Oak Coffee Table

[craigmarshall]

I accidentally cut up an extra board for a project a couple of weeks ago, so I offered to buy it from my boss and designed a "one-board special" project out of the remaining four pieces. It was a 3.2m x 10" x 1 1/4" piece of flat sawn american white oak, and I'd cut it into quarters length-ways, so after planing and thicknessing, I had 4 pieces of 800mm x 27mm x 250mm roughly.

I decided to make a coffee table, using two of the four boards edge joined to make a top (using biscuits for easy alignment), one of the boards ripped down the middle and then joined face to face and ripped and crosscut once more for the four legs (50x50x400 roughly), and the final board for some 60mm rails. I drew it on sketchup and it looked okay, so I went ahead and made it.

Here's the sketchup pic:



Here are the two top pieces being joined into one for the top of the table:



The leg board has been ripped and is being reglued to make a thicker piece:



And here's the finished item in my home. I would normally cut all the sap out of a piece of wood for a client, but I don't personally mind it, and I don't intend to keep the table submersed in water, or even damp, so it shouldn't rot or anything else.



I don't mind the look of sapwood at all. Sometimes it can look stunning, like this:

This is from waywood furniture a few miles from where I work. I would like to work for them one day :-)
www.waywood.co.uk/gallery/pages/03_CodWanyYew.htm

Cheers,
Craig

[wizer]

Lovely Craig, I agree about the sapwood.

[engineerone]

i agree craig too often do we waste some tremendous looking wood or patterns because it is sap.

looks good mate

how heavy is it???

paul

[paulchapman]

Very Nice.

Cheers

Paul

[jaco]

Very nice Craig.

Sap - we buy veneer and generally dont allow sap on the faces.
BUT,
after spending 1 day grading various layons, and looking at the sap, it is actually quite acceptable and if done right, pleasing to the eye.

Phil

[craigmarshall]

Re: Sapwood. Yes - that's decided it, I'm going to use a good looking bit of sap wood on purpose for something.

Re: Weight: Er... I'm not good at estimating from feel, but I can estimate it roughly with numbers.

There was probably only 5% waste, and four boards were each 27mm x 250mm x 800mm (5.4 litres, or 5400 cc). That's a total of 21.6 litres, or 20.5 litres after taking off the minimal waste. Multiply that by 0.7 (kg per litre), as this wasn't particularly dense oak, and it comes to about 14.3 kg

Basically, you can pick it up with one hand, but you wouldn't be able to throw it far :-).

Craig

[thebloke]

Personal thing...I never, ever use any sap, 'specially on oak as it's where all the woodworm beasties immediately call home so all of it goes. As far as I'm concerned the only timber where sap is treated the same way as hardwood is yew, in all other cases that I can think of the sapwood is discarded. I think it detracts from a piece rather than enhance - Rob