and tinting that will hide the glue-up except under the closest scrutiny. But this treatment rarely looks good. You might stumble upon a combination of tints that does the trick without muddying waters too badly. It's the variance in stripe across the panel that is a dead giveway (the changes are too abrupt to be plausible), even if you manage to obscure the glue lines satisfactorily.

[David Dalzell]

I had, and still have, quite a bit of curly California Claro Walnut. I made a linen cabinet from some of this. The curl was beautiful but very difficult to work. Significant tear out when smoothing ( my irons are very sharp). The tearout would occur on one side of the curl, but not the other. i.e. on the upslope of the curl, but not on the downslope. Card scrapers got rid of most of the tearout, but they would often leave some slight tearout themselves. Noticeable by observing some dull surface spots when looking at the wood at a very oblique angle. Finally sandpaper over cork got rid of all tearout. I believe I spent most of my effort on smoothing and cleaning up the surfaces than on any other aspect of the cabinet.

Would I do it again? Yes. I love the visual and tactile sense of this wood.

[Staffan Hamala]

That knot looks like an eye staring out of the board

[Derek Cohen]

Here's an example of the tearout that occurs with little warning. The only possible (?) tell is that the grain changes direction in this area - but it changes direction like that elsewhere without similar results ...



Here is closer look at some of the curl. Some of it, like this, is quite raised. And it makes it difficult to traverse across the grain as it can still tearout (picture taken after the above tearout was smoothed with a cabinet scraper) ...



Charles, my concern is - like yours - that the curl shows up as disjointed sections. I am hoping that the curl becomes a feature and takes the eye away from the joins. There will be a raised base in Jarrah, and this should cause the lighter Marri to become a little less foreground. At any rate, the board depicted earlier will be at the rear, and the chest will be placed in an alcove. This is more likely to be the face of the chest ...



Staffan, you can see the now resin-filled knots that fell out.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Adam Cruea]

Personally, I either play to it or try to hide it.

I look at the species of wood. . .is it plausible to get a piece of wood that wide from the species of tree? If so, then hide it. If not, it's a fact of life that it had to be done this way.

However, I'm the same guy that looks at veneer or bookmatched woods and can see the repeat in grains and say "that's not natural and looks like crap".

For me, the 4 pieces you joined together are a testament to your skill; knowing woodworking, it is not easy to join wood so well as to create a seamless joint.

Just my opinion.