After Croatia, work again.

We had a wonderful week in Croatia. We saw nice villages, great nature and spend some time on the islands. Actually we did a lot in just 6 days. Having a rental care really helps in that respect. Plitvice, with the famous lakes and waterfalls, was unbelievable, and what I didn't really expect, it is all in the middle of a very nice beech forest. I immediately wanted to start making beech planes, plenty of stock around here.

Well, I am back home again, which means planing the table top. First I filled the knotholes with epoxy. Then I finished smooting the visible surface and scraping to get rid of all little imperfections. I am not very happy with the color of the epoxy in the knotholes. It's quite ugly in fact. But the area around the knots is quite atractive. Maybe I will remove some epoxy and fill them with a dark colored epoxy or hideglue. In the picture you can see some imperfections still, but I was "lucky". Just in time I remembered that I hadn't checked for wind in the board, and indeed, more wood needed to be removed here.

Then it was time to straighten the edge. We had some discussions about this on woodworking.nl. So I took it as an opportunity to give my very best on this job. Trying to get a glue worthy edge, allthough I am not going to glue it. In fact, it wasn't so difficult after all. On such a large surface (210cm long and about 4,5cm wide) it is easy to balance your plane. After jointing the edge I marked how much needs to be removed from the other side to get a uniformly thick table top. The thinest part of the board is 3.7cm now, so that's what it's going to be. A lot of work (sigh!).