The Guild of Vermont Furniture Makers Show opens tonight at Gallery 2, Vermont Artisans Designs, in Brattleboro. (See previous post) ... The piece I made for that show has an interesting story that goes with it .. When they originally cut the Northwest Coastal forests in the late 1800s, a lot of the trees had bark so thick that they had to cut them way off the ground using springboards that they notched into the lower sections. Looks like fun. I bought a slab from Berkshire Products about 4 years ago that was cut by a harvester who was going back into the woods, cutting the stumps, and sawing them up into boards ..... The redwood pretty much lasts forever, but you can see evidence of the 100+ years of exposure on the one end of the plank. For this piece we left it. For the other piece of the plank that I used to make the coffee table shown below, I trimmed the live edge and cut most of the discolored wood off. While I was making that piece, we counted the growth rings that you can see in th eclose up (484 in the coffe table) and again when we made th console ( another 177) so the part of the stump where the plank we got came from had over 650 years of growth before it was cut.....Kind of humbling .... Anyway, the table is part of our new metal leg series. The tables all bolts together and are extremely rigid for tables with such delicate looking legs .... Click the pictures to enlarge them and enjoy your tour of a remarkable board ....
At the show
A less dramatic photo ... Lots of fine art too ..
First couple passes of the smoothing plane
The coffee table I made with Sam a couple of years ago
The new table slab juxtaposed with the coffee table top showing the width of the original slab
Close up of the growth rings
In process mockup
Save a tree ... use recycled wood
