Sawdust on the Floor

Looking back over my 30 plus years of woodworking, I have noticed that several things have changed in my shop. The quality and array of tools that are now available to me, are legions better than those I had 30 years ago. But if the truth be told, my budget and my selection process have also greatly improved. And the difficulty, and hopefully the end results of the projects I now under take, are also greatly increased. To my way of thinking these are all part of the normal progression of any woodworker, crafts person or artisan. One of the other things that has changed, is that I now work a lot harder to allow the natural beautify of the wood show thru, rather than covering it up.

For years, when ever I built a project that wasn’t destined for several coats of paint and primer, I tried my best to keep any knots or impurities in the wood from showing. This was a real problem back then, when I made almost everything out of pine, because as we all know that common pine is 30% or better knots. Back then select pine or God forbid real hardwood was out of reach for my budget, and not readily available to the home woodworker.

Now most of my projects are made of either Oak, Walnut or Mahogany. And I have learned to, and you will have to excuse me here because I really hate to use this terminology, but…. celebrate the natural elements of the wood. Most of the woods that I work with all contain a certain amount of knots, or other impurities. As long as they don’t compromise the structural integrity of the wood, why hide them?

Today, when I have a piece of wood that contains a knot, instead of trying to hide it, I work to bring it out. When I built our kitchen cabinets, some of the Oak that I used for panels in the door contained dark almost black knots, which really stood out from the reds and browns of the oaks. If I were to try to cut these out, I would have wasted a lot of good wood. If I were to try to fill them with a wood filler, that would have made to knots even more pronounced. The reds and browns of the filler, would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, when compared to the black of the knots.

I don’t know of any commercially available wood filler that is really black, so I made my own. I took some very fine saw dust, mixed it with a little dark wood glue to form a paste. Then I dyed the paste with some ebony stain. This mixture is then applied just like any other wood filler. Once the paste was dry, I was able to sand it smooth and continue with my normal finishing process.

There were a few panels that the knot was really neat looking, but as I ran the panels through my surface planer, to get them to the final thickness of 1/4″ , they started to become very fragile. I was concerned that the next trip across the planer knifes, the knot would come free. This would not only have destroyed the pieces of wood, but could have caused injuries when the wood from the knot went airborne. To stabilize the knot, I used some Cyanoacrylate Adhesive ( CA). This fast setting glue was perfect for this type of application. Because of the costs of these glues, they normally have very limited use in my shop, but this is one time that the results was worth the expense. I could use the panel with the interesting knot, without worrying about the knot coming out.

If you were to look closely at some of the other projects I have posted on here, you may have noticed that when I have the opportunity to reuse or repurpose wood that contains stain marks from either worm holes or maybe a long ago removed nail, I don’t try to cover over these. In fact I really try to make them more pronounced. My way of thinking is simple, knots and worm holes are part of the natural evolution of the wood, who am I to try to correct mother nature.

So please forgive my flowery language, but I have come to believe that we need to allow the natural beauty of the wood to show through. If I wanted to work with something that was perfect, I would be working with particle board and laminate. No, thank you. I will continue to use real wood and like its beauty shine through.

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