Part of What It's All About!

It's All About the Wood

As work progresses on any project I sometimes lose sight of why I love working with wood.  Then, you start the finish process and the beauty of the wood hits you and once again; you know why you're so passionate about this craft.  I had a difficult time finding enough 8/4 Black Walnut boards that didn't have a lot of sap in them.  The quality just wasn't what I wanted but in Las Vegas, wood supply is pretty limited.  If you've been following along on this project I also mentioned the unruly grain in the stock I was able to select.  In this picture the sap wood is the lighter, almost yellow colored, streak at the top of the apron.  I figure that since the top will hang over, it will put that in shadow and minimize it.  The unruly grain is evident in the grain patterns, where it appears to have hills and valleys is where the grain kind of reverses itself and makes it difficult to plane.  Some scraping and a bit of sanding was needed to tame that.  Notice the detail at the bottom of the aprons, that's how the scratch stock work turned out -- I like it!

Shelf in Place

Here's another shot of the table with the shelf in place.  At this point I still need to wet sand a minimum of 2 more top coats into the wood.  The groove in the shelf is for the spline that will hold the woven cane in place.  One of the other parts assembled today was the top, once again it was too hot in the shop to do the glue up so the kitchen island was used once again.  I was starting to work on the drawer but it's so humid this evening that I'm afraid I'll rust my tools!