King of Timbers!

custard · 29 Mar 2015

I got lucky the other day and bought several large, 42mm thick, consecutive boards of prime English Walnut. Doesn't show up that well in the photo but as well as superb colour and grain almost the entire boards are covered in an unbelievable fiddleback figure.

Kalimna · 29 Mar 2015

I see some exquisite guitar wood there. Please let me know if you have bought too much

Adam

Woodmonkey · 29 Mar 2015

Very nice, do you have a project in mind for them? Must've been a few quids worth...

marcros · 29 Mar 2015

beautiful. I have a few rippled walnut blanks that come up stunning. They dont have the colour that that piece does. will you bookmatch it?

skippy75 · 29 Mar 2015

That is gorgeous, not sure I could ever decide what to do with a beautiful piece of timer like that!

custard · 29 Mar 2015

marcros":3szwo9pe said:
beautiful. I have a few rippled walnut blanks that come up stunning. They dont have the colour that that piece does. will you bookmatch it?

That's a good question. I've seen plenty of woodworkers buy narrow boards with extravagant grain that are say 30mm thick or less. Looks terrific in the timber yard, but then they realise that because they're too thin for bookmatching they'll have to joint them to get something wide enough, which never works out. Fancy grain jointed to fancy grain just looks too busy and jarring to the eye. If it's 40mm or thicker you're in with a chance of book matching, and then you can build up the width as far as you want even from quite narrow pieces. There's something about sequences of book matched boards that the eye can be comfortable with. However nothing in woodworking is simple and book matching brings two problems, first the boards may warp when they're cut and these Walnut boards are currently registering a moisture content of 12.5% which puts them in the risk category, so I'd certainly test before committing. Secondly the grain reflects the light differently so some timbers can alternate light and dark when bookmatched which is a bit off-putting, Walnut tends not to be too bad in that respect, but the rippled figure may change matters so again a test is in order.

Luckily these boards are all very wide so will yield full width desk tops, dressing tables or hall tables. But once I've used a few boards I'll probably get increasingly parsimonious with the rest and want to cut them down to 3mm veneers, which will mean ripping them down to narrower widths for slicing on the bandsaw. So at that point book matching will become essential. Getting the best from timber is like cutting diamonds!