Utility stool from reclaimed rimu
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3 May 2018 at 9:23 pm #539440
Here’s yet another stool, a very simple one this time, made out of reclaimed rimu. It’s all glued and screwed, so no fancy joinery at all — in fact the trickiest part was working out how to orient the legs to cut the compound mitre at the top. My brain goes funny when I try to visualize that sort of thing and I really have to check and double-check myself.
The pieces of wood I had to work with were full of old saw kerfs and screw holes. I cut around the old kerfs and plugged some of the holes with dowels, but I see one that I missed — I’m not really sure that it’s worth the bother of revisiting it, considering its end-use as a utility stool rather than a piece of fine furniture, but we shall see how much it preys on my mind.
I like rimu as a furniture timber, but it does have its issues. It can have a tendency to warp, but this timber is so old that I don’t expect that. As it ages, it gets harder and more brittle, which isn’t usually much of an issue when using it to make things, but it means that it tends to split and splinter when you’re de-nailing recycled wood, and you’ll probably have to be sure to pre-drill every screw and nail hole.
I would have liked to have tapered the legs a bit to make it a bit more elegant, but by the time I’d cut the baulks down I only had 30mm square sticks to work with. Maybe a little bit of tapering would be all right, but I worry that it might have made the legs too delicate for the hurly-burly of day to day use.
5 May 2018 at 8:44 am #540049It’s a New Zealand native timber, a primitive conifer, and it is very pleasant to work, especially with hand tools. Its heartwood is quite dark and often very attractively figured, while the sapwood is a deep caramel colour when oiled and generally pretty even grained — I tend to find the sapwood is often a bit bland, but that’s a subjective thing I guess. It also comes in “colour” grades in which the heart and sap are mixed in all sorts of piebald patterns, which can be very nice in certain applications.
It’s getting hard to come by these days. Once upon a time it was New Zealand’s cheap throwaway timber, used when jobs had to be done at low cost. As a result it was very heavily milled, and now it’s quite pricey — the last time I looked, it was at about $8,000 per cubic metre. There’s still a reasonable amount available from the reclamation yards though, because it was so extensively used in building in the old days.
Nice one Peter, I love Rimu such a warm colour to it. My Dad’s house had a lot of Rimu though it including all the floorboards. I’ve spent hours sanding and applying polyurethane to them when I was younger.
I live in Ireland now so I don’t have access to it.
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