chippie":pcr04qhy said:
Our son Eddie is a Civil War re-enactor and a History major at Texas Tech.
My nephew does the revolutionary war re-enactments. He loves it. He was in the movie The Patriot. He also majored in history but now he is in seminary. I think with his background in history his sermons should be very interesting.
Well here is the finished project. Its a coffee table for my son's graduation.
He will be graduating from the air force academy this May and this will be his graduation present from me. (He'll be giving me his sabre at graduation)
The coffee table is made out of a loblolly pine I found while we were doing a harvest in 2005. Latin for loblolly is taeda which in latin means torch. Romans preferred the branches of this tree for torches hence its name. It measured 54 inches at breast high and had 135 feet of clean wood. Based on my calculations this put the tree's weight somewhere around 23 tons. The only way to process the tree was to fillet the tree to a manageable size by removing a good portion of the butt. Even then, its size still required us to haul the tree nearly 150 miles to a specialty mill that dealt with large trees such as this - they loved it. (this mill is no longer in business and Walmart now occupies the site) No other mill would touch it. As for the butt, it was worthless for lumber purposes but I just couldn't see wasting something that has lived for around 145 years so the project began.
The first problem I faced was cutting an even cut off of a log this size. It took several tries but I eventually got one pretty plumb. Next problem was curing it so it wouldn't check. I figured this would take around 4 years. I began soaking it anti-freeze and this was rather expensive. Unfortunately the container sprang a leak without my knowing it and by the time I did notice it the pie had checked twice. I then used a water soluble parafin and coated it good and waited and hoped. After about 4 years I began work on the table. Since its not truely square or weighted, this presented some problems as well but most of these problems were dealt with. I chose to make the legs out of untreated telephone cross arms since they are required to have a tight grain and are mostly heartwood.
As for its little lethal secret, I placed a secret compartment in the bottom of it so he can stash a couple of pistols if he wants. I guess you could hide valuables in it as well with assurance that no one is going to walk out of his house with the table. ;-)
I'm glad its finally finished and I sure hope he likes it. What do ya'll think?