On With the Parquetry...

With nearly 300 individual pieces of yellow birch wood and Baltic birch plywood already in the queue for the Jeffersonian Book Stand, you might be able to imagine how many separate glue-ups are involved in the entire process ( I decided not to count those. It's a bit mind numbing! ). Preparation of substrates and veneers continues with these "baked-in" edges glued and clamped.

While each glue-up cures, I turn to preparation of the veneers for that particular substrate. This is a maple veneer for the vertical supports that will be on the interior of the piece.

The maple shavings are piling up! These narrow (3/32" wide) shavings come from preparation of the veneer edges. For those of you into technical details, these shavings are about 0.001" thick. That's a nice efficient cut that allows me to take off material at a fast enough rate to get to the veneer shape that I want fairly quickly. It also provides a very good surface, ready for gluing. Later, when I get to the final surface preparation, I'll be aiming for something closer to a thickness of 0.0005". When I first learned about hand planes I couldn't believe it, but it's actually not too difficult to do, and the wood surface gets amazingly smooth. Anyway, that's for later...

For now, it's just good to know that careful preparation ensures that the built-up veneer and parquetry sheets have tight joints and that they are not stressed when the veneer is glued to the substrate.

I've lined up the veneer stock that will become the checkerboard-like parquetry of the top book support panel. In this situation, I'm using sapwood from the yellow birch plank. It has a medium, light color, a very mild grain pattern, and strong prismatic properties.

The following 13 second video shows how changing the viewing angle can really change the appearance of the wood. By simply rotating half of the parquetry pieces 90°, the checkerboard pattern appears.

More to come...

Hej då!

Craig