Process
We had a call about this elm log which was coming down at an estate in Scotland. It is chocolate brown in colour which is unusual and very large. We have now had it milled and have stacked it up with sticks between the boards to allow them to air dry before it goes in the kiln.
Our tree surgeon with the log, due to the width of the log it was necessary to mill one side flat before commencing cutting through the log generally to get the boards.
We try to stay in contact with tree surgeons and ask them to let us know if they have any particularly large trees which are coming down. In this particular case this elm was adjacent to the road and some of the branches had started to die back and the council had ordered it down. We arranged to buy the tree and have it collected by a lorry with a suitably large Hiab to lift the log. It was then taken to a sawmill and milled to our specification.
We have since received the boards back from the sawmill and now the time has come to load them into the kiln to be dried slowly.
Occasionally we have some table bases cast at the foundry but in this case it was a bowl which I client was having set into the centre of a table. Below are some photographs taken during the casting process.
We have recently delivered a 6.6m long table made from a bookmatched pair of oak boards. The client, Studio RHE, was very keen to avoid a third leg and also on the 3 dimensional chevron idea for the table base. Given the top weighs close to 500kg we didn't want any errors in specifying the steel for the base so Whetstone Oak had a structural engineers report to check everything was okay.
We recently delivered a table made from a single width board of Claro walnut to a client. The table required bespoke bases as requested by David Bentheim of Bentheim interiors. Below is the bases being made in the fabricators and an earlier string model we made when finalising the dimensions.
We had a couple of projects requiring large pieces of walnut, so large that they cannot readily be found in Europe so I flew out to the USA to visit some sawmills.
View from the pier in Chicago
An American black walnut log showing pronounced and consistent ripple figuring. Ethanol is applied to demonstrate the colour of the wood.
Wider view of the ripple American black walnut
Some burl which could make an interesting sidetable