Workbench Wednesday – Planing Beam Base I

It’s pretty hard to get much more simple than a Japanese planing beam with its three components: the beam, the base, and the “X” legs.  In my case I laminated two 11/4 pieces of vintage cypress (c.1840) for the beam and will use some of the same stock for the legs.  But the base took a little more thought.

The answer came last year when my brother and I were processing firewood, in this case cutting up a large white oak that had fallen in a windstorm two years before, having been knocked down by two falling maple trees.  It took us the better part of three days to trim and work our way down the twin trunks of the oak after doing the same for the maples.  The main trunk was almost stick straight and as we neared the bottom I found by planing beam base.  About four feet up from the root mass I cut a bole about 3-1/2 feet in length and about 22 inches in diameter, bark included.

It weighed about 350-400 pounds at that point and we wrestled it onto the truck and set it up on smaller bolts to let it dry for a bit on the ground underneath a piece of EPDM roofing placed over it.

Several months later I managed to get it upright and on to my hand truck and brought it into the barn, setting it horizontally on the floor in the unheated part for further seasoning.  By the time I got to working it the weight had dropped perhaps 20-30 pounds but it was still really heavy.  Nevertheless I wrangled it out of that corner with my log hook and rolled it out to the central room on the main floor where I began to cleave off the bark and majority of the sap wood with an adz and a slick, reducing the size to about 19″ diameter and reducing the weight further another 20+ pounds.

Afterward, somehow I wrangled it up onto my firewood-cutting cradle without injury, in order to clean up the surface mostly with a drawknife.

Mrs. Barn now has two trash bags of drawknife shavings to use for woodstove fire tending next winter.

In the end I wound up with a sublime section of tree, mostly straight and exceedingly dense white oak.

Stout, brother, stout.

Up next – cutting and fitting to the end of the beam.

Stay tuned.