Stretching the Limits
This past week has been exciting in the Wood Enterprise Institute. With the prototype under our belt, we are starting to produce our first and second tables. Each member of the production team has been tasked a certain part of the table to create. The design team has come up with a design that the entire Institute agrees on and has provided the production team with dimensions.
As a member of the production team myself, I have been tasked to build the stretcher for the table. The stretcher is a horizontal supporting element connecting the two legs of the table. Sycamore was chosen as the species of wood for the stretcher so that we could have an accent piece compared to the white oak of the table top. Sycamore was also a good choice for this accent piece because it has ray fleck. Ray fleck is a unique characteristic of wood that only shows up in wood that is quarter sawn because of the cell structure in certain species, sycamore being one of them. The Ray fleck creates an interesting pattern on the surface of the wood and we wanted to use this to our advantage.
In order to expose the ray fleck, I started by cutting our originally flatsawn rough lumber into two inch strips. I then milled the strips and glued them back together. However, before gluing the strips back together, I turned them each 90 degrees exposing the ray fleck. Turning the strips 90 degrees was basically the same as creating a new quarter sawn piece of lumber. This is a subtle characteristic however; it is just one of the unique features of the table.
