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The bargain bin at my local lumberyard was fully stocked this week, so I grabbed two rough planks of Walnut and two rough planks of Hard Maple for $33. I think I paid less than $2 per board foot all told. The walnut is fucking beautiful after it gets milled. My daughter has been begging me to make her a clock like I made for her grandparents last Christmas, so I finally got around to that. Although I kicked it up a notch with some walnut splines which I didn't have the know how, tools, or resources to do last year. In fact, returning to my clock project was rather illuminating.
For starters, I used up some more of the shitty poplar I had purchases at Home Depot of all places. No part of it is quite flat or square. I should have milled it again, but I didn't want to lose even more width or thickness off a relatively meager 3/4" thick, 3-1/2" wide plank. Getting the multitude of 30 degree cuts correct was also much easier with my fancy miter gauge, although I discovered it's probably 0.1-0.2 degrees off. I'm not sure it's worth the effort of recalibrating it, so I'm just going to keep that in mind and compensate when I need the angles to be perfect. Gluing it all up was also much easier when all the pieces are exactly the same shape, versus the frankenstein monster of irregularly eyeballed pieces I had cut last time. Just threw a strap clamp around all of them, and weight them down flat between two heavy objects. Easy peasy.
The splines were new, and I'm not sure I like the method I used. I put together a mostly clamped together jig on my router table, and used a 1/4" up spiral bit to notch out the gaps for the walnut splines. But the jig had too much slop in it, and it wasn't well supported on one side versus the other. So the notches came out ever so slightly irregularly shaped, such that the same thickness of spline didn't quite work for all of them. But I got it close by taking a slightly larger than 1/4" strip of walnut, and then putting it through my thickness planer until it was pretty snug. Then I sanded a bunch of small pieces down until it went each unique notch.
I did two coats of danish oil in the afternoon, and need to wait until at least Wednesday before I do a few coats of shellac, and then probably a few more days before I rub that out and truly finish it with some furniture wax. I did that with my wife's chair and was very happy with the results. Well, except instead of danish oil, I used a stain on hers.
Tomorrow I plan on taking the maple and walnut and making a chessboard out of it. Looks like a fairly straightforward process, so fingers crossed. I won't be staining or oiling any of it, so once it's glued up and sanded, I can move directly to shellac. I'm looking forward to it. If it comes out well I think I have enough lumber on hand to make 2 more and save them as gifts.
How much harder would it be to make a singularity chess board? What sort of technique do you use when the sections are curved?
With my limited knowledge, the only way I could figure out how to make it work, and work well without giant seams in the joinery, would be to make the beginning of two chessboards. Which would be gluing alternating strips of light and dark wood together. Now when I did my chessboard, I then crosscut that giant glued up panel of 8 strips 8 more times, and flipped every other crosscut stripe to get the checkerboard pattern.
With this, I'd have to either use a bandsaw and cut those curves very, very carefully, or use a router with a straight bit and a nail in the middle to then make perfect circles. There would be a lot of waste, but between the two boards of stripes I began with, the remainder should complement the circles I routed out of the other.
I don't think I could use just one, because no matter what the kerf of the blade would make a giant seam if I just tried to rotate the two pieces and glue them back together. You can sort of get away with it maybe on shallower curves. Maybe use some sawdust and glue to try to fill anywhere that looks too bad. But the sharper curves towards the center would absolutely show the width of the blade kerf if you tried to use a single boards worth of material.
I'd expect a lot of that chessboard depends on how heavily you're committed to the bit. If it just needs to look right from the top but you want the grain patterns to look intact, that's a great place to rent some time on a cnc to make an inlay or even just use a bunch of veneer or burl and a sharp exacto knife. Would still require a lot of chisel or marking knife work to get those precise corner angles, but it'd save you a ton of material and a lot of really finicky jigsaw work or sanding.
Every time I see someone bust out a CNC machine, I get sad. I can certainly see their utility if it's your business. Not using one basically seems like you are leaving money/productivity on the table. But currently I'm enamored with the craftsmanship of woodworking. Getting my tools perfectly square and flat. Really nailing some perfect miter joints. Things like that.
That's fair; there's certainly a lot more romance and skill to hand tools or conventional power tools, and seeing a full CNC machine used for glorified bowl or crosscut work gets me a little disappointed myself. And it's definitely the sort of tradework that you have to love the process of doing it to really get the most out of a piece, and it's hard to do that when it's all gcode.
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