I’ve been working on a table made of cherry for our family room. Given the casual decor, I’m celebrating sap wood throughout. Some hate it, I happen to like it for this project. Anyway, the shelf is three pieces. A few days ago I cut to rough length, edge jointed, and did the glue up. Went pretty well.
B6F40CFC-B82B-4B15-B48F-5A62304349DE.jpg
I went ahead and roughed out the front curve and set out to remove the glue lines and flatten. Lo and behold, this lovely bit of bug (beetle?) highway appeared just below the surface.
6605A805-9177-4434-B131-982AA4084A2B.jpg
Thankfully, I had a bit of thickness to work with, and set about planning down to see if I could remove most of this.
The LVBU jointer is performing well. I’m taking pretty light shavings with the thought that I don’t want to cause some tear out worse than what I’m trying to fix. I’ve been working across the grain and diagonally. The shavings are cool.
A618F461-A8DB-4F03-9CA3-0100B7097517.jpg
I’ve got about another 1/16” I’m willing to go (really want to keep the thickness no less than 5/8”, but am starting to wonder if it’s going to be enough to remove most of the bug tracks).
Question; if you were left with a bit of tracks, how would you attempt to minimize them? I was planning to finish this in shellac...a first light application (somewhere around 1lb cut), and then a few coats of a heavier cut. Just try to match with whitish putty? Not sure how much cherry sap wood will darken, if any?
I’ve got some scrap, so I can try out a few ideas....
Thanks!