Spalted Maple Table

The Table’s Story.

 All objects have stories; most are never told. This table began in 1946 when a maple seed drifted onto the west-facing side of a cove leading to Haw Branch, the creek that empties into the Big Ivy near Barnardsville, NC. Over the years the seedling grew into a sixty-five foot tree, fourteen inches in diameter at chest height. Then, in 2014, a storm with wind and rain uprooted it, tumbling with it two other maples of about the same size, where they lay unseen or at least unremarked for three years. 

 Beginning with death and rest in rain and snow, pigmentation fungi and fungi zone lines developed within the wood. Fungi damage wood, but the pigmentation and zone line type do so at a very slow rate, so that beautifully spalted wood results that can still be used for flooring and furniture. What commercial furniture makers see as flaws, is to craft furniture makers marks of nature’s beauty. Nature’s flaws are not all beautiful, but spectacular examples mark this table’s wood. Nature’s flaws have an appeal lacking in the flaws of workmanship. Nature provides knots, worm-holes, and variations in grain, which can provide beauty. Workmen’s flaws consist of nicks and scrapes, saw marks, sanding scars, and gaps, none of which add beauty, stability, or function. Only occasionally does an unintended effect of the workman’s error result in something worth keeping.   May Nature’s flaws here appear beautiful to others, not just me. A few minor Workman flaws I could not correct, though known only to me. If you can find them, I’ll claim, as ancient Chinese printers claimed about typos, “I left them so the user could feel superior.” One inadvertent oddity might be attractive to some--an excess drop of polyurethane that solidified into a very smooth fidget knob just under one corner. Anyone sitting near that corner can fidget with it as some people do with fidget gadgets.

 I harvested the fallen trees in 2018, when I first noticed them, cutting them into ten- and twelve-foot lengths, attaching chains, and using my tractor’s forest winch to haul them to a loading place where I hoisted them onto my pickup truck and took them to a mill. I stored the the boards in a pole barn near the Haw Branch, where they air dried for eighteen months. Then I reloaded them and drove them to a kiln and planer, where for twenty-one days hot air circulated, bringing the moisture content down from about 32% to under 10%. By then the fungi had died or lost all power to proceed, but their random work was done, leaving me with boards that look like this.

The table top, and the trestle underneath, one leg, and the pegs that wedge the trestle in place are all made from that tree or the ones that fell with it. The rest of the wood: one leg is made of bass wood tree, also blown down in wet weather and left to die and rest. It grew across the Haw Branch on an east-facing slope. Fungi working there left a pigmentation stain, rather than zone lines. The feet are made from chestnut oak (so-called because the leaves resemble the leaves of American chestnuts, which now are mostly destroyed by a virus introduced to the US about one hundred years ago). The oak tree also grew on an east-facing slope near my house. I cut the tree down and took it almost immediately to the sawmill, then stored the lumber in the pole barn for two years, and subsequently for a year in my dehumidified shop. The oak was not kiln dried. 

 The LTC Woodcraft shop is in Gautier, Mississippi, where I hauled the wood. The first step in building the table was to construct the units: The table top is made of six boards, planed to an even thickness, sanded, biscuited and glued, then sanded again, and again, and again. The side boards retain live edges (the bark has been removed and the edge sanded). The underside of the table has two cross pieces, giving the tabletop extra strength and serving as the points for removing and re-attaching the legs for transportation. The feet and legs were next because they form single units held together by a mortise and tenon, glued and reinforced with dowels. The trestle and the two wedges are single pieces of wood. 

 All theses pieces, when disassembled, lie flat. The underside of the table and lower structure, once sanded and test fitted, were covered with clear satin polyurethane and sanded, painted, and sanded again. The top and edges, when finally sanded sufficiently, were coated with Ozmo Polyx, a food-grade matte finish made of vegetable oil and wax. The Ozmo Polyx, suggested to me and applied to the table top by my neighbor, combined well with the maple wood, bringing an opalescent quality to the grain, which shifts, appears, and disappears with one’s angle of vision. 

 A word about the workmanship. My father was a marvelous jack of all trade, preacher, teacher, and missionary who, or so I thought growing up, could make anything work that didn’t. He could jury-rig and jerry-build almost anything from scrap. Not quite a MacGyver, but a practical fixer. It didn’t always look good, but it worked. I learned jury-rigging and jerry-building from him. And then I thought, where are the aesthetics? They are in the details. It starts with very sharp tools, with careful planning, and with a sense of the beautiful, added to a sense of the functional. I’m not there yet, but I have gotten better. This table is not perfect, but those who have watched me and examined the work as it progressed, have not detected workman flaws. I hope that whoever ends up with the table will, if they find the flaws, find some beauty in them. 

 Peter Shillingsburg, 2021