I live in Southern California where there are no naturally occurring hardwood trees and I have a confession; there’s one type of story I hear from my fellow Neanders that makes me green with envy. It usually starts like this “after a recent storm, a 200-year-old, 100’ tall walnut/cherry/oak tree was blown down in in my yard/neighbor’s house/rural property and I had the tree sawn into lumber for various woodworking projects”.
As a hand tool woodworker living in a place where all hardwoods are imported, I can’t imagine how fantastic it would be to have quality lumber like this close at hand!
For the first time ever, I’ve lucked into a small amount of interesting domestic hardwoods lumber – it didn’t come from a tree, but I hope my fellow Neanders will find the story interesting nonetheless:
My wife’s grandfather was a French-Canadian immigrant who operated a one-man cabinet making shop in Greenwich Village, NYC from about 1920 -1950. He and his wife raised 5 kids and during the depression, he built furniture for the family. This wasn’t the stylish stuffy he built for clients, just utilitarian pieces he could bang out quickly.
We recently inherited a pair of these 3 drawer dresser’s and they’re pretty ugly; 50-year-old carcass tops/sides of solid poplar, with peeling oak veneer. However the drawers, including side/backs, were made of quarter sawn white oak. I have no idea why Granddad consider this a “secondary wood”, but I was able to salvage some that I used to build a Greene & Greene inspired blanket chest described in this thread.
I wasn’t planning on posting so I don’t have pictures from the very beginning, however once I started planing this 50-year-old, air dried QSWO, I was so impressed by the figure and ease of working with hand tools that I took a few pics and wanted to share the build. I think of QSWO as a dense wood that’s challenging to work with hand tools. This old lumber was so dry it literally came off as crumbled dust rather than shavings with a hand plane.
Here’s a couple pictures of the salvage lumber:
[url=https://flic.kr/p/JkJCDz]
[url=https://flic.kr/p/26CbZi2]
I already built the chest carcass so following pics are of the remaining steps. The top is a solid panel with breadboard ends pinned with contrasting Rosewood accents. Here’s some pics of making the tennons on the end of the panel to be captured in the breadboards. Paring chisel to create a ramp against layout line and saw to establish the shoulder, followed by my shop built rabbit plane:
[url=https://flic.kr/p/27VgM7q]
[url=https://flic.kr/p/JkJCxc]
[url=https://flic.kr/p/KRJzY7]
[url=https://flic.kr/p/JkJCte]
[url=https://flic.kr/p/KRJzVb]
[url=https://flic.kr/p/26UfVFh]
[url=https://flic.kr/p/JkJCk8]
No pictures of the breadboard mortises, but here’s the chest top prior to assembly.
[url=https://flic.kr/p/JkJCfZ]