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Bench/table
in Cherry (page 1)
(258,900
/ 266,531 / 245,681 bytes per image)
Several
years ago, a winter ice storm toppled half of an old cherry
tree in our back yard. My neighbor came over with his chainsaw
and converted the bulk of the tree into firewood for his wood
stove. I kept a chunk of the bottom of the tree.
The slab
sat in my garage for years, slowly cracking and checking.
Truth be told I had no plans for the wood and kept it mainly
in the hopes that I might get a Eureka! moment someday. I
can't say the moment ever really came. I thought of things
I needed around the house - maybe a new rack for the stereo
? maybe a chair ? Over time, I decided that the best thing
to do was to further reduce the chunk of wood into a workable
shape. From there I could get a better "view" of
the piece and finally make something.
(266,740 bytes; the upper part of the chunk is in the middle.
The slab on the right is the eventual bench/table)
Unfortunately,
I can't find pictures of the original chunk of wood. Let's
just say that it was large and bulky. I cut the chunk into
two pieces - a lower and upper part. The lower part is still
sitting in my garage and will likely end up as firewood this
winter. The upper part became this bench/table.
The eventual
idea was to flatten it and make a combination bench/table;
something portable and useable for just about anything that
requires a small surface off the floor. I set the height of
the finished item at 18 inches - the height for a typical
chair, and just a tad under the height of a coffee table or
endtable. The slab is partly heartwood on one side (down the
center) and entirely sapwood on the other. This didn't make
for the finest looking chery but the fun part of this project
was in making something out of nothing and that's rewarding
enough. But first, I had to plane the slab down.
(303,124
/ 303,914 / 281,278 / 255,959 bytes per image. The router
and frame used to surface the irregularly shaped slab of cherry)
To surface
the slab I used a router and a straight cutting bit. I built
a frame around the slab, mounted the slab to the frame, shimmed
it to the desired height and ran the router across the top
side until the surface was decently flat. I then flipped the
unit over and repeated the process on the other side. The
final thickness of the slab was just under 2 inches.
03-November-2003
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