Thorsen Side by Side LJ / PW Challenge Karson #5: The second of the twins. The Popular table.

In my blog I started to talk about my next set of Thorsen Greene and Greene Tables. I called them my Twins.. The blog talked about my use of Holly wood and Popular wood to make the set of twins. Both woods in their normal state are quite light. Holly as being classified as the whitest of woods and Popular as an Ivory color for sapwood and usually a light green tint in the heart wood.

Here are pictures of normal Holly and Popular The Holly is in the left and the Popular on the right of the picture.

Those of you who know me might know that I don’t do things the normal way. So here is a picture of the Popular boards that I used to make my selection

Cutting of the pieces for the top and the aprons. Nothing that I’ve read give any real indication as to what causes Popular to turn colors.

I have some popular and as I was looking at it I noticed a bullet in the wood and around the damage the wood was turned purple. It makes we wonder if it is a defense mechanism within the tree. It could be that a lightning strike was close to this tree.

This tree was quite large. These planks were 24” wide and 16’ long when I bought them. They are now 22.5” wide so they have shrunk 1.5” as they dried. The sawmill owner said look at this as he took me over to the pile of lumber. He cut off a piece and handed it to me. I took it all about 350 BD. FT. The stump portion was the blackest. One board I’ve got has purple, brown, robin egg blue, and black in all kinds of streaks.

Since I was going to make a set of twins, I wanted a white table and a dark table, but both made from what would normally be white wood. I didn’t use any stain in the making of this table. It is all natural wood. I did seem to perceive that the wood was changing color as it was exposed to sunlight so I wanted to use a UV protector. I used Pennofin Marine Oil to saturate the wood prior to putting on a top coat of shellac. The Pennofin has over 99% UV block in it.

Other pictures from the construction: Cutting the mortise on the Horizontal router table

The pegs were made out of Holly and here they are being beveled in the breadboards

The breadboards from the twins with one additional breadboard thrown in.

Some of the parts for the twins and the Goncalo Alves table

One of the more surprising pictures is the pile of wood chips after planning the wood. Popular on the left, Holly in the center and Goncalo Alves on the right.

The table when it was dry fitted to allow me to measure the shelf size.

The stack of aprons from the tables that I’m working on. My three and my children’s versions.

I glued up the twins and I took them into the house to show my wife. They sat there 20 minutes and my son had built a city on top of the Popular table.

-- Karson Southern Delaware karson_morrison@bigfoot.com