The owner and I went up to a place called Berkshire Products in Sheffield, MA. We looked around for a few hours as they have hundreds of different slabs. Narrowed things down to 4 slabs, 3 of which were Claro Walnut and the other was Bubinga. The narrowing down started out by size. He wanted something 10' long, at least 1 1/2" thick and wide. After some debate between Myself, him and his wife they decided on the Bubinga slab. They had it shipped to my shop in December '16.

It came in a rather large box. We got it off the truck and onto some horses in the shop


Took about an hour to get the crate open and taken apart.


As you can notice it has a rather large check in it. That was taken into account when we were purchasing it. It was in a good spot. It was about 16-18" off of one side, perfect for an eatery countertop.

Then the fun request came. He wanted me to split the slab using the existing check, not cut it. So to cover my bases I made a video of it in case it went horribly wrong. The video is pretty short, but the actual process took about 2 hours before we found a way to make it happen. Problem was, the check is at a 20º angle. So when we stuck a wedge in there instead of splitting the slab it pushed one side up and the other down and didn't transfer any of the force where we wanted it. We needed the two sides of the slab to go horizontal so the force would be transferred up the check and continue it.

We tried several things. Took the crate material side, which was 6/4x5" Poplar and clamped a pc to the top and bottom so the two sides of the check could only move in a horizontal direction and not up and down like it wanted. Unfortunately it just over powered the Poplar boards. The check only advanced about 1/2" We tried many things, different wedges, lined the check with plastic strips, then wood strips but had the same problem. Finally we came up with some 4" steel C channel. Clamped that on top and bottom and gave a whack to the wedge and it moved 8". Got out the camera and finished it off.