Wood is a beautiful and dynamic material to work with, and one of the important skills to learn when building an ability to create beautiful and functional furniture is how to anticipate how wood will change and adapt to its environment. Another skill is how to work with timber that will likely have warped, cracked and changed as it has dried out ready to be used. As you can see from the picture - sometimes this warping can be really quite severe, and if you can imagine trying to flatten the piece of wood pictured purely by planing and/or sanding you would be left with very little. At best, using the example shown, this would be half the thickness you started with.
We buy all of our timber rough sawn - that means that it has been cut into planks soon after being felled and then has been left to season, and possibly even kiln dried, but that it hasn’t been processed in any way beyond that initial planking. This means that for us, the first stage of any project is milling and processing the timber to get it to a form that is ready to be made into whatever it will later become. Thicker timber generally costs more to buy, and when we select pieces that we will bring home we need to take into consideration how much material will be lost as we transform a piece into the nice straight processed timber we require for a piece of furniture. This means the level of additional thickness required will depend on the size of the finished piece as well as the level of warping that might need corrected. The longer the piece needed the more likely it is that more wood will be lost. As a consequence, where longer pieces are required for say a bed or wardrobe the straightness of the raw timber is of even more importance.
For almost all of the pieces that we, and all good woodworkers, make, even where the final piece is to be made from a single piece of timber, an important part of the process is to rip the wood into lengths and re-join them. This not only allows us to address any bends that have occurred through the drying process, but allows for a stronger final piece as it is less likely to warp in changing atmospheres. In some of our cheese and serving boards you will see that this technique has also become part of the design feature as we have used the opportunity to join different types of wood together contrasting or complementing wood colours or grain patterns. Where a single piece of timber is been used for a table top or board without using this technique it will often lose shape through warping. You will, if you look closely, be able to see the join lines in a big expanse of wood such as a table top where it has been well-made; this is a sign that your table top will be more stable and stand up with more resilience to atmospheric changes.
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