Burr Oak

      I think I may have shared this story before, but maybe not.   (Who cares.  I am going to tell it to you again.)    My oldest son, Chad,  lives on an acreage that has quite a few burr oak trees.   I always thought that an oak is an oak, but I guess there are several varieties of oak trees.   Burr oak trees are in abundance in this area of the county.   They are tall and their trunks are thick.  If I have talked to the sons about anything, it is that when there is a chance to harvest some boards, one never turns down lumber.   So when the wind blew one of his trees down, he had a mill come out and cut out some rough lumber.

  That was almost four years ago.   I have used some of that lumber to make a few projects.   He has used some of that lumber to build a dining room table.   Now he is thinking of building a couple dining room benches.    I told him that I would help him out by taking home some of the rough lumber and dressing it down into finished boards.    That was in August and I am still working on those boards.     I have learned to rethink my thoughts about building anything out of burr oak.   It is a very hard wood.  If you look at the first picture you can see burn marks from the table saw.  This occurred when I was ripping the wood into various widths.   It is heavy!   I had to moved it around and re-stack it a few times.  Even though it has been in the process of drying out in a sheltered garage for almost four years,  my moisture tester indicated that it still was not dry enough to use.  Thus I brought it down to my basement hoping that as the furnace runs this winter, the dry air would help that last little bit of moisture out of the wood.   And as it dried a little more it cracked and twisted some - or warped would be the correct word.

  I planed the boards down to 1 inch thick.   I was going to need some two inch stock so I had to glue boards together to get that required thickness.  I think I used every clamp that I own to make sure that there would not be any air space between the boards.   An interesting note is that when I loaded up the boards to bring home I was pretty sure that I had plenty of lumber with me.   As I started making up boards as per the specs that we had created, I found out that I would not have any spare pieces.  I would have to use every piece that I brought down.

    I mixed up some epoxy glue and used that mixture to fill in any voids or knot holes that each of the boards may have had and I also filled in any cracks that were exposed.    These two pieces in the picture to the right are going to be the seat part of the bench.  They are 15 inches wide and over 6 foot long.





   And there I am.   Doing my favorite thing.   Sanding!    So far I have spent 7 hours and 13 minutes running the sander.  (Not that I'm keeping track or anything.)     
   So the plan is that I will get all the boards dressed up to finished lumber and then take them back to Chad's shop and he will build the two benches.    If he had to buy the oak wood for this project he would probably have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $200.00.
   Next week I will be able to show you a little more of what he will be getting.    So stay tuned.   It will get a little more interesting.
   (By the way,  that burr oak wood sure burns nice in that campfire ring - just in case one needs to vent a little anger.  Yet one has to be careful cause that is why sometimes there is no extra wood.