Lesson Learned.

The following night I found myself in possession of a brand new $90 belt sander. It was necessary to get the job done. A Makita, I felt like it was something I could trust...I wasn't, but that comes later.

The wood I had purchased was irregular and therefore when sitting flush on one side, it had 1/8th inch differences on the other. Further Redwood to Maple is as old tomato to overcooked meatloaf. It was quite frustrating attempting to sand a reasonably hard wood while it was parred with a quite soft and delicate partner. Alas, I started away at it and by the end of the first night was able to encourage Will to join in on the fun the following day.

By way of a "coarse planer" (it's got a real name...) a belt sander, and lots of elbow grease, we accomplished our task of making the plank look like a legitimately laminated piece of wood, sans variation in width and no seams.


Finding that my original belt sander had not the gusto to continue on after 3 hours of sanding and that our new saw horse was already broken, we promply returned to the Home Depot and acquired a new horse and upgraded our belt sander to a 3x21 RIGID with variable speed and some gusto. Now we were cooking with gas. With our new 36 grit belts we had that plank under our control!

So we worked deep into the darkness of evening.


Impossible to stop now, we kept on cooking along and moved directly into designing and cutting our first blank.


By now the stress of finding a name for these boards had begun to rise to a level of urgency.