Receptionist Desk Part II - Milling the rough lumber

It has been awhile since I've done a post. I had to work a significant amount of overtime at work and the amount of time I had available to putter out in the garage was significantly reduced. A couple of weeks ago, my sons and I started sorting through our stock pile of wood. Since the desk has a great deal of narrow and reasonably short pieces we decided to begin by utilizing some of the less desireable boards in the pile. By desireable I mean that these pieces had a lot of defects that would prevent longer and wider pieces from being utilized but would yield a good number of decent pieces for the rails and stiles required to build this desk.

We spent awhile sorting through the boards and estimating the various cuts to try and see what we can come up with. We chose a couple of really clear boards for the counter top around the top and a couple of boards that looked really clean for the desktop.

Over the past couple of Saturdays we've been working through the cut list and jointing and planing the boards required leaving them slightly oversized in all 3 dimensions to allow for some tension release. Tonight Johannes and I finished cutting them to width and thickness. I had hoped to use 7/8" thick material but a few stubborn boards would not cleanup until we reached 3/4". There are quite a few boards that are showing significant rayflake so the desk should really turn out very nicely.

We also began working on the desktop. We began with 4 boards approximately 9" to 9.5" in width. After jointing and trimming the outside edges and removing most of the sapwood and as many defects as possible, we were left with a 33" wide top. The final top is supposed to be about 32" in width. We will lose a bit more as we cut the glue joints. So the final dimension will probably be reduced to closer to the final dimension of 32".

The hardest part about working with rough lumber is that there are times that you can't really see all the defects until after you begin to plane the lumber. I chose two boards that had clearly come from the same tree in hopes that they would match up in color and characteristics. The tree must have had a mineral streak or discoloration in the wood. I wound up with a bookmatched dark streak in two of the boards. You can see the defect in the upper right of the image. The other dark areas especially in the foreground of the image are the result of the beginning of a crotch in the tree. There are a couple of other defects, one knot near the top center of the image and one in the foreground left. The foreground left will be removed when we trim the top to length (its a few inches over length right now). The other is removeable only if I narrow the desktop by an extra inch. The other option is to leave it, perhaps fill it with epoxy to level it to the desktop. I've done this a few times - once on my daughter's pencil post bed and again on the sofa.

Well that's it for tonight.