Filling a large check


h3nry

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In 1980 I went to the garden centre with my dad, and we bought a small macrocarpa seedling and planted it in his garden. By 2000 it was no longer a small ornamental conifer, and rather dominated the garden, so I went to the garden centre with him to by a small electric chain saw and helped chop it down. I had quite forgotten that I had saved a slice of the trunk about 10" across, which I recently found hiding in a corner of his house.

 

I thought it might be nice to turn it into one of those tree-ring clock faces for him, but after 14 years air-drying indoors it has developed a huge check that will need filling. I originally thought of just filling it with epoxy, but since it is large enough that it can't be hidden, and will have to become a "feature" I thought I'd post it here to see if anyone had ideas to make it a less ugly feature.

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Great Ideas guys,

 

Since this is such a pale coloured wood I thought the jet-black might be a bit too contrasting for a clock face, so I decided to go for a wedge of walnut, which should still provide a good contrast.

 

To get the exact shape of the crack, I covered the face side with a piece of double-stick tape and then blew sawdust into the check which stuck to the tape showing me exactly where to cut. I then stuck the other side of the tape onto a piece of endgrain walnut and pared down to the line. I then pared a further thickness off equal to the thickness of two sheets of veneer, and added a slice of maple and walnut veneer to give a stringing effect. Then epoxied it into the crack.

 

It's still a bit irregular, but I doubt anyone will notice. It still needs some more sanding to remove where some spilt epoxy soaked into the end-grain.

Walnut at noon... I like it! or as 4 square said:  5:00..beer time!

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  • 4 weeks later...

This turned out great.  I'm highly impressed with how seemless you were able to fill the check with another piece of wood!

 

Clock looks good ! I would love to hear why you put the filled crack at 9:15 !

 

Just for kicks, here it is with the walnut oriented at the noon position.  It's still nice, but i prefer the white nub at noon :)  When the check is at the top it makes the piece look kind of droopy due to the bottom side having more empty space.

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Thanks guys.

 

Yes my thought was that the clock should be wider than it is tall, so that left the check at 3 or 9 o'clock. And it just didn't look right to me with one of the numbers lying directly on the walnut wedge, so I offset it a bit.

 

It was a simple little project, but probably the only one I'll ever do that starts out by planting the tree for the wood! And that makes it kinda special

 - I'm quite pleased with the result.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Great way to turn something banal into something special. At first I was looking at the gap thinking it should be a particular place, but you were right.. looking at the nub (official term here), the exterior shape really dictates the orientation, doesn't it. Nice resolve. and fantastic memento. 

 

btw-tape, and sawdust.. ingenius solution. Will be stealing that idea someday. brilliant!

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