Spalted Maple Projects #1: Milling Lumber

A few months back. Mike (jockmike2) and I went in together on a couple hundred board feet of air dried lumber at Raven’s Farm, a mill that is local to us. The cost came out to about 1.25 a board foot which was a steal as far as I was concerned. Boards have been setting for a bit, with a dozen getting acclimated to the shop. I don’t have the space for a jointer so have been working the boards with a recent plane addition and then running them through my Ridgid.

Woodworking is my hobby and not my bread and butter. I am good with the slow pace of hand planning. I have a couple jointers and a jack plane and all I really have to do is flatten the board and put on an edge. The boards don’t have to be perfectly clean, just flat, before cutting them down to size and running them through the planer.

What I like most about hand planing is the slow reveal -

The moment when you realizze that what you have in front of you is something special. This was all cut from one tree, it has spalting and some flair and what is this? A little bit of Bird’s eye I see?

The stuff looks pretty plain when you buy it, didn’t really know what we had when we picked it up. Just knew there was some spalting in it, but look at that luminence -

And a nice little stack out of two slabs with about a dozen more to go -

I have some knots I have to work around and I separate the really wild grain pieces for potential panels and small table tops, but this is really going to be fun. I hope to have some eye catching pieces to share with my LJ friends soon.

Happy Woodworking!

David

-- There is little that is simple when it comes to making a simple box.