Finally putting some milled birch to good use.

[Brmorgan]

It was -30°C here this morning so I got called to not bother coming in to work. So I spent the day in the basement instead, and worked on this:

I made a cutting board / serving tray from the crotch of an 18" Birch tree that blew down in behind my dad's house. I cut it up Aug/07 and it's been in my basement ever since. The other pieces developed some checking of various severity in the crotchwood, but this piece was sound. On the other hand, this one also had a bark pocket on the back side. I filled that in with epoxy, which blends in much better in person without the light glaring off it. There is also one small pinworm hole in the top left of the same photo which I might fill in, but I don't know if it's worth it.

It was quite a job getting this one flat though. It was both cupped and twisted a bit, and was much wider than my jointer so that wasn't an option. So I built a sled for the planer, put 2-sided tape on the low points that would contact the sled, and wedged and shimmed the rest to keep it from shifting in the planer. I had to take SUPER light passes, like 1/100" on the later passes, because my planer's knives are a bit on the dull side and it has never been great in figured grain at the best of times. But it got it done after a while. Once all the mill marks were planed out it ended up at about 15/16" - I wanted 1" even but that's not bad.

The handle is Douglas Fir, just a small scrap with some nice grain that I scavenged out of a firewood chunk. I wanted to make it bigger, but I also wanted the beads at each end of the handle to be the same diameter as the thickness of the board so it would sit flat. So I was limited there, though I guess I could have just flattened the beads on one side to gain 3/32" or so. The handle is attached by a 1" X 1/2" round tenon. You can see that I was an idiot and drilled the hole BEFORE I routed the roundover, so the guide bearing dove into the hole causing a gouge. Actually though it doesn't look bad, it just bugs the hell out of me when I do things like that.

As for finish, it has 2 rub-on coats of mineral oil in the photos, but I'm going to keep soaking it to it until it won't take any more. I don't plan on using this much, especially for cutting, so I want it to look nice and shined up for display. This one only took me 3 hours to make, and I'll get a lot faster especially if the wood is straighter to start with. If I could make and sell a couple things like this every week or two it would be a nice help to my wallet right now.

Oh, I almost forgot, what brand names or types of epoxy do you guys use for filling in situations like this or big wide cracks? My local supply didn't really have anything, and I ended up using just some regular 2-part hard-setting epoxy which seems to have done a decent job. Not as clear as some of the stuff I've seen though.

 

[BobL]

Nice - real nice !! I love that feathered grain.

I use 2 pack clear casting resin for filling voids like that. I dries clear and does not shrink too much. I over fill anyway and sand off

 

[dustytools]

Nice job! I love the grain in that piece.

 

[carvinmark]

Very nice.

 

[Zodiac45]

Excellent looking server!

 

[excess650]

....ya gotta love crotch! Nice work. I have some walnut crotch and cherry crotch slabs here in the garage.

 

[TNMIKE]

Looks great

Love the handle

 

[irishcountry]

Beautiful stuff great job keep it up!!!

 

[MR4WD]

Never would have thought to give birch a try. Nice work!

I'm up in williams lake too. It was freakin cold yesterday!!

 

[Brmorgan]

Never would have thought to give birch a try. Nice work!

I'm up in williams lake too. It was freakin cold yesterday!!

Yep, Welcome to the Cariboo! -30°C yesterday morning, only -5°C today.

How long ya up for?

I love working with Birch - nice and soft if you mill it green, but dries quite hard while staying easy to work. The trick with Birch here is finding trees that are big enough to be worth the effort. I've got my eye on a few in the 2-3' diameter range out at Quesnel Lake east of here. Gotta love what the inland rainforest climate can do for them. I'm lucky to see a Birch over 8" diameter around town here.

 

[MR4WD]

Yep, Welcome to the Cariboo! -30°C yesterday morning, only -5°C today.

How long ya up for?

I love working with Birch - nice and soft if you mill it green, but dries quite hard while staying easy to work. The trick with Birch here is finding trees that are big enough to be worth the effort. I've got my eye on a few in the 2-3' diameter range out at Quesnel Lake east of here. Gotta love what the inland rainforest climate can do for them. I'm lucky to see a Birch over 8" diameter around town here.

Could be up for 5 weeks or so. Workin around likely these days (keithley creek actually, which got a foot of snow today and what looked like about 8' in the bottom of the tree wells so far) and will probably finish off at Bella Coola. The diversity of the forests is even more pronounced than at home. Everything from 3' lodgepole, 4' spruce and 7' firs to 8" trembling aspens on that drive. A lot warmer than yesterday though.

 

[Brmorgan]

Too bad it wasn't summer, we could go make some sawdust somewhere. 3 more months...

 

[Brmorgan]

Almost forgot, I also learned to turn an offset pad-foot leg on the lathe:

That was my second attempt. The first ended up in the kindling box. :censored: But once I got my head around the math it isn't really all that hard. My chisels need a good sharpening though.

 

[polexie]

Beautiful grain!! Thanks for posting.

Lex

 

[woodshop]

...I use 2 pack clear casting resin for filling voids like that. I dries clear and does not shrink too much. I over fill anyway and sand off

This is what I use also... but with the stuff I've used, if you want a clear void, you have to sand down the epoxy that's showing to VERY fine grit, almost polish it, then oil as you would the wood.

Beautiful work there bmorgan... as you say, too nice to be cutting into with knives. How long was it drying in your house before you planed it down?

 

[DRB]

It was quite a job getting this one flat though. It was both cupped and twisted a bit, and was much wider than my jointer so that wasn't an option. So I built a sled for the planer, put 2-sided tape on the low points that would contact the sled, and wedged and shimmed the rest to keep it from shifting in the planer. I had to take SUPER light passes, like 1/100" on the later passes, because my planer's knives are a bit on the dull side and it has never been great in figured grain at the best of times. But it got it done after a while. Once all the mill marks were planed out it ended up at about 15/16" - I wanted 1" even but that's not bad.

Do you have any pics of this setup? From what I understand here is that you used a hand held power planer in a sled and rail setup to surface the slab? This sounds like it could be faster than using a router on a sled and rail setup.

 

[Brmorgan]

Woodshop - I milled that Birch log in mid-August '07, and I brought all of it into the basement just before winter that year. So a little over a year in the house I guess. It was definitely done any moving it was going to. As I said, most of the other pieces did get some checking and splitting. But tomorrow after work I plan on looking more closely at them to see what I can do. I was thinking of making a laminated one, with the birch crotchwood on one side and something else on the other, as a couple pieces only have good grain on one face. I have a bunch of types of hardwood pieces that I've scavenged from pallets, or I also have some mahogany kiln stickers from the mill that I could laminate. Or, I also have some really nice spalted birch too.


DRB - Nope, I used my 12-1/2" Delta benchtop, though once I get a handheld I will be making a jig for it so I can do much wider pieces, such as slab tables.. I don't have pictures so my mad mspaint skillz will have to do. The setup looked something like this:

The black piece can be any piece of wood that is known to be flat, in my case a 12" wide solid-core bi-fold door half. It needs to be longer than the piece being planed. The blue pieces are sacrificial rails that get planed away along with the workpiece. These also must be longer than the piece being flattened and are used to eliminate snipe and/or shifting caused by the feedrolls. The gray piece is just a small piece of wood screwed to the sled piece to prevent the piece slipping backwards as it feeds. Though I've found that good 2-sided carpet tape is often enough. The wedges keep the piece from being pressed down and deformed by the feedrolls, though with the use of side rails that's usually not a big problem. Oh, and I probably don't need to tell you this, but make double sure that the screws securing the side rails and end stop are far below the depth you will be planing to.

Just plane the piece down to at least the point where there are two continuous, flattened contact points for the continuous length of the piece. At this point you can remove it from the sled, flip it over, and flatten the other side.

Hope that helps. I've done it a few times and have been happy with the results. I'm anxious to see how well it will work for the 6' X 8" planks I have that I want to build a table out of. Next time I rig something like this up I'll be sure to take a couple pics. Might be tomorrow night, we'll see.

 

[DRB]

Ok I see. Thought that the slab was wider than your bench top planer. Looks like you got a good system there. Thanks for the detailed explaination

 

[Brmorgan]

Made another one:

I wanted this one to be thicker, and since the birch I have is all the same 5/4 and very warped at that, I decided to laminate a different type of wood for the backside. This piece of birch wasn't nearly as nice as the first, but still was worth using for something. Since it had an uneven pattern, I decided to make the one edge uneven to maximize the amount of figured wood I could keep. The areas I cut away were wane, so it was either do this or reduce the whole thing to the width at the ends, so I just angled the tapers to match the angle of the grain in those spots. This piece also had a bark pocket that I filled with epoxy. The handle is Birch and is quite a bit sturdier than the last.

For the back I glued up some strips of some unknown hardwoods that I salvaged from freight pallets that many local stores leave at the curb for free. They were bloody murder on my old planer knives though. I'm not sure I'd do that again, I'd rather have a drum sander or something to get the first layer off. The glue-up turned out better than I really expected it to, since I rushed it a bit. I only let the glue between the strips set for about a half hour before gluing and clamping the whole panel to the back of the birch piece. But I can't find even the tiniest gap anywhere on it, so hopefully glue holds up over time. I doubt this one will be seeing water much though. The dark wood looks pretty much like Mahogany, but somehow not quite. It also did not smell like Mahogany when I was planing/sanding it. Though I'm sure use in a pallet might be responsible for that.

As for the white wood, I have no idea. It really is white, moreso than almost any wood I've seen. Its pores are very long and wavy, not nice and straight like the dark wood. For what it's worth, and this may sound stupid, but this wood smelled EXACTLY like popcorn when I was working it. I thought at first it might be walnut sapwood, but I couldn't remember what walnut's pores looked like. It would make sense though, because the pieces are from a 1/2" X 4" board that is almost perfectly flatsawn. Whatever it is, it makes a nice contrast to the dark wood. It would make a lovely chess board wood, though I don't think I have enough left for that.

I'm quite enjoying making these things. Every one will be unique based on the piece it comes from, which I like. The only problem is that I'm fast running out of good pieces, and it's a few more months before I can even mill more, let alone dry it properly so it's still usable. I do have a couple big Birches on the ground right now that should yield a couple nice crotch pieces each. Dropped them last spring in wet areas hoping they'll spalt up over the past year.

 

[woodshop]

Beautiful... I can tell by the end grain on that dark and white wood that they are both tropical hardwoods. If all you need are small pieces, you can often get some really nice stuff from those pallets that are put together from native woods down there. One mans trash is another man treasure.