Closer look...
Since wood moves when tension is released, we had to use some maple scrap as spacers to keep the wood from closing in and clamping down on the blade.
After about five hours the first piece has finally been rough cut. Three more cuts to go!
After about 10 hours, I finally have the first three cut and milled to the proper thickness. Next step is to joint the edges and glue them together to make one piece of thick veneer. Now to cut the other board of ebony into three pieces. So far, we have about 10 hours in this project. Since we’ve solved a bunch of problems on how to get to this point, the next board will hopefully take half that time to get to this stage.
Didn’t want to bore with the same steps again, but the second board has been cut up and is now the proper thickness. There almost was a major oops that would have rendered this board useless for this project, but fortunately I caught it in time and saved it. Next is to glue these three pieces together to make one piece of thick veneer and do the same with the other three pieces. Then, laminate the glued up pieces to the plywood bases and then the real fun begins - cutting and routing to make the actual floorboard patterns.my dad was invaluable once again, but it’s almost time for him to say goodbye to this project, as I’m at just about at the point where it becomes a one person job again.
A lot of time, thin boards (even thick) will warp. It’s partly due to the grain and released tension, but also because of moisture content. Depends if in how the wood is stored, one side can be more exposed to atmosphere and dry out more than the other side. To fix this “cupping”, you can put the wood on grass that is moist, with the dry side down and a short time later, it’ll absorb moisture, expand and flatten out.
Once the boards are flat enough, we can take them to the jointer to create perfect 90* edges to glue together. In a perfect world, this will result in a glue joint that is invisible to the eye.
Once the edges are perfectly jointed, we do trial fits over and over until we are happy, then figure out how to glue the three boards together so there is pressure on the tips to make sure any wraps left will be flattened out with clamps - but in our case, clamps were not an option. So....
...We got creative with weights and other heavy objects. Hopefully tomorrow when everything is removed, we will have perfect joints that won’t be seen be the naked eye. This procedure will be repeated for the other three boards. If this all goes well, next step will be to laminate the glued up ebony to the base plywood, then cut to shape.
