A woodworker friend of mine passed away a few years ago. Recently, his wife contacted me to ask if I could make a small table for her. She and her husband had purchased a piece of pietra dura on a vacation and she wanted it set into the top of the table. She was very specific and wanted the table 23 inches tall, about 16 to 17 inches wide and with cabriole legs.
When her husband passed away, she gave me several boards of macadamia tree wood. They had a very large macadamia tree in their yard and when they took it down, her husband sawed it into pieces a bit over 1 inch thick and stickered it in the attic. It was very dry by the time I got it.
I had some challenges in building the table. One was that I had only a limited amount of wood and there was no way to get more. Second, the wood was only about 1 inch thick after I did the stock preparation so I had to glue it up to make the legs. Shaping the legs was a lot of manual work with spokeshaves and rasps after roughing it out on the bandsaw. Insetting the pertra dura into the top was also a bit of a challenge.
Macadamia wood is not too bad to work with. It had a not unpleasant odor when working it and it's not too hard. When it came to finishing, the wood is subject to splotching so I had to seal it with dewaxed shellac before I could put any stain on it. It's finished with water borne lacquer (Target EM6000).
Mike
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