Anatomy of a Board continued..

This piece is a Getabako, or shoebox, for a client's entry. I made it with the board I described in my previous post. To give a floating appearance, I designed the piece to hang on the wall. I finished the Getabako by hand rubbing a tung oil and wax finish.


The lighter wood in the shelves is Western cedar. I used this aromatic wood to make inserts so the moisture from our damp Seattle footwear won't damage the wood.


Above is a custom pull I made from a small piece of the same board and inlaid into a mortised drawer front. I love small details like this on furniture. They truly show the maker's hand.

The drawers are made from a piece of figured western big leaf maple felled in Lynnwood, WA and locally milled and air dried by AJ's Custom Sawing. This figure is called fiddleback, or sometimes curly or tiger. Like the name implies, it came from the beautiful figured woods used on musical instruments.

The Anatomy of a Board

Large pieces of wood are wonderful for grain and color matching. For a small piece of furniture you can get most of the structure and then use the fall down for drawer fronts and panel rail and style stock. The down sides to large pieces of wood they tend to have a lot of strength and twist and bow as they are milled and, unless you have very large machines, they are harder to mill.


I have overcome this issue by splitting the large boardsinto smaller pieces and gluing them back together in the sequence they where split. This stabilizes the wood and allows me to mill them efficiently on my machines.


The three large pieces are for the side of an entry table and the diagonal piece at the top is for the two drawer heads. The grain at that end of the board dived off dramatically and the diagonal cut was to get a straight grain piece. The smaller diagonals and long piece are for panel stock for the shelves and back.

Milled Parts

When I break down larger pieces of wood, I mill them to about 1/8 to 1/4 thicker than I need to net, depending on their size. Then I give them a couple of days to relax.

I like to store my milled parts is with clean dry hardwood stickers like the lighter colored beech strips you see between the walnut. I then weight the stacks down with larger pieces of wood.

The stickers provide a spaces which allow for circulation and the weight helps to keep the pieces flat.

Oregon Black or Claro Walnut

Considered one of the most beautiful woods in the world because of the depth of color and prominent figure, Western black walnut is a woodworker's dream. It is the black walnut common to the Pacific Northwest and Northern California and, unlike most farmed East coast black walnut, it is mostly reclaimed or salvaged which makes it more rare.

Unique Oregon black walnut trees in the temperate climate of the Willamette Valley can yield up to five feet in diameter of high grade, quality lumber. The iron rich Oregon soil and plentiful rain results in lumber of exceptional color, with frequent black and orange contrasts to the usual chocolate walnut tones.

This is a recently purchased figured slab of 5/4 (1 1/4) Figured Oregon Black Walnut for a coffee table.

A Trip to Oregon

Recently Laura and I took a road trip to Oregon to get some lumber for a current furniture project. We visited a small urban mill called Urban Recycled Hardwoods in Beverton,OR just outside of Portland. Then we traveled south to Albany to see Goby Walnut, a small mill that specializes in Oregon Black Walnut.


Owner Art Blumenkron has an amazing inventory of walnut, with some slabs measuring over 48" wide. They have an impressive amount of veneers and carving stock. He was extremely patient while I made him unstack piles of veneers so I could get exactly what I was looking for.


The commission is for a coffee table an entry table and mirror, and secretary. I selected boards for color and graining specifically for each piece. I was able to get fletch cut (sequenced) boards which makes grain matching easier and makes a more cohesive piece.

I chose these pieces with curly figure for the top of the coffee table.