Giant Burl Cheese-Platter

One of my wife’s friends mentioned to her that she had spent weeks trying to hand sand a large slab of wood to make a cheese platter for the next Christmas Dinner.
I let slip that I could probably do it in a few minutes with my power tools.
A few weeks later a large uneven slab of dull looking burl, roughly sanded and with very incompletely filled voids arrived with a shy request that maybe I could do something with it.

A Month later it is about as finished as I can get it after -

Planing both surfaces with a router on the Torque Work Centre.

Two days of filling all the remaining voids with various epoxy and other fillers that I had sitting about colored with charcoal and other powdered pigments and then sanding with a range of grits using a Festool random orbital sander.

By now I was realizing the beauty hidden in this piece of wood. We have no idea where it came from or from what tree type but it would be a Eucalyptus. I decided it had to have the full treatment using food safe finishes. I have some genuine Tung Oil from the Brisbane Wood Show so settled for this. Five coats at 24 hour intervals then 3 weeks to cure.

Finally a wax and buff with canubra and beeswax.

The last two pictures show the under surface where I used up some older filler.

-- David Australia