Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
Recently I bought a slab at a neighborhood Sale for $30. The seller was transparent and straight up with the add that he didn't know what kind of wood it was. From the photo posted, I thought it was Cherry and rushed right over to snatch it up. I knew it was a great find no matter the species, but if it was cherry it would have been an extra bargain. To my surprise, when I arrived to pick it up, I found out that this piece of wood was most certainly not cherry. It was far to dense, hard, and extremely heavy. Just feeling it, it felt twice a dense and heavy as white oak.After getting it home, I now needed to figure out what I would make with it. Personally, I've never really been a fan of live edge furniture, especially the river tables. To me, more often than not they come off as looking too much like someone encased beautiful wood inside plastic. Don't get me wrong, some pieces are quite nice, but I think it takes a lot of design effort and skill to make both epoxy and wood mediums play nicely together. I think maybe one of the things that gets me with river tables is the ratio of epoxy to wood, too much epoxy, no matter how elegantly done, distracts too much from the natural beauty of the table. Perhaps I'm just trying to justify my tastes, I don't know.In any event, despite not really being a big fan of the styles this piece seemed like a good candidate for such design. Besides, I've never made a river anything before, so at the very least, I'd get to learn some new skills. In the end, I, very satisfied with how it turned out. I still couldn't bring myself to put the live edges out, preferring the traditional furniture form for a more classic, and in my opinion, classy, aesthetic.Legs are made of poplar and mortised and tennoned together, simple shaker style design. Top is one slab cut in three pieces with black, pearled, epoxy pour 1.75 thick, 3 bow tie inlays on each side made of off cuts from same slab.After working with this wood Im reasonably certain it's Mulberry, but I can't be sure. Initially I thought it might be Osage Orange, and in truth, it might be. The only thing that gives me pause about it not being Osage is that despite it being incredibly dense, heavy, and hard, it was relatively pleasant to work with. I would have expected a dry Osage Slab to really make my tools groan, more than they did.Anyway, thanks for taking a look.