Nothing but trouble

In my last blog post I reported about a spontaneous bow having appeared in the second board. After clamping it down to my bench for a few days it still was bowed, just a little less, but in the end it doesn't really matter. The undercarriage of the table is quite stiff in the length so it is not difficult to clamp the board down.

At least it didn't twist! But to compensate for so much luck, I found that the first board has developed quite a bit of twist in the last couple of weeks. When I clamp it down on the frame it lifts one of the legs into the air. It may be stiff in the length, but it hasn't much against twist. This not how I like things to be, so I shut the door and turned away from this disgusting project.

In the mean time we had an interesting discussion on one of the woodworking forums about how they would have done thicknessing in the past. The opinion was that thicknessing would have been a rare occupation back in the days when they didn't have machines to do the job. Some people reported to have seen trestle tables where the boards were up to half an inch different in thickness, and where the trestles had been worked locally into the underside of the table top until everything sits true on the upperside. That's an interesting idea. I don't need to rework the whole boards to make them true again, I can just remove a bit of wood where it is needed. Nobody is living under the table, so it won't be very obvious from the outside.

In the meantime I discovered another problem. This wood is stained pretty badly in some spots. I guess it is a drying defect and a fungus has invaded the wood. That doesn't need to be a problem as long as the wood stays dry, epecially not with a finish. But the stains can look a bit uncivilised. I have cut around most of them, and on the first board of the table top, the stains are just small blotches nicely devided over the length. That just looks "artistic". But the second board happens to have a big blotch right in the middle, and I am not entirely happey with that.

In an attempt to mask that one, I have experimented with choric bleech. That works very well to make the stain a lot lighter in color, but it needs to be metaculously applied, because otherwise the wood around it is bleeched too.

In the meantime I have planed the board down another 1.5mm (thicknessing again!) And the spot is smaller but didn't go away. So before I'm going to finish the board I will try the bleeching method again.

Well, this project keeps on delivering! I'm nowhere near the finish line yet.