Some may know that I've been lucky enough to work with Singer on integrating wood into some of their 911's. Mostly shift knobs, but there was a dashboard project that ended up on their Mulholland commission and this floorboard project for another commission - of which has one of my ebony shift knobs and soon will also have a ebony parking brake handle.
So... Here's the making of the ebony floorboards, since some of you are interested in how things are made.
Rough piece of ebony as it comes from Africa. It is kiln dried there, then waxed. What's not so visible is the very rough saw cuts from the mill. In order to make it usable the top and bottom need to be surfaced. That was done via the planer - machine with cutting blades that spin super fast and can be height adjustable to adjust cut height.
Didn't get a shot of the planning, as the wood is heavy and all hands were needed at the machine. Top and bottom have been surfaced and ready to true up the sides, as these boards can be 7" at one end and 8" at the other. For this project I need three 7" wide pieces from the two boards (other board not shown).
First we need to make one side straight. That side will then go against the fence of the table saw to make a nice rectangle. We tried to use heavy duty double sided tape to hold the ebony to the sled underneath, but we were having problems getting the tape to stick because of residual wax that transferred to the sled. Since the boards are longer than needed, we resorted to a nail on each end to hole the ebony to the sled. The sled is perfectly cut and acts as the guide against the fence for the first cut.
Done! Now we have a piece of ebony that can be cut into three pieces. Sounds easy, but it's not. The saw blade only extends 3" above the table, and the board is 7" wide. That's not going to work, so we decided to make a first pass, then flip the board 180* and make the second cut. That leaves 1" of material in the center of the board that needs to be cut, but how? To the bandsaw!
Before we made the first cuts on the ebony, we tested on a piece of scrap to make sure that the table saw cuts would leave enough wood for the three pieces we need from this board. Deeper cut towards the middle simulates the 1" thickness of the board, the two shallow cuts show that we will get the three pieces from this board.
Here you can see the middle of the board that the table saw couldn't cut. Also notice how the cut at the bottom bends out to the left. This is because wood is under a lot of tension when one big piece and as you cut the piece into thinner pieces, tension in the grain is released and the wood moves. The bottom cut is perfect, turns out the top cut on the opposite end actually closed the gap.That presents a problem on the bandsaw.
Where things were left tonight.... We are going to need to put wedges into the cut that closed - even though the thin part is just over 1/8" thick, it does not want to budge and we needed to use a screw driver to gently pry it apart so we could put the wedges in that will ultimately get cut away. Tomorrow, I'll make longer, uniform wedges to keep the gap consistent.
Meh, thought it would have showed how the cut closed, but it's not easy to see. Move along...
You can kind of make out how it is spreading apart at this end...
Continuing onto the bandsaw, my dad and I setup a jig so we could accurately cut the 1” of wood remaining in the middle of the board.
