Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
The same lady who brought me the oak table, which fell out of a truck during moving and which I repaired and posted on my project pages, brought me a tea cart to repair, a different breadboard and this breadboard.The tea cart needed complete disassembly and re-gluing. Someone had done the usual “I'll just squirt a bit of wood glue in the gaps” thing, so, as expected, it failed again. Too, some of the joints were badly split and would have failed, catastrophically, in time, taking the glass top with it.The breadboard was a quick cakewalk. The tea cart required vacuuming epoxy into joints, drilling holes to get epoxy in, filling miss-drilled holes and so on. In the end, there was nothing a bit of paint couldn't camouflage.I passed on this one because of the complications of repairing the nasty crack in the end grain teak.To start, the only teak I thought I had was only 3/4” thick and about four inches wide, so I would have had to joint pieces to make larger end grain blocks to hide the repair as best I could.Once done, with the other projects, I changed my mind. I'm still not sure why. I guess that translates to, “[o]kay, I'll fix it, but I have no idea of how I'll approach the repair.”As to the “how” approach, my new Narex chisels arrived the day after the owner dropped the board off. I guess I took that to be a sign [from the wood gods]. Taking this thing to the tablesaw would have meant straight lines and no need for a chisel, except at the ends of the cuts, but the bandsaw would be another story.To try to keep the patches from being too obvious, I opted to use the bandsaw, to make the cuts as close to the cracks as reasonably possible, and to try to maintain the shift pattern of the blocks when glued up.In the end, it was a bit like assembling a thick puzzle. Each piece had to be cut to the rough size of the slot it would be filling, then sanded to fit.I could only do a couple pieces at a time. Too, I opted for epoxy for the filling properties that would overcome my limited talent at sizing and squaring.Once the pieces were sized, all contact surfaces had to be cleaned with lacquer thinner before the epoxy was applied.When everything was in place and the glue cured, I got to justify the carving set I bought a while back, for the process of shaping in the grease grove to the rest of the board.This all brings me to the last photo, for which I apologize. I've been slathering the mineral oil on to the raw wood and letting it soak in as it will.P.S. I don't even want to know how old the gunk was deep inside the cracks.