The Slab (Cherry) On Top

 

Before I left on vacation, I hinted at doing something different for the dresser top than I usually would do. I knew I wanted to make the top out of walnut for the color contrast and just the sheer beauty of the wood. However, working out of my garage that I use at night to park too vehicles leads to some restrictions on what I can have for equipment. Normally, I would buy walnut boards that I would run through my table saw to clean up the edges enough that I can glue them together to form a surface big enough for what I want. This however, usually results in a slight wavy surface that isn't perfectly flat because said boards have slight twists in them. Also, because I have no place to purchase lumber where I can select the perfect boards, I end up with a surface where I can see the edges of every board used.

This time however, after pricing out mail ordering the required walnut boards and ending up with a surface not quite flat and seeing the outline of each board, I went a different route. I found I could order a walnut slab for not much more money and end up with no glue lines between boards but I would still have issues with it not being flat. The latter issue though I thought I could solve using a different way to process the material.

To compensate for a slab that wasn't perfectly flat, I ordered one thicker than necessary. Actually, I generally can't buy a slab as thin as I would like for a dresser top because those selling the slabs expect that the buyer will want to make them flat and thus leave them on the thicker side. So I shimmed the slap onto my rolling work bench so that it at least didn't rock when I pressed one corner or the other and built a couple rails out of scrap plywood to hold a router "sled". Essentially the U-shaped beam would slide on the plywood rails that were clamped to the surface of my workbench and allow my router to go back and forth with a large bit to remove wood and leave the surface flat. Once I had one side flat, I flipped over the slab and did the other side and just kept going until it was the thickness I desired. 

This was a horribly wrist cramping procedure moving the router back and forth along with moving the sled along the rails taking many light passes and took me the better part of 8 hours to complete. It also left me with a huge mess of premium walnut sawdust all over the shop that took me another couple hours to clean up since it got everywhere. I ended up with a large plastic tote full of the sawdust which I hauled down the hill to our compost pile and dumped it. 

But eventually I was left with a dresser top that is one piece, flat and of the right thickness. Before I left on vacation, I carried it inside and set it on the dresser where it remained until my return. You can't really see the beauty of the wood grain due to the tool path marks of my router bit that I used to remove all the excess wood but once sanded, it should look really beautiful. Being that it is a slab with defects in it, I will have to do some work repairing those defects with epoxy once I get caught up on everything else that piled up while we were away. I can't wait to see the result which I know will be the cherry on top of this entire project.