This project has been a blast to work on, and hopefully the second part will follow somewhat quickly. In any case, this won't be a super drawn-out project; I anticipate it only being written in up in 2 parts.
September 2018
My parents had a large maple tree on their property which for years had shown signs of rot, with falling dead branches posing a hazard to their house. When they started talking about getting the tree cut down, I saw the potential to create a unique coffee table from a cross-section slab of the tree!
Astonishingly, a mushroom was growing in isolated darkness inside of the rotted tree!
Not surprisingly, the tree was revealed to be extremely rotted near the base. Luckily, this meant whatever usable portions of wood I could find were beautifully spalted! I rented myself a chainsaw, and went to town!!!
Pretty rough looking to start, my chainsaw skills are quite unrefined. Loads of fun though to have given it a shot! At this point there wasn't much else to do other to let the slab start drying. Because of the rot, the wood was soaking wet; pushing a finger into the wood resulted in water dripping out...
December 2018
The slab was able to dry for a few months, though the weather in my area was still consistently wet.. After being cut, the slab was close to 6 inches thick, which drove my decision to reduce the thickness at this point, rather than waiting 5+ years for it to dry completely (following the 1 year per inch rule). A thinner slab would then dry considerably faster. I decided to use my router with a 1.5" bit to hopefully make the work pretty simple.
Loads of sawdust resulted, but after many hours the job was done!
I constructed a simple rail system to flatten the slab, which then required two people to push the router back and forth to remove material. My brother helped me for a good 10 hours slowly shaving down the surfaces of the slab to a reasonable thickness before finally letting it sit to dry. We removed a total of about 3 inches of wood, roughly 1/8" at a time. I anticipated that the slab would still warp to some extent, so I did not take the it to the final thickness at this point, hence the still-visible chainsaw marks on both sides.
Interestingly, while routing we ran into two nails that had presumably been hammered in my our dad a number of years ago. Even looks like some rot reached the tips of the nails over the years!
For size reference, here are me and my brother
with the slab, we're both 193-195cm tall.
July 2019
A warm summer was very welcome, and seemed to make quick work of drying the slab. It had lost a considerable amount of weight, and at least at the surface was quite dry. I was getting impatient and wanted to bring the slab to a somewhat-usable state.
I bought a random orbit sander and got to work. The routed surface of the slab was very rough, likely due to the fact that the wood was so wet when I did the routing. This added a little extra work when it came to sanding, but a few hours of effort brought me to a spot where I could feel happy looking at it every day. Two coats of linseed oil later, and the slab now sits comfortably in front of the couch! I was amazed at the level of figuring and spalting in this wood, it's really spectacular to look at.
Sanded down a bit, the real colors start to pop!
Here are a few views of the sanded slab in what will be it's final location. Two coats of linseed oil have really brought out the colors, and highlight some of the figuring. We'll be using this as a coffee table until I take the time to complete the project.
But.... there's a lot left to finish on the table... Like I suspected, the top surface has cupped, so a few final passes with the router will be needed to get that flat again, as well as to take out the chainsaw gouge. But since it's looking pretty nice at this point, I will be holding off on doing the finishing touches until the slab has for sure dried completely. I'm curious about drying rates of endgrain vs facegrain, since the slab seemed to dry very quickly... I'll dig into that topic and report when I post the next part of this project. If anyone has any insight on this topic, please post below!
Thanks for reading,
Juju
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